Legality of Forest Service Reorganization in Question

The U.S. Forest Service faces bipartisan skepticism about how it would fare in the wholesale reorganization of the Agriculture Department.

During a Monday hearing before the House Interior Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said his budget includes provisions to transfer Forest Service firefighting resources from the Department of Agriculture into Interior’s new Wildland Fire Service. A few days earlier, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz made similar pledges to the same subcommittee. In both hearings, the Trump administration leaders were warned by Subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, that they lacked a congressional green light.

Congress is still tying off loose ends of the fiscal 2026 federal budget even as President Donald Trump’s cabinet leaders are releasing their spending plans for 2027. Extensive restructuring proposals for the departments of Agriculture (which oversees the Forest Service) and Interior (which runs the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, among others) spill across both fiscal-year congressional reviews. The recent hearings found House members concerned about how wildland firefighting, research and agency staff levels would be affected. 

“There’s still questions that have to be answered,” Simpson told Burgum on April 20. “My challenge is, what’s left of the [Forest Service] if you take wildfire fighting away and put it in Interior? It’s a question we need to ask before we do it.” Simpson repeated almost the same words to Schultz during his April 16 appearance, reminding both leaders that Congress had ordered an extensive study of the proposal before it could go forward.

Maine Representative Chellie Pingree, the ranking Democratic member, was even more pointed that the Department of Agriculture’s restructuring of Forest Service and other agencies lacked legal clearance.

“The law is clear: if the USDA wants to reorganize, it is required to submit additional details to this committee so we can approve the request,” Pingree told Schultz. She cited specific wording in the fiscal 2026 budget law which prohibits spending money to “relocate an office or employees” or make other significant changes without an OK from both the House and Senate. And Congress still hasn’t received the detailed information about the changes which Pingree said was needed for review.

A section of the 168-page budget law on the Forest Service states, “None of the funds made available in this Act, in this and prior fiscal years, may be reprogrammed without the advance notification and approval of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations.” That rule lists eliminating programs, relocating employees or offices, and changing funding amounts.

Nevertheless, both Schultz and Burgum said they were rearranging their wildland firefighters as they brace for what the Interior secretary said would be an “extraordinary fire season.”

Burgum compared WFS’s unification of Interior’s four firefighting units — Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs — to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines under a Joint Chiefs of Staff leadership. Adding the Forest Service would be “the fifth leg of this group,” he said.

“We’re going to be under full suppression this year,” Burgum told the committee. “You get a fire, you put it out.”

He also stated that BLM was spending nine times as much money fighting wildfires as it was earning from timber sales. “It’s just unaffordable to let natural resources burn,” Burgum said. “It’s killing the timber industry and the communities that depend on it.”

Schultz pledged that the nationwide Forest Service management reshuffle announced on March 31 would move officials closer to the lands they managed and reduce government costs. Representatives questioned if the agency still had the personnel to handle basic functions, or the power to make the change at all.

When asked directly by Simpson if Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had legal authority to proceed with the changes without congressional consent, Schultz answered “yes,” adding the plan had been reviewed by the department’s Office of General Counsel. That’s when Pingree warned him that the action would violate the 2026 budget law. 

Last month, the USDA released its plans to replace the Forest Service’s nine existing regional offices with 15 state director’s offices. It would also move the Forest Service Chief’s office from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City. And it would close 57 research stations located throughout the nation.

Schultz said the reorganization plan did not call for cutting scientists, although it did intend to shutter numerous facilities and move staff to other nearby offices, such as national forest headquarters. But under further questioning, he added that while the reorganization didn’t cut research staff, the president’s budget could eliminate as many as 1,100 researchers.

“What this budget is doing is looking to shift research from where it is today to the private sector or universities,” Schultz said. Asked how that would get paid for, Schultz replied, the “states would step up.”

Pingree disagreed. Given the administration’s record of pulling grant funding from universities and states’ strapped budgets, she didn’t foresee the federal agencies finding success with their offloading plans.

“The administration has to stop assuming states will pick this up,” Pingree said. “And I don’t want it passed to the private sector. You can’t just move all our money somewhere else.”

Divesting research and forestry management to state and academic levels caught many of those on the potential receiving end off guard. The University of Montana has both collaborative research programs with the Forest Service and also leases space to federal Forest Service programs on its campus. Paul Lukacs, UM associate vice president for research and creative scholarship, told Mountain Journal that while some routine Forest Service projects had been proposed for next year, he had not received any notice of a wholesale transfer of federal research such as Schultz was talking about.

Montana Republican Representative Ryan Zinke said he supported moving more Forest Service administrators closer to the forests they serve. But during the subcommittee hearing, he switched to how prepared the agency was for a potentially extreme wildfire season.

Schultz said the agency has already hired 9,390 wildland firefighters on its way to a goal of 11,300. He added he was working with the Department of Interior to consolidate all federal wildfire resources into a single agency, which he said would free up the Forest Service to “focus on its core mission of delivering critical outputs and services from NFS lands.”

However, that consolidation faces a Capitol stumbling block. Simpson reminded Schultz that “Congress didn’t go along with that,” and refused to fund the transfer before an outside study could determine its merits. “It would be kind of stupid to combine the Forest Service and wildfire fighting in our bill without having the study completed,” Simpson added. “Otherwise, why do the damn study?”

Schultz replied the study was in the process of hiring a third-party research firm to analyze the benefits or harms of putting all federal firefighting into the Interior Department’s Wildland Fire Service. He expected results would be available this fall. He also said the transition from regional to state offices wouldn’t take place until after the 2026 fire season wound down.

In an email to Mountain Journal, Steve Lenkart of the National Federation of Federal Employees, the largest government union, said his membership would be fighting the reorganization through Congress and in court. The union claims the administrative moves would affect about 6,500 Forest Service employees, while the research changes would disrupt the lives of 2,700 workers in 31 states.

“We consider this a ‘dismantling’ of the Forest Service, not a reorg,” Lenkart wrote. “This administration blatantly breaks the law, time and again, and House and Senate Republicans just let it happen. It is an extremely sad state of affairs for this country, regardless of which political party one follows.”