The U.S. Forest Service will move its headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City as part of an agency-wide reorganization, federal officials announced Tuesday.
Instead of nine regional offices, the agency will create 15 new state-based directors overseeing national forests in their respective areas. In Montana, the regional office currently in Missoula would move to a state director’s office in Helena. Cheyenne, Wyoming would become a combined director’s office for North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska. Idaho would have its own director’s office in Boise.
Missoula would turn into one of five “operation service centers” providing national-level specialty support, such as bridge engineering or technology development. Additional operation service centers will be in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Athens, Georgia; Fort Collins, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Placerville, California.
Missoula would also retain its Rocky Mountain Research Station, which performs wildfire research, ecological science and field technology development. Research centers in Bozeman and Hungry Horse, however, would close.
The release stated restructuring will not affect wildland firefighting operations which currently radiate out of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.
“Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins said in a Tuesday email announcement. “Establishing a western headquarters in Salt Lake City and streamlining how the Forest Service is organized will position the Chief and operation leaders closer to the landscapes we manage and the people who depend on them.”
Rollins revealed plans to restructure most of the USDA last July. But specific details of the agency’s future shape remained vague until Tuesday’s release.
“This is about building a Forest Service that is nimble, efficient, effective and closer to the forests and communities it serves,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz added in the same announcement. “Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found—not just behind a desk in the capital.”
The new structure mirrors the way the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management operates through state rather than regional offices. Former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, now a Missoula resident, said he could see advantages to that change. In his own career, he was regional forester in both Missoula-based Region 1 and Ogden, Utah-based Region 4, each of which had responsibility for part of Idaho.
“We make it harder on the states when they have to fuss with one region or two – It’s very frustrating,” Bosworth said. But he questioned the value of moving the headquarters to Salt Lake City.
“The chief and his immediate deputies ought to be in Washington, where they can work with the other agencies and Congress,” he said. “BLM did that when they sent them to Grand Junction [Colorado at the end of the first Trump administration]. Then they turned around and put them back in Washington.”
State directors would oversee national forest supervisors and work with state and tribal leaders on legislative affairs, communications and intergovernmental coordination. Individual national forests would retain direct responsibility for their landscapes, forestry activity, recreation and wildlife management, among other duties.
Martin Nie directs the Bolle Center at the University of Montana, which studies Forest Service policy and activity. He said while he saw nothing inherently wrong with administrative reshuffling or decentralization, he had several concerns about this decision.
“I find it curious that the Forest Service’s headquarters and leadership will now be placed in a State that continues to challenge the constitutionality and very idea of federal public lands and National Forests,” Nie told Mountain Journal in an email on Tuesday, referring to recent attempts by Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee to sell public lands.
“[Reorganization] must also proceed with a recognition that these are commonly-owned public lands to be managed in the national interest and in accordance with federal law, and those laws and their oversight happen in the Capitol, not in a Governor’s Office. While I need to learn more about the details, I have significant concerns about the degree to which national forests are being managed by and for State governments, and this reorganization appears to be another move in that direction.”
All nine regional offices will close under the new plan, and numerous buildings and other properties may be eliminated, the release said. The remaining research stations would be overseen from Fort Collins, while Vallejo, California would become a national training center and Albuquerque would retain its national business support and human resources duties.
The Forest Service consists of 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands spanning 193,145,865 acres. That includes 49 million acres suitable for timber management, 74 million acres for livestock grazing, and 37 million acres of federally designated Wilderness. It protects drinking water sources for 80 million Americans and receives about 160 million recreational visitors a year. The Forest Service employs about 35,000 full-time and seasonal workers.
