The U.S. Forest Service is moving its headquarters out of Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, the Trump Administration announced Tuesday as part of a “sweeping restructuring” of the agency.
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials, who oversee the Forest Service, said the move West was a “common-sense approach to improve mission delivery” by bringing leadership closer to much of the land they manage.
"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,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins.
The announcement follows a restructuring blueprint the USDA released last year, which was met with concern over its plan to move leadership away from key decision makers in Washington and the removal of the longstanding regional office structure.
Indeed, the final plan will relocate the Chief of the Forest Service to Salt Lake City and move more than two-thirds of positions — about 260 — out of D.C. to Utah or other locations. All nine regional offices, which grouped nearby forests together, will close. Instead, the agency is adding 15 state directors, more closely mirroring the structure of the Bureau of Land Management.
Idaho and Wyoming are set to gain state director’s offices in Boise and Cheyenne. Previously, those states were split between Forest Service regions which were headquartered in other states.
Some of the administrative and technical functions of the regional offices will shift to a handful of “operation service centers,” including in Albuquerque, N.M., Missoula, Mont. and Fort Collins, Colo.
Fort Collins will also serve as the new hub of Forest Service’s scientific research arm, absorbing the management of dozens of shuttering research stations. The agency said scientists will still conduct research across the country and that its fire program will continue to report to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.
Public comments on the USDA’s broader reorganization proposal last year were overwhelmingly negative, according to the agency’s own analysis. 82% of the 14,000 submissions expressed negative sentiment.
The National Association of Forest Service Retirees, for example, whose members include former chiefs, wrote they were “extremely concerned” about the plan to eliminate the regional offices and consolidate research leadership in a single location.
Steve Ellis, the previous chair of the organization who worked at both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, said D.C. staffers are often in the nation's capital for a reason.
"Their primary mission is to work with Congress and in the center of government, and all those entities that are back there, because Washington, D.C. is the center of the U.S. government. Whether you like D.C. or not, that's where it is, and it's important to be there," he said this week.
To Ellis, the impacts of the headquarters move may hinge on which employees are kept in Washington.
However, the Forest Service’s announcement this week garnered some bipartisan support.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, called it a “big win for Utah and the West,” and celebrated “hundreds of jobs” coming to his state. Jared Polis, Colorado’s Democratic governor, also offered his enthusiasm in the USDA press release.
"More than a third of Colorado is federal land including world class ski areas like Vail and Breckenridge, and having a closer relationship with our federal partners is important to maintaining those lands and the communities around them,” he said in a statement.
The major overhaul is expected to happen in a phased approach over the next year, and the closure of offices and research stations will likely require more relocations, the agency said.
"From our standpoint, that's horrible," said Max Alonzo, the national secretary-treasurer of the National Federation of Federal Employees. "People that have worked their whole life in a career, to get to a certain point, to be treated like this; we definitely don't agree with it."
Alonzo previously worked for the Forest Service more than a decade. He said the agency reached out to the labor union seeking to negotiate the changes. A spokesperson for the Forest Service said employees would be offered the opportunity to stay with the agency but their location and work may change.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between KUNR, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, KJZZ in Arizona and NPR, with additional support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
