The Trump administration on Tuesday announced it will shift the U.S. Forest Service’s headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City, laying out a broader reorganization that includes closing research sites in much of the country and shifting more of the agency’s leadership and resources to the West.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the headquarters move is expected to be completed by summer 2027, and the agency said the relocation would move about 260 Forest Service positions currently located in Washington. The department said 130 workers would stay put, while it did not yet know how many staff at regional offices would need to relocate, and a spokesperson did not answer whether the transition would involve layoffs.
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said the plan reflects where “Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found — not just behind a desk in the capital,” adding that the agency is moving leaders closer to the places it manages. The agency said that nearly 90% of National Forest System land is in the West, even as Utah is only the 11th-ranked state for national forest coverage, with about 14,300 square miles (37,000 square kilometers).
The Forest Service said the overhaul involves research closures in 31 states and a move to consolidate research leadership at a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado, rather than maintaining multiple dispersed research stations with their own leadership. The agency said it has about 260 positions in Washington expected to relocate with the headquarters change, while also pointing to a wider administration effort to relocate thousands of employees out of Washington and eliminate layers of management as it seeks to slim the federal workforce.
Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden told reporters that Salt Lake City stood out for its “reasonable cost of living,” proximity to an international airport, and the state’s “family-focused way of life.” Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, celebrated the decision as “a big win for Utah and the West.”
Critics said the headquarters move and research consolidation could reduce capacity and influence over how public lands are managed. Taylor McKinnon, an Arizona-based staffer with the Center for Biological Diversity, called it “a costly bureaucratic reshuffle” that, in his view, would shift more power to corporations and states to log, mine and drill public lands. McKinnon said, “National forests belong to all Americans,” and argued, “Our nation’s capital is where federal policy is made and where the Forest Service headquarters belongs.”
Josh Hicks, a conservation campaigns director at The Wilderness Society, predicted the move would lead to less access to public forests and threaten wildlife habitat, clean water and air. Hicks said in part, “At a time when wildfires are getting worse, and access to public lands is already under strain, the last thing we need is an unnecessary reorganization that creates chaos and confusion for the land managers, researchers and wildland firefighters who help keep our forests healthy now and for future generations,” and he warned the plan could hollow out the Forest Service given what he said happened after Trump’s earlier attempt with the Bureau of Land Management.
The Wilderness Society also pointed to the Trump-era BLM move, saying it resulted in staff leaving with management experience and that such an outcome could repeat under the Forest Service’s reorganization. The agency said many regional offices will close, with their services shifting to hubs in New Mexico, Georgia, Colorado, Wisconsin, Montana and California.
U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said the timing was “the wrong time for upheaval” given the Mountain West’s historically low snowpack, extreme heat and a prospect for a dangerous fire season, but she said she was cautiously optimistic the reorganization could be positive if jobs and leadership end up closer to New Mexico and other states. A Republican on the committee, Rep. Celeste Maloy of Utah, welcomed the move, saying it could improve responsiveness to wildfires and ensure decisions are informed by on-the-ground realities.
The Forest Service’s deputy chief of fire and aviation management, Sarah Fisher, said on a podcast Tuesday that there would be no changes to the agency’s operational firefighting workforce.