Ask A Scientist: How Do We Save US Forest Service from President Trump’s Restructuring?

   

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Across the US Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management, US Department of State, and the White House, UCS Chief of Staff Julian Reyes has had a hand in weaving climate science and resilience into agricultural and natural resource management for nearly a decade.

His work—growing federal climate policies and programs from the ground up and helping create climate-informed resources with US government decision makers and communities—showed Reyes firsthand how science-guided leadership brings about positive, sustainable outcomes that benefit us all. And he’s watched in disbelief as the Trump administration has dismantled essential agencies that would protect farmers, ranchers, and foresters and help them understand and prepare for climate risks.

The Trump administration’s plan to slash the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service offices and relocate and consolidate its research and development (R&D) facilities would also potentially abandon generational investments in critical forestry data, samples, and resources. This would leave land managers, firefighters, and decision makers without the crucial information they need to manage climate risks and protect US forests from wildfires growing in frequency and intensity. These long-term data are irreplaceable and can help us solve future problems no one has conceived of yet.

There’s also a more immediate concern: what gutting the Forest Service means for the US as it faces what’s expected to be a severe wildfire season.

We spoke with Julian Reyes about what happens if President Donald Trump’s administration carries out a sweeping US Forest Service restructuring, and what he thinks its iconic mascot Smokey Bear would say about the plan.

AAS: What’s important about the US Forest Service that has you and UCS concerned about the restructuring?

Julian Reyes: In addition to the very important firefighting capabilities at the Forest Service, agency scientists also provide a critical line of defense for our nearly 200 million acres of national forests and grasslands through scientific understanding of the complex nature of climate change and its role in longer, more intense wildfire seasons and increased insect and disease outbreaks.

The expansive restructuring of the agency, which includes moving headquarters to Utah and spreading staff to the winds, is irreversibly destructive to the federal scientific enterprise and leaves the nation to face growing climate threats with fewer experts predicting and managing wildfires. It also leaves us less equipped to protect forests that provide clean air and water, and less able to support many rural livelihoods. More importantly, the reshuffling of Forest Service staff poses an imminent threat as hotter, drier conditions across much of the country are setting up dangerous wildfire risks in the coming months.

AAS: The Forest Service restructuring plan is part of an ongoing pattern of attacks on science from the administration. What kind of impact will this latest attack have?

Julian Reyes: As National Coordinator for the USDA Climate Hubs program, I worked hand-in-hand with many Forest Service R&D scientists, the very same ones who are being uprooted from their research stations. I also fondly remember meeting Smokey Bear for the first time at the San Bernardino National Forest while learning about their wildfire control strategies and research. Seeing the news about the relocation and reorganization made me very sad for my Forest Service colleagues, knowing that the next few years will require many to leave the agency, move states, and/or switch careers completely. Truly devastating.

Forest Service R&D scientists were essential to bringing their perspectives on climate-related impacts and adaptation on forestlands, including their interplay with agriculture. For example, the Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station collaborated with regional geneticists to build the Seedlot Selection Tool, which helps forest managers match planting materials based on current and future climates.

Another important resource that may no longer be updated, or may be lost, is the Fire Management Adaptation Menu, produced by the USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub and Forest Service Northern Research Station. Losing this critical information would take away tools that help land managers anticipate climate change impacts and identify steps they can take to adapt forests to changing fire regimes. These are just two of many examples of what will be lost.

AAS: What lessons have we learned from previous Trump administration agency reshuffling, and what do they tell us about this plan will work?

Julian Reyes: We can get some insight into what the impact will be from similar moves by the first Trump administration’s relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, as well as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Headquarters. These moves yielded negative results and decimated those agencies.  Relocation of federal agencies outside of Washington, DC, was a tactic by the first Trump administration to diminish the use of science, data, and evidence in decision making. In 2019, the USDA’s ERS and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) were moved to Kansas City for flimsy reasons like “cost savings,” to “provide better customer service,” and “better attract and retain staff.”

Likewise, the BLM, a major federal land management agency and partner to the Forest Service, had its headquarters moved “out West” to Grand Junction. Already, 97% of BLM staff were located in the western United States. And according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), nearly half of the relocated staff declined reassignment, and the agency’s reorganization efforts did not yield effective reforms.

Having worked at BLM headquarters in 2024, I can share my personal observation that the agency was still hamstrung from the 2019 relocation with decreased staffing, missing expertise, and loss of institutional knowledge.

I see a parallel here with Forest Service headquarters being moved to Salt Lake City. It will disrupt key services and important research, accelerating the demise of its world-class research. After seeing what happened at BLM, ERS, and NIFA, I believe the Forest Service will be less effective at coordinating issues across states and less visible in important policy conversations with other land management agencies.

The disastrous effects of President Trump’s recent push to deregulate industry have been most visible in the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) chaos. The now largely defunct department’s haphazard cuts, combined with budget proposals to slash funding and staffing for dozens of federal agencies, make the sole purpose of these moves clear: the destruction of competency, experience, and effectiveness at federal agencies. The administration is not seeking efficiencies or savings: they are seeking to clear a more profitable path for special interests through the exploitation of public goods like our national forests. Industry only profits from horizontal trees, not vertical ones.

If the Trump administration were to move forward with this restructuring as planned, Forest Service R&D would join research efforts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as casualties of this administration’s deliberate, dangerous subterfuge.

AAS: How exactly does moving scientists to different sites negatively affect Forest Service research?

Julian Reyes: The More than Just Parks Substack explains the impact of relocating scientists well:

“You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”

By its own account, Forest Service R&D is the “world’s leading wildland fire research organization.” This work includes how climate change alters fuel moisture and fire behavior through warmer and drier conditions. And the science is clear—the wildfires burning now aren’t the same fires that burned 30 years ago. They are burning at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, growing with greater speed, and under more extreme fire weather conditions.

These longer, more intense wildfire seasons are destroying homes, livelihoods, and lives. In addition, costly wildfire seasons are driving up property insurance premiums and contributing to rising housing affordability challenges, according to UCS Senior Policy Director for Climate and Energy Rachel Cleetus. As my colleague succinctly put it, “Without robust science, staffing, expertise, and resources, as well as fair pay for wildland firefighters, the job of tackling worsening wildfire seasons will be much harder—and that could put people in greater danger.”

The scale of disruption across R&D sites will yield a significant brain drain and push scientific discovery back decades, especially on issues relevant to the Forest Service: wildfires, pests, post-fire restoration, and more.

AAS: You’ve met Smokey Bear. What do you think he’d say about the Trump administration’s Forest Service restructuring plan?

As Smokey Bear has taught millions, only YOU can prevent forest fires. In this case, only YOU really can prevent literal forest fires by fighting the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the Forest Service and ensuring that critical science on wildfires, climate, and carbon continues.

In a recent blog post, I wrote about how the Trump administration’s effort to shutter 57 of its 77 research and development facilities isn’t really about efficiency—it’s about hollowing out another science agency whose mission is to protect people, places, and livelihoods.

The Forest Service has since updated the text on its website to qualify that these research and development (R&D) closures are “possible” but not a foregone conclusion. Yet, as details of the restructuring emerge, they make one thing painfully clear: this plan would dismantle the world’s premier, and largest, wildfire research agency at a time when wildfire risk, climate impacts, and economic losses are accelerating. I think Smokey would agree that it’s disgraceful.

AAS: What can people reading this do?

Julian Reyes: Right now, we can call or email our congresspeople and tell them to protect critical forest management research. We can demand that Congress reverse the gutting of the US Forest Service. There is much to lose if we don’t speak out against these harmful actions. We’ve seen the administration make a show of indiscriminately slashing federal agencies only to reverse course soon afterward and scramble to rehire staff in order to meet basic needs and avert disaster. But once talent and longtime institutional knowledge are lost, they may never be recovered.

The Trump administration’s plan to slash the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service offices, and relocate and consolidate its research and development (R&D) facilities would also potentially abandon generational investments in critical forestry data, samples, and resources. This would leave land managers, firefighters, and decision makers without the crucial information they need to manage climate risks and protect US forests from wildfires growing in frequency and intensity.

Michelle Rama-Poccia is a bilingual writer and podcast host at UCS.