Trump's changes set Forest Service up to fail and rubber-stamp extraction, expert says

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that the headquarters of the U.S. Forest Service will move from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City. President Donald Trump’s administration will also close research facilities in 31 states as part of the organizational overhaul.

Proponents say moving the headquarters west of the Mississippi is a way to move leadership closer to where the majority of National Forest System land exists. Opponents say that the agency’s headquarters should be in the nation’s capital, where federal policy is made.

Jim Pattiz is the co-founder of More Than Just Parks. He spent more than a decade writing about America’s public lands. He sees the changes as an attempt to gut the Forest Service.

As he recently told The Show, he thinks the administration’s choice of Utah as the service’s new home is part of that plan.

Full conversation

JIM PATTIZ: They’re frankly in cahoots with the state of Utah. A couple weeks ago, I reported on a partnership agreement that they signed — the chief of the Forest Service, who is also a logging executive — signed with the governor of Utah. It gives the state unprecedented control into the Forest Service’s operations within the state of Utah.

You know, this is a state that is actively suing the federal government to take control of 18 million acres of our public lands. So when the federal government, when you’re being sued by the state of Utah and the federal government is then signing these partnership agreements and now moving the Forest Service’s headquarters to the state of Utah, that sends a pretty clear signal, I think.

SAM DINGMAN: Another key shift here is that the Forest Service’s regional offices are being closed and replaced with state directors who are going to be embedded at the state capitals in 15 states.

Why is that change significant? Because, as I say that out loud, some people are thinking that that sounds somewhat bureaucratic. But you’re saying it’s actually a really big deal.

JIM PATTIZ: Yeah, it’s significant for a couple of reasons. Number one, and kind of the most obvious, the Trump administration has been doing this, even going back to the first Trump administration. When you close the regional offices and then they’re basically creating these state directors out of whole cloth. That basically eliminates all of the leadership at these regional offices and then allows you to appoint your own political appointees as these state directors.

The regional offices, in addition to the D.C. headquarters, this is where so much institutional knowledge is concentrated, particularly in leadership. These are all the leadership positions of the Forest Service. And basically they’re going to be gone. They’re going to be eliminated, either literally eliminated, or in most cases, it will be a situation where they’re told, "Hey, you have to move to this office in Salt Lake or this new office in this other state, or this other place."

And they’re not going to uproot their family. Usually when you’re in a leadership position like that, you’re already at a point where you can retire. And so they’re not going to do that. They’re either going to take a different job, or they’re going to take retirement.

But then the other main point here is that these state directors, as you point out, they’re embedded in the state capitals. These new state directors are going to be basically embedded with these state governments, and these directors are going to be at their beck and call.

And that’s not at all how the Forest Service should operate. This should be something — these are federal lands. They’re not lands that belong to the state. Moving the Forest Service headquarters to Utah moves you 2,000 miles away from the accountability that you need to have in Washington, D.C. And it moves you very close to those state-level lobbyists.

DINGMAN: So there’s some arguably sleight of hand happening here, where they can say that by making the state-level directors proximal to state governments, there’s empowerment. But it’s actually disempowering to take the headquarters out of D.C., which is where the actual Forest Service policy is being decided.

PATTIZ: Absolutely, that’s exactly right. And you’re disempowering Americans.

DINGMAN: So the precedent for this was in Trump’s first term, when he moved the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management from D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado, which, among other things, was a very small town, not close to a major airport, which obviously had implications for staff making decisions about their futures. What happened when the Trump administration made that move that you see as predictive in terms of what we’re likely to see here?

PATTIZ:Eighty-seven percent of the affected BLM workforce left. They separated from the agency rather than moving to Grand Junction. And of course they did. You can’t uproot people like that and expect them to just go over there. And the Trump administration knew that. They can claim all kinds of things about getting it closer to land.

The entire point of that move was to get rid of all of this institutional knowledge and to be able to replace people with their own pliable political appointees, people who were going to rubber stamp more extraction. And so that’s exactly what happened with the BLM.

But the Forest Service, what people need to understand is this is on a much, much larger scale. This is affecting so many more people. The Forest Service is a much larger agency than the BLM.

DINGMAN; Yes, as you point in the piece, we’re talking about, I think it’s 193 million acres of land. The other major impact here, as you write about, Jim, is the effect this is going to have on research projects.

PATTIZ: I want to point out that the Forest Service Research and Development Program is the largest forestry research organization on the planet. Our Forest Service Research and Development Program is the envy of the world. I mean, generations of institutional knowledge, incredibly long running studies.

And they have, in many cases they do what are called experimental forests. And so they’re testing all kinds of ways to bring back habitat or restore watersheds or whatever it is. And they’re shuttering most of these experimental forests and these research stations, and you can’t pack that up and bring it.

And they know that. The Trump administration knows that.But the purpose of this is to stifle that research so that we can’t make informed decisions. When people want to make developments on Forest Service land, whether that’s a mine or whether it’s logging activities or any other kind of development activities, oil and gas, you name it, they won’t be able to point to bodies of research or even conduct the necessary research to say, “Hey, wait, you know, that’s going to have a negative impact on this, this area.”

There won’t be anybody left to do it.

DINGMAN; Speaking of that, one of the things you argue in the piece is that a lot of these moves are being made to create a kind of a pretext, right? The idea being that they close up these operations that we’ve been talking about, shut down projects that cannot be relocated, which then creates a window in some undetermined period of time for them to say, “Well, what is the Forest Service really doing? It seems like they’re not getting anything done. We should, in fact, curtail it even further.”

PATTIZ: Absolutely. And … this was laid out in Project 2025. This is what the Trump administration, on a smaller scale, tried to do in the first term. And now it’s like it’s on steroids.

But yeah, this is the objective, whether it’s the Forest Service or any number of federal agencies that they don’t like. It’s to shrink the agency, basically, to hollow out the agency and then to point at it and say, “Look, this agency’s no good anyway. They’re not working.”

And tell the American people, “You know what? The private sector can do this a whole lot better.”