US Forest Service to move headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City

The Trump administration will move the US Forest Service headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City and shut down its regional offices, the agriculture department has announced. The announcement sets in motion a controversial reorganization for the country’s second-largest federal land management agency that Trump officials have planned since last year.

The move, which the USDA touted as a “commonsense approach”, recalls the first Trump administration’s chaotic attempt to relocate the Bureau of Land Management from Washington DC to Colorado, first announced in 2019. The agency lost nearly 90% of its Washington-based staff, who declined to move – only for the BLM to return toWashington after Joe Biden took office.

Agriculture department officials described the move as a way to bring the administration of the USFS, which manages nearly 200 million acres of federal land, closer to its holdings, which are concentrated in western states. Under the new “state-based model”, the agency will be run by 15 directors overseeing one or more states instead of the current structure based on regions.

“This is about building a Forest Service that is nimble, efficient, effective – and closer to the forests and communities it serves,” USFS chief Tom Schultz wrote in a statement. “Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found – not just behind a desk in the capital.”

About 90% of the USFS workforce already works outside the capital, according to the news outlet Mountain Journal.

Conservationists view the plan as the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken to weaken public land agencies.

“This administration’s plan to dismantle a 120-year-old agency will mean less access to the public forests people rely on, less capacity to reduce [the] intensifying wildfire risk, and more threats to clean air, clean water and wildlife habitat,” said Josh Hicks, the conservation campaigns director for the Wilderness Society.

“Simply put, this reorganization will wreak havoc on the Forest Service management and organization, adding fuel to the unpopular narrative by officials like Senator Mike Lee that public lands should be sold off to private industry.”

The USFS reorganization is “part of the Trump administration’s attack on science and the scientists America depends on for healthy public lands”, Aaron Weiss, the deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities, wrote in a message to the Guardian. “The ecological and institutional knowledge that will be lost by shutting down research stations across the country could take a generation to restore.”

Utah governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, cheered the decision, noting that relocating the agency – whose workforce was gutted by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” cuts – would bring jobs to the state.

“With nearly 90% of Forest Service lands west of the Mississippi, moving the US Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City will put leadership closer to the lands, communities, and challenges they manage,” Cox wrote on social media. “It also means hundreds of jobs coming to Utah and better, faster decisions on the ground for the people who rely on our public lands, from ranchers and timber producers to families who work and recreate there.”

The USFS will also consolidate its research facilities across the country into one, located at Fort Collins, Colorado.

Colorado governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, applauded the relocation.

“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,” Polis said.