Forest Service organizational shake-up designed to get more money and work on the ground

The U.S. Forest Service, which oversees 193 million acres of public land, including 20 million in Idaho, 9.3 million in Washington and 15 million in Oregon, will undergo a major overhaul in the coming years.

Much of its headquarters will relocate from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City. Its nine regions headed by regional foresters who each oversee several national forests will be dissolved and replaced by 15 state-based directors with small leadership teams in places like Boise, Olympia and Salem, Oregon. They will oversee the national forest within those states, or in some cases such as the Colorado and Kansas office based in Fort Collins, multiple states.

Many of the jobs and positions at the regions will be moved to operations service centers to provide “shared administrative, technical, and enabling support” to forests and state offices. The agency’s research stations will be consolidated into a single organization and many will close. Its firefighting apparatus will be little changed.

Individual national forests and ranger districts will remain largely as they exist now.

The changes, announced Tuesday by U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, have been in the works since 2024 and are designed to reduce bureaucracy and move decision-making closer to the land and increase staffing on forests and their ranger districts.

“We are flattening the organization so we are much closer to the ground and we are driving a lot of that capacity to directly help our forests and districts that are really under capacity right now,” said Associate Forest Service Chief Chris French on the “Hotshot Wake Up” podcast.

The Lewiston Tribune visited with three retired Forest Service employees – Cheryl Probert, former supervisor of the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest; Chuck Mark, former supervisor of the Salmon-Challis National Forest; and Jim Caswell, former supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest and national director of the Bureau of Land Management – to get their perspectives on problems the agency faces and how the restructuring may or may not help.

They described funding shortfalls that have reduced staffing or led to consolidations that tended to pull people further from field work combined with decades – and in some cases more than 100 years – of internal policy directives and regulations that have complicated decision-making.

“I think over years and years the Forest Service has gotten more hidebound. The notion of ‘let’s get it done, let’s find a way, let’s work within the laws and policies we have and make changes where we have administrative authority and cut red tape, let’s meet the letter and intent of the law,’ I think that is restricted and has been piled on and piled on so you can hardly move and get things done,” said Caswell.

Probert said the increasing percentage of the agency’s budget devoted to firefighting has pulled money from the agency’s other missions such as recreation and restoration. It also faces a significant backlog of facility maintenance and has lost some capacity to understand social dynamics of the public, including local communities and those far from specific forests.

“What we really need to do is get back to that focus on accomplishing work on the ground. It’s not about how good our analysis is. It’s not about whatever,” she said. “It’s getting back to getting work on the ground whether it’s trail work, watershed restoration, timber management, whatever it is, getting that work done on the ground needs to be a priority.”

Mark describes the agency as being divided into four layers – ranger districts, forests, regions and the Washington, D.C., office. He estimates the agency is 15-30% below full staffing largely from funding shortfalls. He said there has been internal talk for years about reorganization built around scaling back regional offices.

He has mixed feelings about the reorganizations but is pleased that the agency’s firefighting apparatus is being retained. The Trump administration had previously sought to consolidate wildfire suppression that is spread across several agencies into a single entity. That effort was not funded by Congress.

“If this results in getting more money to the ground, hiring more folks that do the work at the ranger district level and reduces red tape and makes us more efficient, maybe it’s worth it but we have a long way to go between now and then,” Mark said.

Caswell and Probert are more optimistic.

“I think it pushes the decision-making space back down toward the ground and I think that is a really positive thing,” said Caswell, who bases his support on the assumption that state directors will be chosen from within the ranks of the Forest Service and will not be political appointees.

He noted the move from regions to oversight administration being organized by state borders makes sense, especially for Idaho. National forests in the Gem State are now split between two regions, one based in Missoula and the other based in Ogden, Utah.

Probert said the agency has to be flexible as it makes the transition and willing to adapt on the fly.

“The agency needs to go at it with the mindset of we are going to try this and there are going to be some things that don’t work,” she said. “So we are going to have to adjust and be more nimble than we have in the past with that adjusting and make sure it not necessarily just works for the agency. It’s about what works for our communities and the resources and getting the work on the ground.”

Mark said he is most worried about the employees who have gone through a lot in the past few years. There were budget shortfalls that began toward the end of the Biden administration that led to an agencywide hiring freeze. Many vacant positions were held open or filled temporarily by people serving in acting capacities. The Trump administration began with the Department of Government Efficiency Service firing the agency’s temporary employees and then enticing hundreds of people with decades of experience into early retirement. That was followed by talk of the reorganization plan that was not revealed until last week.

“My biggest concern is not with the proposal itself. It’s for the employees. The amount of change they have been blindsided with over the last year – this stuff just keeps coming and I don’t know how much more the employees in the agency can take – it’s frankly overwhelming. Morale is not good and anxiety is sky high.”

The agency does not have a firm timeline for accomplishing the reorganization but told the Tribune it will happen in phases. The first part of that, moving about 260 employees in the Washington, D.C., office to Salt Lake City, is scheduled to be complete by the summer of 2027. About 130 employees will remain in the nation’s capital. The agency does not yet know how many other employees will be required to move or how much the reorganization will cost.