The U.S. Forest Service announced on March 31 that it will move its Washington, D.C., headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, close all nine of its regional offices, and shutter research and development facilities in 31 states as part of what the U.S. Department of Agriculture is calling a sweeping restructuring of the agency. The transition is expected to wrap up by summer 2027.
Under the new structure, the nine regional offices will be replaced by 15 state-based director positions. States with heavy national forest coverage—Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska—will each get their own director’s office. States with less acreage will be grouped: Nevada and Utah will share a director, as will Colorado and Kansas. Six operational hubs providing specialty support will be distributed across Albuquerque, Athens (Georgia), Fort Collins (Colorado), Madison (Wisconsin), Missoula (Montana), and Placerville (California). The agency’s scattered research stations will consolidate under a single leadership structure anchored in Fort Collins. Fire and aviation management will remain unchanged.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins framed the move as common sense. “Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment,” she said in the announcement. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz added that effective stewardship “is achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found—not just behind a desk in the capital.”
A Gutted Agency Restructures
The reorganization comes after one of the most turbulent years in the agency’s 120-year history. In February 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency directed the USDA to cut its Forest Service workforce, firing probationary, non-firefighting employees. USDA officially confirmed about 2,000 terminations; an agency source cited by CNN put the number at 3,400—more than 10 percent of the agency’s total workforce—and that higher figure has since been consistently cited by the agency’s own subsequent analyses. Then–Forest Service Chief Randy Moore announced his retirement weeks later, writing in a farewell letter to staff that the previous weeks had been “incredibly difficult.”
The firings rippled through ongoing conservation and restoration work. In western Montana, fisheries biologist Mariel Leslie was terminated on February 16, 2025, just as she was preparing to reintroduce beavers and place wood in the water to restore trout habitat in a tributary of the West Fork Bitterroot River. The federal staff who would have overseen the project—in partnership with Trout Unlimited—were gone before the work began.
The administration has proposed cutting the agency’s operations budget, which covers salaries, by 34 percent in fiscal year 2026, with an additional 21 percent reduction to the national forest system budget and a 48 percent cut to capital improvements and maintenance, according to High Country News.
What It Means for Fisheries
More than 40 percent of the country’s blue-ribbon trout streams flow through the 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands the Forest Service manages. In the West, the stakes are even higher: about 60 percent of all native inland trout habitat sits on Forest Service lands. As climate-driven warming shrinks suitable coldwater habitat, Trout Unlimited projects that within a few years, 80 percent of all cutthroat water in Montana will be concentrated on National Forest land—making the agency’s capacity to manage and restore those watersheds more consequential, not less.
Trout Unlimited, whose five-year, $40 million watershed restoration partnership with the Forest Service was announced in 2022, has previously documented the direct connection between agency staffing and on-the-ground restoration: leveraging $20 million in Forest Service funding to complete $62 million worth of projects, restoring more than 400 miles of fish habitat and reconnecting another 700 miles by removing passage barriers.
The reach extends well beyond the West. The Interior Highlands are a case in point: the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri harbors Blue-Ribbon Wild Trout streams including Little Piney Creek, while the Ozark National Forest in Arkansas shelters streams flowing through the Boston Mountains where the Neosho bass (Micropterus velox)—established as a genetically distinct species in a 2022 phylogenomic study in Nature—holds on in clear, rocky runs. Its native range is confined to the Ozark Highlands and Boston Mountains of southwestern Missouri, northeastern Oklahoma, and northwestern Arkansas; the Ozark NF is the primary public land buffer between these fish and the hybridization pressure from introduced Tennessee-strain bass.
In Appalachia, national forests are the backbone of native brook trout recovery. The Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia has been a focus of TU-Forest Service restoration that reconnected more than 100 miles of brook trout habitat. The George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Virginia hold the state’s highest-density brook trout streams, including the Dry River, where agency researchers have worked to reintroduce native fish into high-elevation headwaters. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests in North Carolina—with the Davidson River, the North Mills River, and hundreds of smaller tributaries—are among the most productive wild trout systems in the East. East Tennessee’s wild brook trout populations, concentrated in the upper valleys of the Cherokee National Forest, span more than 100 streams.
In the upper Midwest, the Superior National Forest in Minnesota encompasses more than 2,000 lakes, 1,300 miles of cold-water streams, and the 1.1-million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness—the largest wilderness area east of the Rockies. The forest holds lake trout, brook trout, walleye, and northern pike across nearly 700 square miles of surface water. In the Northeast, the Forest Service has identified the 800,000-acre White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and Maine as “the last bastion of resilient brook trout habitat” in New Hampshire. Thousands of stream miles above 2,500 feet in elevation hold native brookies; TU and the Forest Service have partnered there on bridge replacements on the East Branch of the Pemigewasset and restoration work across ten headwater streams in the Kilkenny area, among other drainages.
Research facility closures could affect species monitoring in key watersheds. The Portland, Oregon, research station, responsible for critical work on species including spotted owls, will close under the plan. Eric Forsman, a former Forest Service wildlife biologist who spent decades studying spotted owls at the agency’s Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon—which will remain open—said the loss of local research leadership across the agency “is not going to improve the programs.” He added that the closures may help the budget “but it won’t improve the quality of the research or the amount of research that gets done.”
Familiar Territory
The announcement drew immediate comparisons to the Bureau of Land Management’s relocation to Grand Junction, Colorado, during Trump’s first term. That 2019 move was framed in nearly identical terms—putting leadership closer to the lands they manage—and produced a different result: by the time the Grand Junction office opened in 2020, only 41 of the 328 BLM employees expected to relocate had done so, according to a High Country News investigation. Many simply left the agency.
The Forest Service’s own summary of public comments on its reorganization plan, submitted during a public comment period last summer, found that 82 percent of 14,000 submissions were negative. Tribal representatives, conservation groups, and former agency employees cited concerns that relocating staff and further cutting budgets would “compromise ecological management, public access, and employee morale.”
Robert Bonnie, who oversaw the Forest Service as a USDA undersecretary during the Obama administration, did not mince words. “This is not going to strengthen the Forest Service, it is going to weaken it,” he told High Country News. “It’s not about solving problems, it’s about blowing things up.”
Former Custer Gallatin National Forest supervisor Mary Erickson said she wasn’t ready to pass final judgment, but raised a harder question: “It’s just such a sweeping change with no real analysis about if there would be cost savings.”
No senior Forest Service official addressed how the work currently performed by the nine regional offices would continue through and after the transition. The agency said it would provide employees and partners with detailed transition guidance as milestones approach.
