I was on a road trip to visit a friend late in March when my phone started lighting up. The Trump administration had just announced a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service. People — among them current and former agency staffers — had thoughts.
Under the overhaul, the Forest Service will move from a regional to a state-based leadership structure, relocate its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and close nearly three-quarters of its research stations. A news release described this as a much-needed shift to streamline the agency and bring its leadership closer to the forests and grasslands it manages, which are primarily west of the Mississippi.
But a common refrain emerged among the sources I spoke with: The Trump administration is trying to break the Forest Service, they claimed, to pave the way for privatizing or even selling off the 193 million acres of land it oversees.
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On a recent podcast, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said this is false, that the reorganization is about prudently stewarding taxpayer dollars, not dismantling the agency. Trump officials have also said that a public lands sell-off is not part of the president’s agenda.
I figured the controversy would die down a bit by the time I wrote this newsletter. But nearly a month later, it’s still top of mind for most of the former firefighters and recreation and environment advocates I speak with.
“I worry that I sound paranoid like a conspiracy theorist — why would anybody want to break a federal agency?” said Rich Fairbanks, a former Forest Service firefighter and board member of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “But that’s exactly what they appear to be trying to do.”
To him, the reorganization smacks of an attempt to sow chaos and drive experienced employees out the door. He described the decision to move the headquarters to Salt Lake City as a red flag. Not only is it likely to prompt more staff departures, he said, but Utah is widely seen as the epicenter of an ongoing movement for states to take over federal public lands. It’s also home to Sen. Mike Lee, who last year proposed selling off millions of acres of public lands.
Max Alonzo, a former Forest Service firefighter who now works as national secretary treasurer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, similarly believes the administration is setting the agency up to fail. He noted the president has also proposed deep cuts that would slash the USFS operations budget by 44% and eliminate funding for forest and rangeland research to refocus the agency’s mission primarily on timber sales.
The administration plans to replace its nine regional offices with 15 state directors. These changes to leadership structure make little sense to Alonzo unless the intention is to lay the groundwork for an eventual state takeover of the agency and its lands, he said.
“They’re putting the chess pieces in place to get rid of our national forests,” he said. He believes the goal is to open the door to more mineral extraction, logging and drilling.
“It’s all about breaking the government so people decide the government doesn’t work,” echoed Hugh Safford, a UC Davis researcher who worked for the Forest Service for over two decades.
Safford is concerned that the move to shutter dozens of research stations will prevent Forest Service scientists from doing on-the-ground work on issues affecting local lands, like seeing how different ecosystems respond to wildfire, pests and drought. This research has driven some of the most important global advancements in fire planning and forest management, he said. He would know: Until 2021, he managed a staff of ecologists that provided science support to Forest Service leadership.
“They are destroying the research part of the agency,” he said. “These plans are so draconian and so depressing my hair stands up when I even read about them.”
Dave Calkin worked for 23 years at the Forest Service, overseeing a team of scientists that researched wildfire management. He took an early retirement offer last April, just after the agency terminated thousands of probationary employees, including a young researcher in his office.
“The more you can demonstrate government isn’t working, the more you can argue to privatize and sell off public lands,” he said. “And that’s clearly one of the intentions of everything they’re doing.”
More recent land news
Although administration officials would later distance themselves from the effort, the Interior Department helped craft talking points that Sen. Lee used to pitch his controversial proposal to sell off federal public land last summer, Chris D’Angelo of Public Domain reports.
Trump has withdrawn hospitality executive Scott Socha as his nominee to lead the National Park Service, reports Jake Spring of the Washington Post. That comes as many parks face their peak seasons with a dramatically reduced staff and the agency braces for more potential cuts, my colleague Justine McDaniel writes.
It’s not just the Park Service: The president’s budget proposal also seeks to decrease staff at the Bureau of Land Management and eliminate its wilderness management funding in favor of focusing on energy production, reports Christine Peterson of Outdoor Life.
The Trump administration is again planning border wall-related construction inside Big Bend National Park, weeks after U.S. Customs and Border Protection backed away from such plans amid bipartisan backlash, according to Travis Bubenik of Marfa Public Radio, who cited an online map showing the planned construction.
A day after Bubenik’s report, the border wall map disappeared from the Customs and Border Protection website, leaving the public with no way to know where and when construction on the wall will take place, writes Mary Andino of Gear Junkie.
A few last things in climate news
Wildfire, insurance and the price of gas took center stage at the California governor’s debate on Tuesday night. My colleague Blanca Begert broke down each candidate’s defining statements.
In yet another escalation of President Trump’s efforts to obstruct clean energy projects in favor of fossil fuels, the administration said it will pay two energy companies to abandon their offshore wind projects in federal waters — including one off Morro Bay, according to The Times’ Hayley Smith.
Extreme drought is fueling wildfires in the southeastern U.S., Zachary Handlos writes for The Conversation, as concern also grows over intensifying drought conditions in Nevada and Northern California.
Winters have grown shorter in most places across the country, upending everything from tourism and recreation to the transmission season of certain diseases, report Ignacio Calderon, Ramon Padilla, Veronica Bravo and Janet Loehrke in this interactive USA Today project.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
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