They're Gutting the Forest Service to 'Make It Better,' and If You Believe That, I Have a Bridge to Sell You
Let's start with the punchline, because I can’t be bothered to build suspense for something this stupid. The Trump administration says it wants to make the U.S. Forest Service more effective and "closer to its customers."
Closer to its customers.
Read that again. The USDA, the colossal government blob that oversees the Forest Service, is going to get closer to its customers by taking its Pacific Northwest headquarters—the one that has managed the unique, massive, fire-prone forests of Oregon and Washington for a century—and moving its core research functions to… Colorado.
I'm no geographer, but I'm pretty sure that's not closer. Unless the "customers" they're talking about are lobbyists in Denver. Then, yeah, I guess it makes perfect sense.
Trading Local Knowledge for a PowerPoint Deck
The Memo from Planet PowerPoint
The whole genius plan was dropped in a July memo from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. It's a masterpiece of corporate consultant-speak. They're going to "consolidate" nine regional offices into five hubs scattered across the country. They're taking seven different research stations, each with decades of specialized, localized knowledge, and cramming them into one mega-station in Fort Collins, Colorado.
The memo, of course, is conveniently vague on the details that matter. Will the hundreds of employees in Portland be relocated? Fired? Will their institutional knowledge just evaporate into the ether? How will the chain of command even work? The memo doesn't say. It just uses a lot of buzzwords like "effective" and "less bureaucratic."
This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of an idea, dreamed up by someone who's never smelled a Ponderosa pine and thinks a watershed is something you keep in the backyard. It reminds me of the time my city council tried to "streamline" trash pickup by outsourcing it to a tech startup from another state. We had garbage piling up on the streets for three weeks because the app couldn't differentiate between an alley and a one-way street. This is that, but for 24 million acres of irreplaceable forestland.
The Genius Plan to Manage a Forest From a Thousand Miles Away
So, Who Exactly Asked For This?
Here’s the funny part. If this move is to get "closer to the customers," you'd think the customers would be thrilled. Right?
Wrong. Everyone—and I mean everyone who actually deals with the forests—hates this.
The timber groups are worried it’ll snarl logging operations in red tape that stretches halfway to the Rockies. The state foresters, you know, the people who actually have to fight the damn wildfires, think it’s going to make a dangerous situation even worse. In a letter to the USDA, Oregon's own state forestry and agriculture officials warned the move would "diminish the responsiveness required to increase timber production and reduce wildfire risk." That's polite government-speak for "Are you people insane?"
Even the conservationists and the cattle grazers, groups that usually agree on nothing, are on the same page here. They all fear that yanking the regional staff out of the region will drain the Forest Service of the one thing that makes it useful: local expertise. You can't manage the damp, dense rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula with the same playbook you use for the arid plains of Utah. It just doesn't work.
Senators from both parties have been grilling USDA leaders about it. Nobody seems to have a straight answer. It’s almost as if the decision was made in a vacuum, completely disconnected from the people it will affect. Imagine that.
How to Kill a Century of Science in One Easy Memo
A Century of Knowledge Down the Drain
We're not just talking about some office building with a nice view of downtown Portland. The Pacific Northwest Research Station is over 100 years old. It’s the scientific brain that studies the specific ecology of the region. Wildfires, salmon watersheds, Douglas fir ecosystems—this is the place where the fundamental research that informs every major land management decision gets done.
Moving that work to Colorado is like moving a marine biology lab to Kansas. The context is everything. The scientists there work with the forests they can see, touch, and measure. They've built relationships with local stakeholders. They have a century of accumulated data and experience tied to that specific place, and the administration thinks you can just copy-paste it to a new time zone and...
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one. Maybe putting a thousand miles between scientists and the forests they study is some 4D chess move I'm too dumb to understand. Maybe the real "customers" are the ones who benefit when a vital public service is crippled by incompetence.
And the timing is just perfect. The USDA has already shed more than 15,000 employees this year. And get this: a congressional analysis suggests an internal shake-up this big usually requires, you know, authorization from Congress. The USDA didn't bother seeking it. They only published their memo and opened a window for "public comment" after they got called out in a Senate hearing. The deadline for comments is this Tuesday, by the way. A single email address, reorganization@usda.gov, to decide the fate of millions of acres of public land. It’s a joke. It's offcourse a joke.
They're not trying to fix the Forest Service. They're trying to break it.
They Broke It On Purpose.
Let's be real. This isn't about efficiency. This isn't about saving money or getting "closer to customers." This is a deliberate act of sabotage. You don't make an agency better by ripping out its brain and scattering its limbs across the country. You do that when you want to make it weak, confused, and ineffective—so weak that it can no longer stand in the way of private interests who see our national forests not as a public trust, but as a commodity to be carved up and sold off. This isn't a bug. It's the entire point of the program.
Reference article source：
