The Hollowing of the Forest Service

This administration is advancing the most significant transformation of the public’s national forests in decades. The loudest part of this effort is the push to aggressively expand commercial logging across federal forests, including gutting protections for nearly 45 million acres of protected forests. At the same time, the administration is quietly dismantling the federal government’s capacity to oversee and manage these lands by pushing out federal workers, undercutting the USDA Forest Service’s world-class research capacity, and transferring more management responsibilities to nonfederal entities.  

While the Forest Service needs thoughtful reform, this is not that. These moves are aimed at undermining federal responsibility for and federal oversight of the public’s forests while making it harder for the Forest Service to reclaim that capacity in the future—privatization in all but name. The reorganization works hand in glove with the president’s directives to supercharge commercial logging while locking in a diminished, desiccated agency. The result will be less accountability to the public, fewer decisions informed by robust science, and less staff dedicated to the health and enjoyment of national forests.  

Key moves 

Staffing & resources 

The administration has sought to reduce the Forest Service’s capacity by cutting both personnel and funding. These changes leave the agency less able to manage forests, engage with the public, and respond to emergencies like wildfires that threaten nearby communities. And they leave the agency more reliant on state and private entities to fill critical gaps. Without adequate staff and resources, the agency can’t effectively manage public forests. 

• DOGE & staff reduction 
  • The Forest Service lost nearly 6,000 employees in 2025 alone, according to the USDA’s inspector general a reduction of approximately 16 percent. And the exodus continues. 
• 2026 budget request 
  • The president’s fiscal year 2027 budget request seeks to reduce the Forest Service’s discretionary budget by approximately 75 percent, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense. This includes major cuts to National Forest System management and overall Forest Service operations. It would also eliminate funding for several major firefighting programs. While there is apparently little money for staff, science, or protecting communities from fire, the proposal would boost funding for the commercial logging program by nearly 450 percent. Even if Congress ultimately goes a different route with funding, the budget request sends a strong signal about the administration’s priorities. 

Management 

The administration has also moved to restructure how the agency operates. As noted, the agency’s structure is not sacrosanct. But this move is not a thoughtful reform package; it is a bid to undercut the Forest Service's independence, degrade the agency’s managerial competence, and tie national forest management more firmly to commercial logging. The upshot is a weak agency that’s less able to effectively manage the public’s forests in the public interest and more focused on satisfying narrow commercial interests.  

• HQ move 
  • The Forest Service plans to relocate its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, the epicenter of the modern movement to sell off public lands. When the first Trump administration moved the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Colorado in 2019, the agency lost 87 percent of the staff who were reassigned. 
• Dismantling the regional management framework 
  • The Forest Service plans to create a state director system for overseeing forest management. Currently, the agency organizes forests into nine geographic regions. While far from perfect, the regional system provides a degree of insulation from state politics, including the sell-off/privatization boosterism that is prevalent in several western states. This new system increases the risk that national forest management will be significantly more susceptible to those pressures.  
• Transferring management 
  • The Forest Service is increasingly relying on a variety of contracts and agreements to transfer management responsibility out of federal hands. These instruments take various forms, such as cooperative agreements, memorandums of understanding, and shared stewardship agreements. Used appropriately, they can accomplish important goals, such as needed restoration and better integration of Tribal knowledge into decision-making. But this administration is wielding them to advance its aggressive logging goals and lock in substantial nonfederal management. Again, what we’re seeing is de facto privatization.  

Research 

On top of these other changes, the administration is also significantly curtailing the Forest Service’s world-class research program. These changes aim at permanently disabling science as an independent voice within the agency. In particular, by turning what remains of the research program toward its political priorities, the administration is looking to have the research serve a commercial logging agenda rather than operating as a force for ecologically sound decision-making. The world’s leading forest research institution—working on cutting-edge science on wildfire behavior, wildlife ecology, freshwater hydrology, and carbon sequestration—is poised to become a shadow of its former self. 

• Research stations 
  • The Forest Service intends to close around 57 of its 77 research facilities, including most research facilities east of the Mississippi. 
  • It will consolidate research into a new headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado. 
  • It will undermine site-specific research, such as by leaving experimental forests unstaffed. These forests are the site of critical ecological research, including longitudinal data collection that has—in some cases—been gathered for up to a century.  
• Analysts and funding 
  • The Forest Service's proposed budget zeroes out research funding and transfers the fire science program to the U.S. Department of the Interior. 
  • Around a fifth of Forest Service STEM PhDs left the agency between December 2024 and December 2025. 
  • Research will focus on administration priorities like timber production and veer away from ecological priorities like climate change, fire ecology, and forest resilience/adaptation. 

Public oversight 

The administration has also sought to undercut the Forest Service’s duty to look before it leaps by eliminating analytic requirements, curtailing public input opportunities, and minimizing disclosure obligations. These changes leave the public in the dark and leave the agency without the publicly sourced, often local information it needs to improve project design. And the administration also makes it easier for more destructive projects—often couched as insignificant, despite their acreage and impact—to be hidden and proceed unchecked by the public to whom these lands belong.   

• National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) 
  • The USDA finalized new NEPA regulations for the Forest Service on April 3. The stated purpose was to implement Executive Order 14154 and its direction to “prioritize efficiency and certainty over any other objectives.” 
    • The Forest Service is no longer required to offer a public comment period on any draft environmental analysis, except for projects subject to a special process (see below). 
    • The agency is no longer required to inform the public of proposed actions on the national forests. 
    • The Forest Service is now able to use “categorical exclusions” (CEs)—a process that lets the agency avoid robust analysis and public engagement—for substantially more actions and with fewer guardrails. CEs are normally used for routine actions where the absence of potentially significant environmental impacts is well established. 
    • Adding new CEs is now substantially easier. 
• Project review process 
  • Earlier this year, the Forest Service also proposed an overhaul of its “predecisional administrative review” process. This process, authorized by the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, required the agency—for certain projects—to offer comment opportunities on the environmental analysis and allow interested parties to raise concerns about a project before finalization. 
    • The Forest Service has significantly shortened both the comment and objection periods—to 20 days for environmental impact statements and 10 days for environmental assessments. 
    • The agency is no longer required to actively inform interested parties of comment or objection opportunities. 
    • The Forest Service has diluted the objection process by giving itself more authority to reject objections and eliminating independent review of the objection. 
    • The agency has created a broadly worded emergency exception, providing a pathway for many projects to avoid this process. 
• Leadership directives 
  • This erosion of public oversight advances top-level directives. Last March, the president issued Executive Order 14225, which—among other things—directed federal agencies to eliminate any policies that “impose an undue burden on timber production,” in addition to specific directives to short-circuit the NEPA process.  
  • Following this, the secretary of Agriculture used emergency authority to unlock fast-track processes for forest projects—including logging—across nearly 60 percent of the National Forest System.  
  • And the acting associate chief of the Forest Service issued a memo last April directing the agency to “use innovative and efficient approaches” to meet only the minimum necessary environmental obligations while ordering the regional foresters to increase timber production by 25 percent.  
  • Congress has also mandated logging targets for the Forest Service for the next decade. These targets increase steadily each year, and they are paired with a directive for the agency to execute numerous long-term (at least 20-year) contracts.   

Conclusion 

Less manpower. Less transparency. Less independence. Less science. After a year and a half, the administration is well on its way to turning the Forest Service into a shell of its former self. 

Federal lands are only as durable as the institutions that manage them. If those institutions are aligned with the public interest, then the lands will be managed for the public. If those institutions are aligned with extractive interests, then the lands will be managed toward extractive ends.  

The administration is pulling every available lever to eliminate the parts of the Forest Service that made it responsive to the public, grounded in science, and focused on long-term, thoughtful forest management. And it is working to tie what remains to a constellation of pro-extractive interests. The result will be a National Forest System managed not for the national interest but for the interests of a narrow few. 

The damage from these changes will extend far beyond the vast number of acres that will be logged. The administration’s proposed actions will weaken our ability to prepare for wildfires, degrade drinking water quality and wildlife habitat, and make forest management decisions less informed, all while increasingly keeping the public in the dark. Once the scientific capacity and public accountability mechanisms of the Forest Service are gutted, rebuilding them could take decades.