The U.S. Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research facilities in 31 states under a reorganization plan announced this week, threatening science that looked at how wildfires, drought, pests and global warming are putting pressure on forests.
The agency plans to consolidate its research division into a centralized office in Fort Collins, Colo., and move field researchers to locations in nearby states. But employees said they feared the move would lead many scientists to leave instead. The reorganization will also move the agency’s headquarters to Salt Lake City from Washington, affecting 260 employees.
Many of the research facilities are at universities where Forest Service scientists have access to laboratories and computers or at experimental forests where scientists can monitor the effects of environmental changes over long periods of time. They also investigate logging techniques, endangered plant and animal species, and how forests grow back after devastating fires.
The agency is closing six research and development facilities in California, five in Mississippi, four in Michigan and three in Utah, among others.
It will also close all of its nine regional offices, which currently manage 154 national forests. Some states will have their own offices and others will be consolidated.
The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres of forest and grasslands in 43 states and territories, including forests managed for commercial logging and pristine wilderness areas. The agency lost 5,860 of its 35,550 employees during the first half of 2025 to cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and early retirement programs, according to an inspector general’s report issued in December.
Critics raised alarm over the proposal to consolidate research stations while much of the Western United States is suffering from record temperatures and prolonged drought that increase the risk of wildfires this summer.
“This move will lead to an increasing divergence between sound science and land management,” said Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, a nonprofit forest protection group.
Some jobs will change and some employees will be asked to move to new locations, according to a March 31 email that Thomas M. Schultz, Jr., the Forest Service chief, sent to employees of the research and development section.
“The consolidation of research stations does not mean a retreat from the agency’s research mission,” Mr. Schultz said in the email. “Forest Service R&D has produced world-class science for over a century, and that will continue. The consolidation is about organizing the research enterprise more efficiently, not diminishing it.”
A Forest Service spokesperson declined to answer questions, pointing to a news release issued by the Agriculture Department, its parent agency.
Among the closures is the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Ore., a facility founded in 1925 that has 246 employees, most of them scientists, according to its website, and oversees projects from Oregon to Alaska.
During President Trump’s first term, a similar relocation plan at the Bureau of Land Management prompted most of the staff to resign. The administration closed that agency’s Washington headquarters in 2019 and moved it to Grand Junction, Colo., leading to the departures of more than 87 percent of the main office’s employees, who oversee oil and gas development as well as recreation and grazing on millions of acres of federal lands. The Biden administration moved the bureau back to Washington in 2021.
Several current Forest Service research employees said they were confused by this week’s reorganization announcement and that they expected many of their colleagues would leave the agency rather than move to other states.
One senior scientist, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said that the Forest Service wasn’t clear about whether the scientist’s research work would continue to get funding or where the scientist would be relocated, making it difficult to decide whether to stay at the agency or leave.
Another researcher said studies about ecological and climate stressors on forests are being downplayed.
“They have narrowed the kinds of themes that they are interested in,” the researcher said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “There are all these people who have done amazing work for decades on everything from acid rain to climate and they have put them in a new bin called ‘forest management.’”
Mr. Trump has long denied the science and effects of climate change, and his administration has cut funding for climate-related research across the federal government. Conservation groups say that eliminating climate-related science will result in forests that are less healthy, and less resilient to future environmental changes, which also means fewer trees for the wood products industry.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: Eric Niiler
- Photo: John Stember
