The U.S. Forest Service is relocating its headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City and dismantling the regional management system it has used since 1907 — a restructuring the USDA calls a common-sense move closer to the forests, and critics call one of the most destabilizing shakeups in the agency’s 121-year history.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the changes on March 31, framing them as a priority of the Trump administration to improve how the agency manages America’s forests while cutting costs and boosting recruitment.
The scope of the overhaul is vast. Roughly 260 employees — about two-thirds of the D.C.-based workforce — will be moved to Salt Lake City or to new operational service centers around the country, with only 130 positions remaining in Washington. All nine regional offices that have coordinated Forest Service operations across the country for more than a century will close.
And 57 of the agency’s 77 research and development stations will be shuttered, with the surviving 20 consolidated under a single headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado.
The restructuring is expected to roll out over the next year.
A New State-Based Model
In place of the regional system, the Forest Service will appoint 15 state directors who will each oversee operations within one or more states, serving as leaders for forest supervisors, operational priorities, and relationships with states, tribes, and partners.
The new structure more closely mirrors how the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management operates through state offices rather than regional ones. But the shift isn’t a simple one-to-one swap. The original Forest Service regions were drawn along topographic and watershed boundaries, not state lines — meaning states like Idaho, which was previously split between two regions, will now fall under a single state director. Colorado, which has been part of the Rocky Mountain Region alongside Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas for more than a century, will instead share a new state office with Kansas.
Regional office functions will move to six operational service centers in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Athens, Georgia; Fort Collins, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; Missoula, Montana; and Placerville, California.
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What It Means for Colorado
Colorado feels the impacts of this restructuring from multiple angles.
The Rocky Mountain Region’s office in Lakewood will close, ending its role as the administrative hub for 11 national forests and grasslands across several states. Fort Collins will gain both an operational service center and the new consolidated research headquarters, which will absorb management of the remaining research facilities nationwide.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis praised the plan, saying the Fort Collins service center will bring new jobs to the state’s agricultural workforce.
In a statement included in USDA’s press release, Polis noted that more than a third of Colorado is federal land, including ski areas like Vail and Breckenridge, and that a closer relationship with federal partners is important to maintaining those lands.
But the picture isn’t entirely bright. Top Forest Service officials in Colorado, including former longtime White River National Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams, have already departed the agency over the past year. Fitzwilliams retired after the administration required him to fire more than a dozen employees, and he has described what’s happening as a deliberate dismantling of public land institutions.
The Forest Service manages 11 national forests in Colorado — including the White River, Arapaho-Roosevelt, Pike-San Isabel, San Juan, and Rio Grande — totaling roughly 14.5 million acres. These lands are critical not only to the state’s outdoor recreation economy but also to wildfire management, watershed protection, and backcountry search and rescue operations.
Massive Research Cuts Raise Alarm
The research consolidation is drawing some of the sharpest criticism. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) warned that shuttering more than 57 research stations while eliminating an unknown number of forestry scientists could leave the agency less capable of addressing growing threats from wildfires, disease, and climate change.
PEER noted that the administration did not inventory the scientific research needs of the National Forest System before consolidating research capacity — a step many observers have long advocated for. The group’s Western Lands Advocate, Chandra Rosenthal, cautioned that the move undermines the agency’s ability to understand forest diversity by eliminating research stations studying local conditions, particularly as the administration simultaneously seeks to increase timber production.
Much of the affected research is place-based and long-term, involving watershed studies, old-growth monitoring, and ecosystem-specific work that depends on being physically embedded in the landscapes under study. That type of science cannot simply be relocated to Fort Collins.
Comes After Unprecedented Workforce Losses
The restructuring announcement lands on an agency that has already lost a staggering number of employees. At least 3,400 Forest Service employees were terminated in the first quarter of 2025, and more than 15,000 additional employees took early retirement or buyout offers — amounting to roughly a 50% reduction in the Forest Service workforce since 2024.
USDA received overwhelmingly negative feedback on the reorganization plan before finalizing it, with 82% of public comments opposing the changes.
The National Association of Forest Service Retirees, which includes seven former chiefs, also weighed in. In a letter to Congress, the group’s then-Chair Steve Ellis said the organization was “extremely concerned” about the proposal, noting that employees were already stretched thin from firings and early retirements and that this was “not the time for massive dislocation.” Ellis said the group saw nothing in the proposal that would improve services or efficiency, calling it a directive to do more with less.
Fire Operations Unchanged — For Now
One thing the restructuring does not touch, at least immediately, is wildfire response. No changes are planned for field-based operational firefighters, and the Fire and Aviation Management program will maintain its existing structureuntil fire management operations are eventually transferred into the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service. An internal memo indicated that the Wildland Fire Service will initially consolidate fire management within the Department of Interior only, meaning Forest Service fire crews are not being merged with Interior’s for the time being.
That said, critics argue that the loss of institutional knowledge from the broader restructuring and workforce reductions will inevitably affect fire preparedness indirectly — especially heading into another Colorado wildfire season.
What This Means for Outdoor Recreation
For hikers, climbers, and backcountry users in Colorado and across the West, the full effects of this restructuring may take months or years to become clear. The immediate concern among public lands advocates is that a smaller, more decentralized agency — one that has already lost half its workforce — will struggle to maintain the trails, roads, campgrounds, permit systems, and SAR coordination that recreation users depend on.
The shift to a state-based model also raises questions about whether national forests will increasingly be managed in partnership with — or under pressure from — state governments and industry interests, rather than through a unified federal framework focused on the long-term public interest.
As one longtime western Forest Service employee told Government Executive, while moving employees out of D.C. may be prudent, eliminating the regional structure entirely is a radical change that will upend reporting chains and coordination.
The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands across 44 states. Nearly 90% of that land lies west of the Mississippi. How it is managed — and by whom — is one of the most consequential public lands decisions of this generation.
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