This Land Is Your Land. This Land Is My Land. So Why Is the U.S. Forest Service Being Gutted?

The U.S. Forest Service is in the middle of a sweeping reorganization ordered by the Trump administration and announced by USDA on March 31, 2026. The headline version: the agency is moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City; closing all nine regional offices; shifting to a new state-based leadership model with 15 state directors; and consolidating its research program while closing 57 research facilities. USDA says this will make the agency more efficient and closer to the land it manages. Critics say it risks hollowing out the agency just before fire season, amid already serious staffing strain.

This land is your land. This land is my land.

The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands that millions of us rely on for hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, clean water, wildlife habitat, and local outdoor economies. The Conservation Alliance reports that recreation on Forest Service lands generates $23.3 billion in annual economic output, meaning changes within the agency do not stay within it. They ripple outward to trailheads, campgrounds, gateway towns, gear shops, guides, and all of us who simply want our public lands well cared for.

So what exactly is changing?

Here’s the clearest version I can give you.

USDA says the Forest Service will:

• Move headquarters to Salt Lake City;

• Close all regional offices;

• Replace the old regional structure with 15 state directors overseeing one or more states;

• Shift support work into service centers in Albuquerque, Athens, Fort Collins, Madison, Missoula, and Placerville; and

• Consolidate research under one national organization in Fort Collins while closing 57 research facilities.

Structure is not just structure.

Research stations may not sound sexy until you realize they produce the science behind wildfire behavior, forest health, invasive species response, watershed protection, and climate impacts. Close 57 of them, and even if some staff or projects survive on paper, you still risk losing expertise, continuity, and place-based knowledge.

There’s also the timing. The Forest Service has already been under budgetary and staffing pressure, and this month’s reporting has linked recent staffing losses to declines in wildfire mitigation and trail maintenance. Inside Climate News reported that the agency had lost 16% of its workforce in the first year of Trump’s second term, and other reporting has cited reductions in mitigation and maintenance work as local partners scramble to fill gaps.

So when critics use words like “dismantling,” they’re reacting not just to an org chart but to the possibility of fewer people, less science, more confusion, and slower stewardship at the very moment our forests need the opposite.

What this could mean on the ground

I didn’t realize this until I started digging into the reporting, but the biggest risk may be cumulative.

Maybe your local ranger district still opens the gate. Maybe your favorite trail still gets cleared. Maybe your campground still has staff this summer. Maybe. But when an agency loses institutional memory, scatters leadership, closes facilities, and asks already-stretched employees to relocate or adapt to a new structure, the cracks can show up everywhere at once: delayed maintenance, slower permits, less recreation support, weaker habitat restoration, shakier science, and more pressure on nonprofits, volunteers, and local communities.

And no, this is not just a “forest people” issue. National forests protect drinking water, support wildlife corridors, buffer communities against worsening fire risk, and sustain a major part of the outdoor recreation economy. What happens to public lands happens to all of us.

Where Field Trip stands

Field Trip is not neutral about whether public lands deserve competent stewardship.

We’re for forests managed with science, staffed by real people, and protected as if they belong to all of us — because they do. We’re for transparency. We’re for public pressure. And we’re for outdoor brands to use the voices they built on public lands in the first place.

SaveUSFS.org was built to help people contact outdoor brands and urge them to speak up. The site, credited to Alt National Park Service as part of its public pressure campaign to get outdoor brands to speak out, has said outright that many companies built their businesses on public lands and shouldn’t stay silent now. It also offers direct brand contact links and ready-made messages people can use. The Conservation Alliance has now backed that pressure campaign, and more than 70 outdoor businesses signed a statement raising concerns about the reorganization and the agency’s ability to manage its 193 million acres well through the transition.

How you can help

Go to www.saveusfs.org and contact the outdoor brands you support. If they have made a public statement, thank them—with words, social posts, and your purchases. If they have not made a public statement, urge them to do so. Ask them to join coalition efforts. Ask them what they are doing—specifically—to defend the forests their marketing departments love so much.

Then keep going: follow local reporting, support public-lands groups, and get political about it. Call your U.S. representative. Call both senators. As the Forest Service reorganization rolls forward, ask for oversight, transparency, and real accountability. Ask how staffing, science, wildfire readiness, trail maintenance, public access, and watershed protection will be protected during the reshuffle.

You can find your House member HERE, your senators HERE, and use www.usa.gov/elected-officials to look up federal contacts in one place. You can also contact USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and send comments to the Forest Service.

USDA says this transition will continue over the coming year, which means this story is not over. Not even close.

This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.