Why the Trump Administration Is Closing 75% of U.S. Forest Research Facilities
A federal restructuring will eliminate regional offices, centralize authority, and expand logging priorities as wildfire risks rise.
Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist. Subscribe to his Substack.
The U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of public land, is undergoing a sweeping restructuring under the Trump administration that will eliminate all regional offices, relocate its headquarters, and close roughly three-quarters of its research facilities—57 out of 77, according to multiple reports on the reorganization plan.
The changes coincide with a push by President Donald Trump to expand domestic timber production and are raising concerns among scientists and policymakers that the agency’s scientific capacity is being reduced as wildfire risk intensifies and snowpack declines across the West.
The reorganization, announced by the Department of Agriculture, replaces a decades-old regional system with a state-based leadership model and significantly reduces the agency’s presence in Washington, D.C. Federal officials have said the changes are intended to streamline decision-making and align management more closely with state-level conditions.
At the same time, federal policy is moving in a clear direction. In March, the administration ordered an immediate expansion of domestic timber production, directing agencies to increase supply from public lands. The Department of Agriculture has also announced more than $100 million in financing for sawmills and wood-processing facilities, part of a broader effort to expand industrial capacity tied to federal timber output.
Those two shifts—centralizing authority and expanding industrial demand—are not separate. One concentrates decision-making power. The other creates pressure to use that power to increase extraction.
The Forest Service has long operated under a “multiple use” mandate, balancing timber production with recreation, watershed protection, and conservation. That balance has depended on a distributed system: regional leadership, localized expertise, and a wide network of research sites collecting long-term ecological data.
That system is now being reduced at scale.
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