MISSOULA — A Trump administration reorganization of the Department of Agriculture would eliminate U.S. Forest Service regional headquarters and significantly change or eliminate some agency functions.
On Thursday, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brook L. Rollins issued a secretarial memorandum detailing a reorganization plan for the Department of Agriculture, including the U.S. Forest Service, that takes effect immediately.
The plan eliminates regional and area management and centralizes organizational functions across the Department of Agriculture, including hiring, grants and public affairs functions.
In her memorandum, Rollins put the emphasis on agriculture and said the goal was to ensure “that Make America Great Again and Make America Healthy Again exist not in opposition to one another, but as complements to a common mission for our country.”
The first of four principles of the plan says the size of the workforce must align with financial resources and priorities. Congress allocates the financial resources, so they aren’t necessarily constant. But President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 slashes the Forest Service allocation, cutting the operations budget by a third and zeroing out research. It also zeros out wildland fire suppression because Trump is proposing to transfer firefighting responsibilities and resources to a new and as yet unnamed and unauthorized agency in the Department of the Interior.
Rollins' memorandum says the USDA doesn’t plan on a mandatory workforce reduction, choosing instead to depend on voluntary retirements. Rollins will implement a reduction in force if not enough people volunteer to leave. Already, more than 15,300 employees have left the USDA under the “Fork in the Road” Deferred Retirement Program and other retirements, according to Rollins. To compensate for the loss of people, Rollins said the reorganization is necessary.
The second principle, that of bringing the USDA “closer to its customers,” requires relocating more than half of the 4,600 staffers in the Washington, D.C., headquarters to one of five hub locations: Raleigh, N.C.; Kansas City, Mo.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Fort Collins, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Two locations — Albuquerque, N.M. and Minneapolis, Minn. — will host most administrative support activities.
The first Trump administration took similar action when it moved the Bureau of Land Management headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado, under the claim that the agency needed to be closer to the people who were affected. Only 41 of the 328 members of the headquarters staff ended up moving to Colorado, resulting in the loss of institutional knowledge. A 2021 BLM employee survey showed most felt the move and other changes left the agency with neither the staff nor the resources to carry out its mission.
The third principle of Rollins’ reorganization is the elimination of management layers and bureaucracy. To achieve that, various area and regional offices have been eliminated, including the nine Regional Offices of the U.S. Forest Service, which will be phased out over the next year. The Region 1 Office in Missoula will go away, leaving the supervisors of the 12 national forests in the northern region to answer directly to the Chief of the Forest Service.
Some say phasing out regional offices is not necessarily a bad move, but it’s got its downsides. On the positive side, employees in regional offices were sometimes redundant when certain duties could be done by one or two people in a centralized office. And that meant that sometimes funding was sucked up at the regional level and didn’t make it down to the districts.
However, national forest supervisors benefited from having a regional forester who could provide guidance and serve as a buffer between adamant politicians and the supervisors. The elimination of regional foresters makes forest supervisors more of a target, adding political pressure to the job. Some say it also eliminates a person who could lobby for their region’s specific needs.
“Scrapping the Forest Service’s Southwestern region will drain conservation capacity from Arizona and New Mexico’s already stressed national forests and biodiversity,” said Taylor McKinnon, Southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Our region’s frequent-fire forests and rich biodiversity need stronger boots-on-the-ground leadership, not its elimination by the Trump administration.”
The memorandum says the Fire Sciences Lab in Missoula and the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., will be preserved. But the five Forest Service research stations will be consolidated into one in Fort Collins.
It’s unclear what will happen with the Bozeman Office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which provides monthly water supply and snowpack reports during the winter. The memorandum says the NRCS “will align its regional structure with the five USDA hubs locations.”
Finally, Rollins’ fourth principle is to consolidate support functions, so many offices will be funneled out of regions and the individual agencies into USDA offices. So most hiring for the Forest Service and various agricultural services will be done by the Assistant Secretary of Administration, as will most contracting and land leases. Grants and financial assistance may be transferred out of the USDA altogether, leaving entities that partner with the Forest Service, such as private trail crews or firefighting service providers, wondering how they’ll be affected.
Some say that running employee applications through a central office could make hiring more difficult. Until about 20 years ago, forest supervisors had more choice in who they hired. Then the human resources department was moved to Albuquerque and the hiring process slowed and didn’t necessarily hire the most appropriate people. Now, the prospect of moving human resources to an even higher bureaucratic level in the department has some thinking it will be even less efficient. The same person hiring an egg inspector will be hiring a trail crew member without understanding the demands of each job.
Former Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor Bill Avey said the loss of so many Forest Service employees over the past six months sets up a situation where this reorganization is even more stressful on the agency than one would expect. An estimated 27% of the Forest Service workforce has retired or resigned, and many of those who left were highly experienced employees near the end of their careers. So the Forest Service has experienced a massive brain-drain that leaves less experienced employees trying to fill leadership roles while the agency shifts beneath them.
“That’s only been exacerbated by the loss of institutional knowledge that’s walked out the door, particularly since February. That’s what’s going to cripple the outfit,” Avey said.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.
