Trump Plans to Move Forest Service HQ to Utah, Close Labs in 31 States

The Trump administration announced it will relocate the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and shutter research facilities across 31 states in a sweeping overhaul that experts say risks permanently dismantling decades of place-based ecological science that informs wildfire response nationwide.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins unveiled the restructuring on March 31, framing it as a cost-cutting realignment that would put agency leadership closer to the forests it manages. The transition, expected to finish by summer 2027, goes well beyond a change of address: all nine regional Forest Service offices across the country will close, and seven geographically dispersed research stations will be consolidated into a single unified research organization headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado. Of more than 50 research and development facilities currently operating, only about 20 will survive.

"Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment," Rollins said.

The geography of winners and losers is stark. Utah gains the administrative nerve center of an agency that oversees 193 million acres of national forest and grassland. New operational service centers will be established in Albuquerque, Athens, Madison, Missoula, and Placerville, California, with Fort Collins doubling as the research hub. Missoula retains its Rocky Mountain Research Station, which handles wildfire behavior research, ecological science, and field technology development. The research centers in Bozeman and Hungry Horse, Montana, will close.

The science losses are significant elsewhere. Portland's Pacific Northwest Research Station, a 100-year-old institution employing roughly 246 permanent, full-time scientists, will be folded into the Fort Collins hub. Critics have pointed out that long-running watershed studies, old-growth monitoring programs, and forest health datasets cannot simply be relocated: experiments tied to specific ecosystems over decades end when the facilities housing them close, and the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran them walks out with them.

The move echoes Trump's first-term relocation of the Bureau of Land Management from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado, which triggered a significant departure of senior staff and left that agency with thinned institutional capacity. The Forest Service restructuring is considerably larger in scope, reaching research infrastructure in more than half the country.

The administration has insisted wildland firefighting operations will be unaffected, with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise retaining its coordination role, and has designated 15 state directors to take over functions previously handled by the nine regional offices. But the reorganization arrives as the Forest Service is already under acute pressure: more than 5,100 firefighting positions sat vacant in recent seasons, with some regions facing shortfalls approaching 40 percent. Eliminating the scientific infrastructure that helps agencies understand fire behavior, forest disease, and watershed health, while operational staffing remains critically thin, will test the administration's claim that this is management efficiency rather than a fundamental reordering of a science-driven public land agency.