The U.S. Forest Service has announced that it will begin a “sweeping restructuring,” moving its headquarters from Washington D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, and transitioning to a “state-based organizational model.”

Under the plan announced in a news release Tuesday, the Forest Service will close all 10 of its regional offices across the country, including one in Lakewood, and move their operations to a “network of operational service centers” in six cities. The plan also calls for closing dozens of research centers across the country and consolidating research operations into a single organization based in Fort Collins.

“This is about building a Forest Service that is nimble, efficient, effective and closer to the forests and communities it serves,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said in a statement. “Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground, where forests and communities are found — not just behind a desk in the capital.”

The reorganization announcement comes a little more than a year after President Donald Trump’s administration fired tens of thousands of employees across the federal government, including at least 3,400 at the Forest Service. Even more Forest Service employees — including top officials in Colorado — left the agency in the past year through the administration’s deferred resignation program.

The Trump administration’s mass firings and calls to reorganize have raised concerns that public lands are under attack. Former long-time White River National Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams, who retired last year after the administration required him to fire more than a dozen employees, has said the nation is witnessing a “deliberate dismantling of public land institutions.”

As part of the reorganization, the Forest Service chief and two-thirds of the Washington-based staff will move to the new headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, or service centers in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Athens, Georgia; Madison, Wisconsin; Missoula, Montana; Placerville, California and Fort Collins, according to the news release.

The reorganization will end the regional system that the Forest Service has employed since 1907. Colorado, which has for more than a century been a part of the Rocky Mountain Region that also includes Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, will instead share a “state office” with Kansas under the reorganization plan.

The plan calls for 15 state directors who will oversee Forest Service operations within one or more states and “serve as national leaders for forest supervisors, operational priorities and relationships with states, tribes and partners.”

Stay connected to Summit County.

Sign up for daily or weekly newsletters at SummitDaily.com/newsletter

To “unify research priorities,” the release states that Forest Service research facilities at about 56 locations across the country will close. The Forest Service plans to keep only about 20 research facilities, including one in Fort Collins, which will become the headquarters for the agency’s research operations.

No interruptions or changes to field-based operational firefighters or their positions are planned as part of the restructuring, and the Fire and Aviation Management program will maintain its existing structure, according to the reorganization plan. The release states that this structure is “essential to effective wildland fire response until the Forest Service’s wildland fire management operations are unified” into the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service.

The agency will continue its “frontline operations,” including active forest management, wildfire response, forest restoration, recreation management and partnerships with states and tribes as the restructuring is implemented over the coming year, according to the news release.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis has lauded the reorganization plan, stating that the federal agency’s new service center in Fort Collins will bring new jobs to the state’s agricultural workforce. In a statement Tuesday, Polis noted that more than one-third of Colorado is federal land and most of the state’s ski resorts are located on National Forest lands.

“Colorado is known for outdoor spaces and nation-leading research institutions that are strengthening our forests and public lands, so it only makes sense that the U.S. Forest Service would include a location in our great state,” he said.

While the Trump administration has said that the reorganization will help streamline the federal agency, some nonprofits that work closely with the Forest Service have questioned whether the reorganization will achieve its intended goals.

The Sierra Club in a statement Tuesday noted that when the Trump administration in 2019 sought to relocate the Bureau of Land Management from Washington to Grand Junction, it caused “many federal workers with specialized expertise to retire from the federal service.”

“The Forest Service should be structured in a way that allows them to steward our public lands effectively and with robust public engagement,” Sierra Club Forest Campaign Manager Alex Craven said in the statement. “This administration has routinely pursued the exact opposite by gutting protections and the public lands management workforce. Despite continued appeals of ‘common sense’ management, it’s far from clear this latest reorganization will get us any closer to that.” 

The National Association of Forest Service Retirees — a nonprofit that includes hundreds of former agency employees, including seven previous chiefs — had previously raised concern about Forest Service’s plans to reorganize when the agency first began outlining them last summer.

In a July letter to Congress, the association’s then-Chair Steve Ellis stated that the organization was “extremely concerned” about the proposal to close regional offices and consolidate research operations in a single location. While Ellis wrote that the nonprofit is “not opposed to recognition that is carefully planned,” he noted that Forest Service employees have already seen increased workloads due to firings and early retirements over the last year, so “this is not the time for massive dislocation.”

“We do not see anything in the proposal that would improve services or efficiency,” Ellis wrote. “Rather, it appears to simply cut staffing and funding without describing how the work will continue to get done. It provides the classic direction to do more with less.”