The Trump administration’s planned revamp of the Forest Service depends on the shaky proposition that political appointees will stay out of the day-to-day operations of national forests.
That’s the truth behind the Agriculture Department’s announcement that it’s moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City and dismantling the regional offices that stand between top leadership and local forest managers, said Steve Ellis, a former Forest Service official.
Ellis — who also served at the Bureau of Land Management and retired from there in 2016 as deputy director, the top career position — said he’s seen this story before. When the first Trump administration moved BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2020, managers found that decisions as localized as where to allow cattle grazing or dig for gravel had to go through political appointees at the Interior Department in Washington.
“The question is, to what degree will political appointees press on the scale of field level decision-making, regardless of what the new organizational structure looks like?” said Ellis, who is also a former chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees.
