Tom Schultz’s appointment was already unusual when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins plucked him from the timber industry to lead the Forest Service in February 2025, bypassing the agency’s career foresters.
Now Schultz, in what’s historically a nonpolitical position, is in another atypical situation: He’s sandwiched between a presidentially appointed undersecretary he reports to and new political hires who work for him as “senior advisers.”
All of these officials are now leading a big reorganization of the agency, which is relocating the headquarters to Salt Lake City, replacing regional offices with state-based leadership and consolidating dozens of research facilities.
“It’s different from the history of the agency,” said retired Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, who worked for the agency for more than 30 years before he was picked to lead it during the Obama administration.
While Schultz has experience with forestry, Tidwell said, “It’s disappointing for me to see the agency go this way.’
Former Forest Service officials said it’s unusual if not unheard of for the agency’s chief to both manage and be managed by political appointees. The arrangement is a reflection, they said, of the Trump administration’s desire to exert more control over the forest agency, steer it toward greater timber production and make it look more like the Bureau of Land Management, which is led by a Senate-confirmed political appointee and has wider policy swings when White House administrations change.
Tidwell and others are mourning what they see as the potential end of a professional forestry staffer atop the 30,000-employee Forest Service.
“It was always the resource and the public that came first,” Tidwell said. “I think it was better. It was better for America.”
Asked about the criticisms, USDA said through a spokesperson, “Under President Trump, the Forest Service is focused on delivering meaningful results that directly benefit the American people and our natural resources, rather than remaining a rigid organization that cannot adapt to changing situations. Like any reorganization and restructuring, the Forest Service is bringing in new talent to support the mission, and channeling resources to where they are needed most, not just where they historically went.”
Political advisers
The change at the top might make the Forest Service’s founder, Gifford Pinchot, cringe, said Char Miller, an environmental analysis and history professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. In 1905, Pinchot persuaded officials to create the forest agency in the Department of Agriculture, where he believed it would be insulated from the more rampant patronage and corruption of the Interior Department at that time, Miller said.
“The Forest Service was established under the principle that no political appointees would enter that agency,” Miller said. While there’s always been political pressure applied, he said, the Forest Service was built to resist it — including by having a chief whose term lasted from one administration into the next.
The flip side, according to the Trump administration and others more supportive of the new direction: The president sets policies for the country and should be able to put a team in place — top to bottom — that will carry them out.
President Donald Trump has called for curbing the civil service protections for certain high-ranking employees throughout the federal government to accomplish that goal. The administration followed through on that change this month with a June 3 executive order that essentially made people in 8,000 positions “at-will” employees, including many who work in policy and legal areas.
Four career positions at the Forest Service have been reclassified: deputy director, director of legislative affairs, grants management specialist and operations research analyst.
“The President’s power to remove subordinates is a core part of the Executive power vested by Article II of the Constitution and is necessary for the President to perform his duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’” Trump said in an earlier executive order on Jan. 20, 2025 — the first day of his second term.
At least one Trump ally, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has suggested the chief would be more accountable as a political pick of the president, subject to Senate confirmation, rather than a civil service hire by the Agriculture secretary.
“It is time for the American people to hold the Chief of the Forest Service accountable,” Lee said in a news release announcing the bill — the “Forest Service Accountability Act” — last year. “The U.S. Forest Service has a profound impact on countless communities and millions of acres across the nation, including in Utah, making it crucial for the head of the department to be a Senate-confirmed position.”
The recent political hires are two “senior advisors to the Forest Service” — Ken Verheyen and Layne Bangerter — with connections to Michael Boren, the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment. A third, Jon Christianson, is also a Forest Service adviser, reporting to Schultz, the chief told a House Natural Resources subcommittee at a June 4 hearing.
Their hiring has attracted scrutiny from committee Democrats, including Rep. Maxine Dexter of Oregon, who led the questioning at the hearing.
Verheyen, Christianson and Boren have each been directors for the Sawtooth Conservation & Recreation Alliance, a property rights group for landowners around the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho.
Verheyen doesn’t have forestry experience but has a “tremendous business background,” Schultz told the subcommittee, adding that he’s helping to craft the agencywide reorganization that was announced on March 31.
“As we have a lot of discussions about leadership and how to drive organizational change and work through implementation of reorganization, his background has been very instrumental to me in helping me see things and helping us think about how to organize an agency,” Schultz said.
Bangerter, who’s worked at USDA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and EPA, directed Trump’s campaign in Idaho and, like Boren, is a ranch owner in the state.
Schultz was a vice president at Idaho Forest Group, a timber company, and previously was director of the Idaho Department of Lands. While the shakeup at the agency is a big change, the total number of employees won’t be much different from what it was during the first Trump administration, he said.
New state directors
Next on the skeptics’ watch list: the 15 state directors the Forest Service plans to hire, replacing the nine regional foresters as a go-between separating the headquarters from local forest districts. The positions have been advertised as “Senior Executive Service general” level, which is a term that means they could be filled either by career employees or political appointees.
Through a spokesperson, the Forest Service said it doesn’t intend to make the state directors political hires.
“The fact that the Forest Service advertised the State Director positions on USAJOBS demonstrates we intend to fill them with career professionals,” the agency said, referring to the federal job listing website.
Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden said in an opinion article in the Washington Examiner on April 10 that the state directors “will be career employees and subject to federal hiring standards” working alongside local partners.
Those reassurances don’t fully convince Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics and himself a former Forest Service manager. While those jobs may not be filled with political appointees now or ever, Hood said, the posts could have been advertised instead as SES “career-reserved” to dull any suggestions of political influence.
If the Forest Service follows the BLM model, Hood said, “I’d imagine the governors and maybe the political parties will determine who gets the job.”
The shift to a BLM-style mindset is unmistakable, said Mary Jo Rugwell, a former BLM Wyoming state director and president of the Public Lands Foundation.
While state directors at the BLM typically are career employees, they aren’t always separate from politics, Rugwell said.
It is not unusual with a new administration to see shuffling within the ranks of the state BLM directors.
Whether they’re political hires or not, state directors may be more accountable to governors than the Forest Service’s regional foresters have been.
“You have to develop a close working relationship. That governor needs to trust you,” Rugwell said.
The connection can grow distant, Rugwell said, when political officials in Washington wield too much influence.
Rugwell said that from what she could see, during the Biden administration local officials too often didn’t have the authority to make their own decisions. “It was driven from above,” she said.
Putting political appointees in senior roles at the Forest Service could test the chain of command, said Steve Ellis, a retired Forest Service official who retired as deputy director, the top career job, at BLM. The danger, he said, is that people in those roles could call local forest managers directly rather than working through the chief, an exercise in political influence that’s new to the Forest Service.
“The chief says we’re getting the decisions down to the ground — but are we?” Ellis said.
Contact Marc Heller on the encrypted messaging app Signal at hellmarcman.49
