When stewarding a forested landscape, there is no single tool for every acre. We do not log every mountainside, burn every valley bottom or treat every forest the same way. Good stewardship depends on matching the tool to the place, the time and the need. The same should be true of agency reform. If the U.S. Forest Service needs to change — and in many ways it does — it should be reformed with the same care good land managers bring to the ground.
That is why the March 31 reorganization order announced by the Trump administration and USDA Secretary is more troubling than it first appears. Moving leadership closer to Western landscapes and communities is not a radical idea, and it is easy to see why Utahns — and many westerners — would welcome a Forest Service headquarters in Salt Lake City rather than Washington.
But reform, too, must fit the landscape it is meant to improve. The same order that moves leadership west would also consolidate research leadership into a “unified national research enterprise” and eliminate more than 50 Forest Service research facilities — including all three in Utah. Moving some decision-makers to the West could be part of a sensible reform, but that rationale undercuts itself when the same plan closes local research stations.
That loss deserves more attention. The Forest Service Research and Development branch is not just a paper-producing arm of the federal government, it is one way the agency, and the country, learn from the land. It produces the measurements, experiments, long-term data sets and practical tools that inform decisions by the Forest Service, states, tribes and private landowners. This work is not peripheral to stewardship: it is how better stewardship develops.
In Utah, that research is not abstract. The Cedar City Shrub Sciences Lab studies shrub land ecology and management. The Logan Forestry Sciences Lab hosts scientists working in forest and woodland ecosystems. The Ogden-area Riverdale Lab houses the Forest Inventory and Analysis unit, which reports on the condition and health of forests across the Intermountain West. These are not interchangeable office spaces. They are centers of knowledge, built on local relationships, long-term experiments and decades of accumulated data.
While “unified research enterprise” may sound efficient in a press release, forests, rangelands and watersheds are not improved by making science easier to steer by political appointees in state offices.
Place-based science works best when it is both local and independent. It must be local enough to understand the watersheds, fuels, forests, timber mills, grazing systems and communities in question. It also must be independent enough to ask difficult questions, test new methods, challenge assumptions and sustain long-term work as political priorities change. A commonsense land-management agency should want science close to the field, not merely close to the chain of command.
While “unified research enterprise” may sound efficient in a press release, forests, rangelands and watersheds are not improved by making science easier to steer by political appointees in state offices. Valuable forestry research often takes decades, not election cycles. The most useful work is quiet, cumulative and rooted in place. When that capacity is cut away, it is not easily rebuilt.
The Forest Service says the reorganization is intended to simplify the chain of command, strengthen local partnerships, and give field leaders greater ability to respond to conditions on the ground. Those are worthwhile goals, they do not require weakening the local scientific foundation that tells leaders what conditions on the ground actually demand. In land management, we would never call it adaptive stewardship to remove feedback from the land. We should not mistake it for sound reform here.
There is a better path.
Move strategic parts of leadership west if that improves responsiveness. Reduce redundancy where it genuinely exists. Consolidate some administrative functions where the case is strong. But do it with the precision of a selective treatment, not the heavy hand of a bulldozer. Keep the scientists, foresters, hydrologists, range experts and research partnerships rooted in the places that make their work invaluable. Preserve the local research stations, experimental forests and laboratories that keep national decision-making accountable to real places.
For 118 years, Forest Service research has helped the country understand its forests and grasslands more clearly and manage them more intelligently. That model may need reform. But a plan that claims to bring the agency closer to the land while cutting away the science that keeps it rooted there does not strengthen stewardship; it weakens it.