AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A month ago, the U.S. Forest Service announced a major reorganization, which includes relocating its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah. Critics say it's actually an attempt to dismantle the Forest Service and that the timing on the eve of a potentially rough wildfire season could not be worse. Rachel Cohen of the Mountain West News Bureau reports.
RACHEL COHEN, BYLINE: The air is crisp on an early spring morning in the Arapaho Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado. On a good weekend, trails like this one draw hundreds of visitors, hikers and bikers. The Forest Service has managed this land for over a century, and now it wants even more of its staff to be closer to woods like this.
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TOM SCHULTZ: So what we're trying to do is push decision-making down to the ground.
COHEN: Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz testified to Congress last week.
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SCHULTZ: So that men and women on the ground - give them more responsibility and authority to make decisions.
COHEN: Schultz defends the agency's restructuring plan but hasn't given a timeline for it. In addition to moving Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City, it also scraps all nine regional offices and replaces them with 15 new state ones and consolidates research management to one location in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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SCHULTZ: We cannot sustain the footprint that we currently have.
COHEN: But while the government sees efficiency, Juli Slivka sees...
JULI SLIVKA: Just another devastating blow to our public lands.
COHEN: She works for Wilderness Workshop, a nonprofit environmental group in western Colorado, and says she's seen this before when the first Trump administration moved the Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colorado.
SLIVKA: We saw the Bureau of Land Management rent a beautiful new building for its, I think, 300 employees that were supposed to move here from Washington, D.C. And we saw literally no one come week after week.
COHEN: About 87% of staff who were asked to move quit instead. The Biden administration moved the agency back to Washington. Slivka says the Forest Service is already hamstrung. Sixty-five hundred employees took buyouts or retired last year. She worries more expertise will walk out the door now and at a critical moment. Colorado and much of the West saw little snow this winter, leaving the ground dry and prime for burning.
SLIVKA: There's really no sense in creating this huge upheaval right as we head into fire season and basically hoping that it all works out or goes according to plan.
COHEN: The Forest Service says these changes won't affect firefighting and that it's staffed up for the summer. But Ann Bartuska has her own concerns. She worked at the Forest Service for nearly two decades, eventually leading its research arm. Fifty-seven research facilities in 31 states are on a list to potentially shutter. The Trump administration says the researchers aren't being fired, but it's still unclear where they'll work. Bartuska says science can't just be picked up and moved.
ANN BARTUSKA: If you're doing work on the sugar maple decline in Vermont, New Hampshire, you probably are based in Burlington.
COHEN: A strength of government research, she says, is its staying power. The Forest Service maintains about 80 experimental forests. Studies at many go back decades. The agency says the science will continue.
BARTUSKA: But if you're closing facilities associated with those sites, then how do they sustain the data? How do they sustain the work that's going on?
COHEN: Bartuska understands the agency might not have the money to keep all those buildings in good shape, but she still has questions. Thirty members of Congress, none Republicans, want more details, too. They sent a letter to agency leaders asking for data to back up the changes and gave a deadline of this week to respond. For NPR News, I'm Rachel Cohen. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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