The Trump administration is shaking up Forest Service. We broke down what's changing

In early April 2026, a claim circulated online that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration had ordered the dismantling of the Forest Service, the government agency in charge of managing the country's 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands.

The rumor spread on Facebook, Reddit and Instagram after More Than Just Parks, an online, third-party resource for information about national parks, published a Substack post (archived) titled "BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service."

The article claimed the headquarters is moving to Utah, all regional offices are being closed and the research program "is being destroyed."

Snopes readers searched our site for more information and contacted us to ask what this would mean for the agency moving forward.

The claim emerged after the Forest Service's parent agency, the Department of Agriculture, published a statement on March 31 announcing a large-scale reorganization of the Forest Service.

In short, the Forest Service will continue to exist but will undergo a comprehensive restructuring. Offices and many facilities will close or relocate. Whether the changes amount to a "dismantling" of the agency is subjective. As such, we have left this claim unrated.

Snopes contacted the Forest Service and the Agriculture Department for comment. We spoke with Chris French, the associate chief of the Forest Service, by phone.

Current state of US Forest Service

National forests are different from national parks. The Interior Department's National Park Service runs the latter. While they are both categories of land the federal government owns, national parks are designated specifically "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein." National forests, in contrast, must balance conservation with commercial operations, including logging, mining, oil and gas, according to French.

The Forest Service is responsible for all aspects of forest management, including fighting wildfires (it has more than 11,000 wildland firefighters on staff, according to its website). It also boasts the "largest forestry research organization in the world," maintaining labs around the country that allow scientists to study the ecology of the land it has been entrusted with managing.

In July 2025, Trump's Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a reorganization of the department as a whole. A news release about the undertaking describes the Department of Agriculture as a "bloated, expensive, and unsustainable organization," noting that it needs to dramatically cut costs. 

Speaking by phone, French repeatedly suggested he would love to spend more within the Forest Service but is confined to a Congress-approved budget. He also said the agency has needed to dedicate more resources to wildfire prevention, leaving less money for other responsibilities. (The agency's firefighting programs will not be affected by the changes).

The news release says the reorganization is based around the following four pillars:

• Ensure the size of USDA's workforce aligns with available financial resources and agricultural priorities
• Bring USDA closer to its customers
• Eliminate management layers and bureaucracy
• Consolidate redundant support functions

According to French, the Forest Service's restructuring is nothing more than the agency implementing Rollins' restructuring pillars for the entire USDA. But the Forest Service's announcement of changes created outcry among conservationists. 

Jim and Will Pattiz, founders of More Than Just Parks used the term "dismantling" to describe the reorganization (archived), while Bill McKibben, cofounder of the 350.org campaign, described it as a "gutting" in a New Yorker article.

Between them, they warned the restructuring would expand upon the Department of Government Efficiency's cuts and could make it easier to hand over control of forests to individual states or to potentially privatize federal lands. The Forest Service's webpage on reorganization says it has never considered transferring lands to the states (section titled "Myth: The reorganization is a step toward transferring federal lands to the states").

Moving national HQ

Prior to the announcement, the Forest Service was organized into nine geographic regions, each with a regional headquarters, and a national headquarters in Washington, D.C. After the restructuring, the headquarters will be in Salt Lake City. Just one-third of the staff currently based in Washington will remain there, according to an agency fact sheet on the reorganization.

Rollins said moving the national headquarters to Utah would bring the agency "closer to the forests we manage," wording that closely aligns with her second USDA reorganization pillar. (Most federal land in the U.S. is located in the western states.)

Meanwhile, environmentalists felt the choice of Utah was telling. McKibben noted that the state is "at the heart of … the Sagebrush Rebellion," a movement to return control of federal lands to individual states. "In recent years, Utah's senator Mike Lee has led efforts to sell off huge tracts of those lands across the West to developers," he wrote. More Than Just Parks expressed the same concern. 

French disagreed, saying the location of the new headquarters was pragmatic, not political. He mentioned Denver, Boise, Idaho, and Missoula, Montana, as other potential sites due to their location, but said the Forest Service ruled them out due to other concerns, including good connections to the rest of the country and cost of living. Finally, the Forest Service already has office space in Salt Lake City that French said is only 20% occupied. 

More Than Just Parks and McKibben said the HQ move will lead to brain drain in the Forest Service, pointing to statistics about the Bureau of Land Management's similar move to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019 (it later moved its HQ back to Washington). Just 41 of 328 employees who needed to relocate did so.

(The Forest Service's chief said this will not happen because "Grand Junction is different to Salt Lake. Salt Lake has a lot of amenities, it's very family friendly, it's got a tremendous airport.")

The National Federation of Federal Employees, the labor union representing federal workers, also criticized the reorganization, according to The Guardian newspaper, saying Americans would "pay the price." The union also reportedly claimed the restructuring is illegal, due to a provision in the 2026 budget bill that prevents funding from being used if it "relocates an office or employees" or "reorganizes or renames offices, programs, or activities." 

Shuttering regional model

Prior to the reorganization, per French, the Forest Service had four layers in its chain of command: the federal office, nine regional offices, forest offices and district offices.

The reorganization scraps the regional centers for a state-based model. According to French, all regional headquarters will be shuttered, leaving the federal office to handle policy decisions. Maintenance will be handled by "operational service centers" to be established in six cities and respond to maintenance requests at various sites as needed. Additional centers could be added further down the line, according to the reorganization announcement.

"15 state directors will be distributed throughout the country to oversee Forest Service operations within one or more states," the Forest Service's news release announcing the change says. "State directors will serve as national leaders with primary oversight of forest supervisors, operational priorities, and relationships with states, tribes, and other partners." The agency said the change would simplify the chain of command, allowing forest managers to report directly to the chief of the Forest Service.

French also said the new state directors would not be "doing the management oversight that was essentially repeated from region to region." A follow-up email from the Forest Service noted they would have "executive management oversight of forests within their state office." 

McKibben and More Than Just Parks also expressed concern about the state directors, suggesting they would be political appointees or, in more general terms, people with close ties to the oil, gas and lumber industries. 

The Forest Service said via email that the state director roles will be "career Forest Service senior executive employees selected through established federal hiring processes," not political positions. While some positions will be filled internally, final decisions on new hires will be made by "agency leadership in alignment with federal hiring regulations."

(It should be noted that Rollins appointed Tom Schultz, a former executive at one of the nation's largest lumber companies, to lead the Forest Service. Schultz is the first chief of the Forest Service not to have previously served in the agency).

Given there will be more state directors than regions, Snopes asked French how exactly restructuring would reduce management. He explained that each of the nine regional offices previously had somewhere between 350 and 800 staffers. Each state director will have fewer than 10.

He also emphasized that employees in those regional roles would be guaranteed new positions at their previous pay level. (Snopes did not have enough time to ask French how closely those positions would match the employees' existing roles.)

Research operations

McKibben and More Than Just Parks also raised concerns about the Forest Service's decision to centralize research operations in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Forest Service claimed this would "unify research priorities, accelerate the application of science to management decisions, and reduce administrative duplication," linking to a page detailing which centers would be retained or closed.

Twenty research stations across the nation will stay open and 57 will be shuttered, according to that page.

McKibben said the Forest Service's experimental forests will be cut by the reorganization. Such forests are decades-long projects, as trees take a long time to grow. Scientists have studied them to observe how the warming climate affects ecosystems over time.

According to More Than Just Parks, consolidating research operations to Fort Collins is another issue facing the research sector. Forestry requires boots on the ground, so if scientists want to study a forest, they must visit it. "When these facilities close, the experiments die," the outlet wrote.

French emphasized that this change is about cutting facilities, not cutting research. He cited multiple examples of Forest Service facilities that were either sitting empty or being used once or twice a year, such as all five buildings at the Bartlett Experimental Forest in New Hampshire.

He said he is hoping to "give those over to the universities" and to set up programs to house Forest Service staff in nearby facilities to allow the research to continue. 

Snopes asked French to clarify whether the reorganization would result in the closure of any full laboratories, or whether it would affect only supplemental buildings — after all, housing can be rearranged, but cutting funding for a laboratory inherently means stopping the science. "It runs the gamut," French said. He later gave an example of a laboratory that would be cut, explaining that the scientists would hopefully be colocated to a nearby university with lab space. (The Forest Service ended the interview before we could ask how feasible transferring those experiments would be.)