Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, with his friend Theodore Roosevelt in 1907: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

COULTERVILLE, Calif. – Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot are turning over in their graves as Donald Trump launches a devastating war against the conservation movement at the same time he sent the U.S. military to attack Iran.

“With the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice,” according to one writer on Substack, “the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a ‘reorganization.’ An execution.”

The administration announced it would move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters out of Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah, home to the most anti-public-lands movement in America.

“They’re shuttering every single one of the 10 regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives,” wrote Jim Pattiz and More Than Just Parks.

More than 50 research outlets across 31 states are set to close, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, “the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone,” Pattiz says.

And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with 15 political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service build more roads and cut more trees. It’s 193 million acres of protected forests, an area larger than Texas, the largest public land agency in the country, “handed over to the very people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.”

Utah Governor Spencer Cox (left) and logging executive and USFS Chief Tom Schultz (right) sign a partnership agreement. USFS

They called it euphemistically a reorganization.

But what it actually is, “stripped of the Orwellian window dressing,” according to Pattiz, “is the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history. It dwarfs anything that’s come before.”

The Bureau of Land Management headquarters move in Trump’s first term — widely understood, even then, as a deliberate gutting of the agency — involved a few hundred positions. This involves thousands. That one closed zero regional offices. This one closes all 10. That one touched one agency’s headquarters. This one dismantles the headquarters, collapses the regional structure, and wipes out the scientific backbone of the largest forestry organization on Earth.

“The BLM move was a knife in the dark,” Pattiz says. “This is a chainsaw in broad daylight.”

Of 328 BLM positions ordered to relocate, 287 employees left the agency. Only 41 moved at all — scattered across various western offices. And only three actually relocated to the new “headquarters” in Grand Junction. The agency lost 87% of its Washington-based workforce.

“Decades of institutional knowledge, scientific expertise, and legal acumen walked out the door and never came back,” he writes. “That wasn’t an accident. That was the plan. And the plan worked so well they’re doing it again at 20 times the scale.”

Career scientists will be replaced with political loyalists, not loyal to the Constitution or the mission of conservation, but the man, Mr. Trump.

Why Salt Lake City, Utah?

The state that is suing the federal government to seize 18.5 million acres of public land, a case engineered from the start to reach a sympathetic Supreme Court and detonate 150 years of settled public land law.

Where Governor Spencer Cox, just weeks ago, signed a deal with this same Forest Service Chief — the former logging executive — giving Utah de facto control over Forest Service operations on 8 million acres of national forest.

The state that produced Mike Lee.

“The rat in the walls of Congress, the most dangerous anti-public-lands politician in modern American history — a man who has spent his entire miserable career trying to sell your national parks, gut the Wilderness Act, auction off BLM land to developers, and dismantle every protection standing between your forests and the industries that want to devour them,” Pattiz writes.

It’s a hotbed of Sagebrush Rebellion ideology, where the political class has spent decades trying every conceivable legal, legislative, and administrative maneuver to wrest federal land out of public hands and into the grip of state politicians and their industry patrons.

In the USDA’s press release, Cox calls this “a big win for Utah.”

Of course it is, and a loss for the country.

Theodore Roosevelt created the national forests to protect them from exactly the kind of industrial plunder this administration is enabling. Gifford Pinchot built the Forest Service from scratch to ensure that America’s forests would be managed by trained professionals in the public interest, not by political appointees serving the timber industry from a satellite office in the state that wants to own the forests for private development.

“Roosevelt fought the robber barons. Pinchot fought the timber trusts,” Pattiz writes, accurately. “They built the agency as a shield for the American public against the exact forces that are now being handed the keys.”

If the American public had guts anymore, people would stand up to this move. Unfortunately, conservation groups like the Sierra Club built by John Muir have lost their focus and their power to bring change. And that’s really too bad.

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