In announcing one of the largest reorganizations in the 120-year history of the U.S. Forest Service, the Trump administration declared that there would be “no interruption or change” to the agency’s firefighting force.

But critics say the upheaval comes at the worst possible time—with the agency’s ranks already depleted and demoralized, and a new federal wildfire forecast showing exceptionally high fire risk in both the Southeast and across much of the West over the next three months.

By the end of March, 1.62 million acres had already burned across the country this year —231 percent of the previous 10-year average, the National Interagency Fire Center said in its seasonal forecast released Wednesday. That included the largest wildfire in Nebraska’s history, which last month scorched 640,000 acres and killed an 86-year-old woman who was trying to escape. It is a sign of the challenges facing the federal government’s largest team of wildland firefighters, those in the Forest Service, who already were being integrated with a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service located in the Department of Interior.

“At a time when wildfires are getting worse, and access to public lands is already under strain, the last thing we need is an unnecessary reorganization that creates chaos and confusion for the land managers, researchers and wildland firefighters who help keep our forests healthy now and for future generations,” said Josh Hicks, conservation campaigns director at The Wilderness Society.

The Trump administration maintains that it is transferring leadership closer to the majority of the forests and communities it serves by relocating the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Utah and by closing 31 research facilities across the country. Over the coming year, the Trump administration plans to eliminate the Forest Service’s regional offices and transition to what officials call a “state-based model.” The Forest Service plans to name 15 state directors distributed throughout the country, each to oversee agency operations within one or more states. These will be supported by regional operation service centers and what the agency said will be “a unified national research enterprise.”

“President Trump has made it a priority to return common sense to the way our government works,” said U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the Forest Service, in making the announcement on Tuesday. The Forest Service, founded in 1905, has always been headquartered in Washington, D.C. But Rollins said, “Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment.”

A Smaller Forest Service, Facing Bigger Challenges

The Forest Service, with about 26,260 employees at the end of January, lost 16 percent of its workforce in the first year of the second Trump administration, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management. That’s higher than the average 12 percent reduction across the federal workforce.

Meanwhile, the agency faced further change because of the Trump administration’s plan, announced last year, to create an entirely new U.S. Wildland Fire Service that would combine the federal wildland fire forces spread across the government, the largest of which was at the Forest Service.

In its announcement on the Forest Service reorganization, Trump administration officials said the agency’s firefighters would continue to report to the Forest Service Deputy Chief for Fire and Aviation Management at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, where the Forest Service is a primary partner.

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“This structure ensures the [Forest Service’s] ongoing, close coordination with the Department of the Interior and interagency partners,” the USDA statement said. “It will reinforce the unified, national approach essential to effective wildland fire response until the Forest Service’s wildland fire management operations are unified into the U.S. Wildland Fire Service within the Department of the Interior.”

Amid the upheaval and uncertainty, morale at the Forest Service already was low, outside observers have found.

A 26-year-old nonprofit nonpartisan group of former employees, the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, discussed at a February board meeting in Denver that the group had to establish an “employee care team” over the past year to help Forest Service staff who were caught up in the changes. “This has not historically been a part of the NAFSR mission,” said the meeting notes posted on the group’s website.

“The current administration has successfully used the narrative that everything is [OK] and

morale is good … that the budget and staffing reductions are to remove waste, fraud, and

abuse,” the meeting notes said. “We have mostly been hearing the opposite from employees, and that morale is not good.”

A federal workforce-wide survey by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service found that nearly half of Forest Service respondents viewed the agency as worse at delivering services than it was one year ago. Max Stier, the partnership’s president and chief executive, said he anticipated a relocation of the Forest Service headquarters—like the short-lived relocation of the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado in the first Trump administration—would result in costs to taxpayers, productivity declines and delays in critical services to the public.

The Forest Service has a key responsibility in addressing significant fire risk throughout the West in the coming months, due to widespread drought, lack of snowpack and record high temperatures, according to the National Interagency Wildfire Center’s outlook. Albuquerque, for example, recorded its earliest ever 90-degree F reading on March 21, more than six weeks earlier than the previous record, set May 3,1947, the outlook noted. With precipitation less than 25 percent of normal, much of New Mexico is facing an elevated fire risk between April and June, the outlook showed. More than 30 percent of New Mexico land is federally owned, including five National Forests.

The closure of the Forest Service’s regional research facilities will shut down some of the on-the-ground science being done on steps that need to be taken to protect landscapes and communities from the worst effects of climate change.

For example, among the facilities that are slated for closure is the agency’s century-old Pacific Northwest Research Center in Portland, Oregon, which conducted a landmark study of the 2020 Cascade Mountain range fires, their historical antecedents and their implications for fire management as the climate grows warmer. Two research facilities are slated for closure in South Carolina—one on the campus of Clemson University, the other in Huger, where research has been conducted into the impacts of forest disturbance and coastal wetlands protection and restoration, including at the Santee Experimental Forest northwest of Charleston.

But 90 percent of National Forest land lies west of the Mississippi River, and Trump administration officials and supporters said it only makes sense to move the Forest Service headquarters nearer to where most of the agency’s responsibilities lie. USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden, noting the “reasonable cost of living” and “more family-focused way of life” in Salt Lake City, called the relocation “long overdue.”

But Stier said that the predictable outcome will be an even smaller Forest Service.

“Based on what history has shown us, this decision is another method to reduce headcount,” he said. “Relocation and reorganization efforts typically result in many employees—especially experienced career agency leaders—choosing to resign over uprooting their lives, leaving agencies understaffed and unprepared to deliver on their missions to serve the public.”

Peter Aldhous contributed to this story.