MORE THAN JUST PARKS • March 31, 2026
Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement. They’re shuttering every one of the ten 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 expertise. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you cannot restart once it’s gone. And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees embedded in state capitals alongside the governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.