1. United States
  2. Alaska
  3. Letter

Block Funding for Forest Service Reorganization

To: Sen. Murkowski, Rep. Begich, Sen. Sullivan

From: A verified voter in Anchorage, AK

April 9

I need you to block all funding for the Forest Service reorganization that would relocate headquarters to Salt Lake City, shut down ten regional offices, and dismantle more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states. This is not reform. It's a deliberate strategy to purge career professionals and hand control of 193 million acres of public land to political appointees and industry. The BLM headquarters move during Trump's first term resulted in 87% staff loss. Of 328 positions ordered to relocate, only 41 employees moved at all. That wasn't failure—it was the plan. Now they're doing it again, replacing regional expertise with fifteen political appointees embedded in state capitals alongside governors and industry lobbyists. The choice of Salt Lake City is no accident. Utah is actively suing to seize 18.5 million acres of federal land. Governor Spencer Cox already signed an agreement giving Utah control over eight million acres of national forest. Consolidating research in Fort Collins will kill decades of watershed studies, old-growth monitoring, and ecosystem research that cannot be relocated. These forests belong to all Americans, not the timber industry. Demand congressional oversight hearings and refuse to appropriate a single dollar for this dismantling.

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