1. United States
2. Va.
3. Letter

Stop the Forest Service reorganization announced in March. This plan violates congressional appropriations bills that explicitly forbid reprogramming funds for reorganization and moving Forest Service offices and headquarters. The administration is breaking the law. Shuttering 57 of 77 research stations will destroy the world's foremost forest research program. Closing all nine regional offices eliminates the institutional knowledge needed to manage 193 million acres across 43 states. When the Bureau of Land Management headquarters moved to Colorado during Trump's first term, 87% of staff left and only three people showed up to the new office. The agency never recovered. This reorganization will impact up to 5,000 employees, and the Forest Service has already lost over a fourth of its staff since January. Moving headquarters to Salt Lake City while Utah sues for control of 18.5 million acres of federal land is not coincidence. The current Forest Service chief's previous job was running a logging company. The nominee for the Bureau of Land Management said Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to create national parks and forests. This is asset stripping designed to hand our public lands to resource extraction companies and states. Use your oversight authority to block this illegal reorganization and protect our public lands.