Block Funding for Forest Service Headquarters Relocation and Restructuring

Congress must immediately block all funding for the Forest Service headquarters relocation to Salt Lake City and the closure of the agency's ten regional offices. This restructuring will gut an agency that manages 193 million acres of public land without a single congressional vote. Moving headquarters to Utah is not coincidental. Utah is currently suing to seize 18.5 million acres of federal land, and Governor Spencer Cox just signed a deal giving Utah control over eight million acres of national forest. Placing the agency in the epicenter of the anti-public-lands movement while replacing career professionals with fifteen political appointees embedded in state capitals is designed to dismantle federal land stewardship. When BLM headquarters moved during the first Trump administration, 287 of 328 employees left the agency. Only three actually relocated. This forced relocation strategy purges the institutional expertise needed to resist political pressure for increased logging and extraction. The closure of more than fifty research facilities will destroy decades of irreplaceable long-term ecological research. Thirty-year watershed studies and old-growth monitoring programs cannot be moved to Fort Collins. They will simply end. This is not reorganization. This is demolition. Stop it now by denying funding for relocation and restructuring.