Fire veterans and wildfire scientists have offered sharply divergent assessments of the U.S. Forest Service’s 121-year restructure, with frontline firefighters backing the shift to a state-based operational model, whilst leading researchers warn that plans to close 57 of the agency’s 77 research stations will gut the scientific foundation underpinning effective fire prevention. That is according to expert commentary gathered by Wildfire Today ahead of what fire forecasters have flagged as an extreme wildfire season.
Wood Central understands the restructure replaces nine regional offices with 15 state-based directorates in the West, retains the historical regional approach in the East, and relocates headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City — changes Wood Central first reported as the most significant structural overhaul to the Forest Service since 1905. It comes as Chief Tom Schultz has put on record that almost two-thirds of America’s 193-million-acre National Forest System is at risk from wildfire, insects or disease.
Kelly Martin, a decades-long fire veteran across the Forest Service and National Park Service and former president of the International Association of Wildland Fire, said the operational logic of the restructure—“pushing decision-making down to a collaborative process between state and federal government”—has practical merit. This approach is particularly relevant in a system where the two levels of government have long operated side by side without any binding obligation to coordinate priorities, and, to her, makes sense.
But Martin pointed to a coordination requirement that officials have not addressed: for the new model to work as intended, Forest Service state directors would need to be formally required to align their highest-priority projects with state-based land management agencies — a mandate absent from the announced restructure. And whilst preparedness and response funding has surged in recent years, hazardous fuel reduction and active land management — the preventative work that reduces long-term wildfire risk — have seen none of the same momentum, a disparity the restructure does nothing to close.
The research station consolidation is the most debated aspect: according to Wood Central, the closure of 57 out of 77 stations and their absorption into one central Fort Collins facility is viewed by Morgan Varner, Director of Fire Research at Tall Timbers and former Forest Service researcher, as directly contradicting the commitment to localized decision-making. Varner argues that pulling research away from areas with active wildfires or prescribed burns undermines the relevance and effectiveness of the agency’s scientific work.
Many of the affected stations sit inside university laboratories or multi-decade experimental forests, where researchers have accumulated fire ecology knowledge tied to specific landscapes, specific fire regimes, and the communities that live amongst them. Schultz has rejected the charge that the closures constitute an attack on science, arguing that the existing station model had generated operational silos that prevented effective coordination — with Fort Collins redirecting its work toward active forest management, fire management, minerals, and recreation.
Fire and Aviation Management Deputy Chief Sarah Fisher has confirmed publicly that the restructure carries no impact on current wildland firefighting resources, with the existing Geographic Area Coordination Centre structure and reporting relationships with the National Interagency Fire Centre to continue under the new model.
Wood Central understands the Forest Service had already shed a significant portion of its broader workforce under USDA-wide job cuts that axed more than 4,000 positions, before a federal judge ordered those staff reinstated — and Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center of Western Priorities, warned that adding disruption at the agency’s upper levels, ahead of a predicted extreme fire season, compounds that risk considerably.
“Adding chaos at the upper levels of the Forest Service should worry everyone who lives in and near America’s forests,” Weiss told Utah’s Deseret News. That human cost has a concrete recent precedent: when the broader USDA underwent a parallel restructuring in 2025, an estimated 80 per cent of affected staff resigned or retired rather than comply with relocation requirements — and researchers who received a Fort Collins notice now face the same calculation.
Martin stopped short of catastrophising, acknowledging that speculative worst-case readings — including concerns about public land sales — are harder to substantiate without operational detail, though he warned the restructure carried real stakes if mishandled: “It’d be a real tragedy and a real shame if a ‘dismantling’ came to be.”
According to Varner, the USDA’s 2025 restructure lost an estimated 80 per cent of affected staff to resignation or retirement — an attrition rate the Forest Service now risks repeating across a far larger workforce whilst targeting 4 billion board feet in annual timber harvests by fiscal year 2028.
