Almost two-thirds of America’s 193-million-acre National Forest System is at risk from wildfire, insects or disease — a figure U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz has put on the record in his first detailed interview since announcing the agency’s sweeping restructure. Schultz, speaking to Utah’s Deseret News, used that assessment to drive his first detailed public defence of the overhaul — as criticism from conservation groups and Western Democrats continues to sharpen.
The Deseret News interview, published Saturday, is Schultz’s first detailed public account of the overhaul — a restructure that dismantles nine regional offices in favour of 15 state-based directorates and relocates the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, the most significant structural change to the Forest Service since 1905.
Pointing to two decades of accelerating wildfire impact and declining forest health, Schultz told the Deseret News the agency’s own data identified “almost two-thirds of the National Forest System that are at risk of wildfire or some insect and disease issue.” Though conservation groups have dismissed the overhaul as politically motivated rather than data-driven, a charge Schultz rejected directly, he argued the restructure is “about smarter government” and “government where the people are at.”
Central to Schultz’s operational case for change are more than 3,000 internal directives generated at regional and national levels over decades, which he told the Deseret News had produced an “administrative state” within the agency: “What they do is they slow down the ability to get work done. They limit discretion.” That body of internally generated rule-making had “created a fair amount of mistrust” among state, tribal and local partners, Schultz said, whilst limiting managers’ discretion in the field.
The move from nine regional offices to 15 state directorates, which critics argue expands rather than rationalises the footprint, reflects two fundamentally different operating models, Schultz told the Deseret News. Each state director will lead a staff of six to eight people focused on liaison and intergovernmental affairs, compared to the hundreds employed across each regional hub: “It’s not expanding it — it’s being more attentive to the needs of those states and those locales we’re going to be operating in,” he said.
On research consolidation — the most contested element of the restructure, with 57 of 77 stations across 31 states confirmed for closure — Schultz rejected the charge that the cuts represented an attack on science, arguing that the existing five-station model had generated operational silos that prevented effective coordination between facilities. The consolidated research operation in Fort Collins, Colorado, will instead direct its work toward active forest management, fire management, minerals and recreation — priorities he said the administration has made central to its land management agenda.
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center of Western Priorities, warned the Deseret News that institutional and ecological knowledge built over decades could take a generation to recover — and that adding disruption at the top of the agency ahead of a predicted extreme fire season compounded that risk: “Adding chaos at the upper levels of the Forest Service should worry everyone who lives in and near America’s forests,” Weiss said.
Schultz dismissed the charge that the state-based structure would subordinate national interests to local ones, telling the Deseret News, “I fundamentally disagree with the premise,” and arguing that proximity to the land yields better decisions than distance. He was equally firm on fire season readiness, confirming the agency was laser-focused on ensuring it did “not impact in any way, shape or form our readiness and our ability to suppress fires and protect communities this coming season.”
Schultz confirmed no involuntary redundancies are planned — “There are no layoffs. There will be some directed reassignments,” with just 260 D.C.-based staff from a workforce of more than 30,000 to be relocated, and the agency is committed to placing any employee who chooses to remain. The full elimination of regional office structures, he told the Deseret News, is targeted for completion by the summer of 2027.
To learn more about the state directors model, the Fire and Aviation Management carve-out, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ commitment to targeting 4 billion board feet in annual timber harvests by fiscal year 2028, read Wood Central’s initial coverage: Forest Service Quits D.C. for Salt Lake City — Biggest Shake-Up in 121 Years.
