The Trump administration plans to drastically restructure the U.S. Forest Service. The federal agency manages millions of acres across more than 150 national forests. Changes include moving its headquarters to Salt Lake City and transitioning from its legacy regional centers to state-based operations.
MTPR's Sheri Quinn spoke with Rob Chaney, author and reporter at Mountain Journal, about what the reorganization spells for Montana and wildfire management.
Sheri Quinn: Would you say that there are a lot of concerns, local concerns, about moving headquarters out of D.C. to Salt Lake City? Are you hearing from other sources outside of the state?
Rob Chaney: I've talked to a couple of past Forest Service chiefs, the person in charge of the Forest Service at the national level in the past, who have said this really does not work well for U.S. government policy to move headquarters into the middle of the country when most of their work is actually taking place in Washington, D.C.
Quinn: Going from the regional service centers to national state operations, how is that going to work and how is that going to affect operations in Montana?
Chaney: In Montana, and particularly in Missoula, there's two levels to that. The regional office becomes a state office for specifically Montana.
But also, the Forest Service has the Rocky Mountain Research Lab here in Missoula. And that does a lot of things, including wildfire science, including ecological science here on the University of Montana campus.
It also has a technology center. That does everything from how to sharpen cross-cut saws to the chemistry of aerial fire retardant. That research center is going to stay in Missoula. However, similar research centers in Bozeman and Hungry Horse are going to close.
So, there are a number of other research centers scattered across the country that have nationwide service to the Forest Service's scientific and technical needs. So, a lot of those places are going to be reconfigured or have their people move to headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Missoula is going to maintain some of its independence and a lot of its infrastructure here, which I'm sure is going to be a relief to a big community of scientists here in western Montana.
Quinn: How will this reorganization affect wildfire response?
Chaney: The federal wildfire system was proposed to have a massive reconsolidation last year. They were going to take all of the Forest Service’s firefighters, who make up more than two-thirds of the guys in yellow shirts and the engines and the deployment for federal forest fires, and combine them with the Interior Department, which is Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, each of which has their own dedicated firefighting service.
So, on the one hand it looks like you've got a whole bunch of fire departments all running around duplicating each other's efforts. On the other hand, each one of those different agencies has a very, very different mission.
And although the Trump administration proposed this big consolidation, Congress rejected it. They, on a bipartisan agreement, refused to fund the consolidation, and ordered a big study to justify or to explain why this might be better than the system we've got now, which is already combined in the National Interagency Fire Service, the NIFC, that has been working for decades.
So now, moving the Forest Service into this new structure and into this new headquarters in Salt Lake, is seen by a lot of the sources I've talked to as a big distraction as we're coming into one of the biggest fire years that a lot of forecasters have seen over the horizon.
