The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.
“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.
You cannot move a thirty-year watershed study. You cannot relocate a decades-long old-growth monitoring program. You cannot box up a forest and ship it to Colorado. When these facilities close, the experiments die. The datasets end. The partnerships with universities that took generations to build collapse. And the institutional knowledge of the scientists who ran those programs walks out the door, because the administration damn well knows most of them won’t follow a forced relocation to a single consolidated office that has nothing to do with the ecosystems they’ve spent their careers studying.”
Nine regional offices. 57 research labs. 193 million acres. An interactive map of what was lost.
Call your senators. Both of them. Tell them the Forest Service reorganization is proceeding without the congressional approval required by Section 716 of the Agriculture Appropriations Act and Section 421 of the Interior Appropriations Act. Use those numbers. Say them out loud. Staffers write down what they don’t recognize, and these are the provisions their bosses voted for.
If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didn’t get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?
If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDA’s general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?
Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.
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5 Calls
