Shitstain Moving Forest Service HQ To Salt Lake City; When He Moved BLM HQ Last Term, 90% Of Agency Staff Quit

[hatrack]

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The U.S. Forest Service will relocate its headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City, moving hundreds of positions as part of a broader agency reorganization the Trump administration says would move officials closer to forest communities. The move threatens to hollow out the current staff of the service’s D.C. headquarters, who may decide not to move to Utah. President Donald Trump had similarly moved the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Colorado in his first term, leading 90 percent of the staff to leave the agency — only for it to return to Washington.

In its announcement, the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, did not say how many staff would be relocated. Agency leadership told employees that roughly 260 positions would be moved, according to two sources familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The agency will be reorganized around 15 directors overseeing one or more states from offices throughout the country. The USDA did not immediately respond to questions about how many staffers would be moved. “Moving the Forest Service closer to the forests we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars and boosting employee recruitment,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.

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Steve Ellis, a former deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service employee, said the Forest Service needs people in Washington to form relationships with counterparts in Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to ensure the agency gets the resources it needs.

The BLM move to Grand Junction, Colorado, also led to brain drain of experienced staff leaving the agency who didn’t want their children to change schools or their spouses to leave there jobs in Washington, Ellis said. “If you want to downsize the federal government and get federal employees to leave, that is one way to do it,” he said. “You’re losing a lot of seasoned talent, a lot of institutional knowledge when you do that.” The Biden administration later moved BLM back to Washington.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/03/31/forest-service-headquarters-move-utah-trump/

[pfitz59]

1. Easier to fill vacancies with corrupt toadies

The GOP goal is to ultimately 'privatize' all public lands.