MTJP
MTJP
Democrats had eight months, a Senate hearing, fiery letters, and the constitutional power to stop the Forest Service dismantling with a single sentence in the appropriations bill. They chose not to write it.
What You Can Do Now ScrollThe exact same law, signed on the same day by the same president, contains Section 505 covering Division A agencies. Here is what it says:
Relocates an office or employees. Reorganizes offices, programs, or activities. That is a word-for-word description of what just happened to the Forest Service.
Congress wrote that sentence. They wrote it into law. They wrote it to protect other agencies. And they did not write it for the Forest Service. The Forest Service lives in Division C. Division C contains no equivalent language.
At the level of appropriations drafting, where every word is negotiated and every clause is deliberate, the absence of that language is not an oversight. It's a decision.
Binding law. The president signs the bill or the government shuts down. Democrats know this. They use it all the time. They used it in this very bill to block the wildfire agency consolidation. They used it in Division A to protect other agencies from exactly the kind of reorganization that just gutted the Forest Service.
They had the template. They had the precedent. They had eight months of evidence. They had their own letters demanding this exact outcome. And they chose not to write the sentence.
Use as an email or a phone script. The more specific you can be about the national forests or research stations in your area, the more effective your message will be.
I'm writing about the Forest Service reorganization announced on March 31. The administration is relocating the headquarters to Salt Lake City, closing all nine regional offices, and shuttering 57 research facilities in 31 states. This will gut the largest forestry research organization on the planet and destroy over a century of institutional knowledge.
I need to understand why this was allowed to happen. Democrats knew this reorganization was coming since July 2025. The Rollins memo laid out the entire blueprint. The Senate held hearings. Four senior Democratic senators wrote letters demanding it be stopped. 47,000 Americans submitted public comments, 82% in opposition. Seven former Forest Service chiefs warned it would destroy the agency.
And when it came time to write the FY2026 appropriations bill -- the one constitutional tool that could have stopped this -- no prohibition on the reorganization was included. None. The same law contains Section 505, which protects Division A agencies from exactly this kind of restructuring. But Division C, which funds the Forest Service, got nothing. You wrote the sentence for the Commerce Department. You did not write it for the agency that manages 193 million acres of public land. Why?
I am not asking you to express concern. I am not asking for a hearing or a letter or a statement. I am asking you to act. Use every tool available to pressure this administration and your Republican colleagues to stop the demolition of a storied American land management institution.
And commit publicly to including a binding prohibition in the next appropriations bill -- not just on this reorganization, but on the restructuring of any federal land management agency without explicit congressional authorization. The Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management -- all of them need this protection.
Every day you wait, more scientists leave. More long-term research dies. More institutional knowledge walks out the door and never comes back. Act now. Not next month. Now.
I'm writing about the Forest Service reorganization announced on March 31 and asking you to take immediate action to protect the hardworking Forest Service employees who are being uprooted by this plan and to halt the closure of research facilities that serve every state in this country.
The Forest Service is closing 57 research facilities across 31 states, eliminating all nine regional offices, and forcing thousands of employees to either relocate or lose their jobs. These are not Washington bureaucrats. These are scientists, foresters, and land managers embedded in the landscapes and communities they serve -- researching wildfire behavior, watershed health, timber sustainability, invasive species, and forest disease.
Their work underpins every timber sale, every fire management plan, and every land management decision on 193 million acres of land that belong to every American. When that expertise is gone, land managers will be making decisions blind.
The administration says this will make the agency more responsive. But when they made the same promise about the Bureau of Land Management in 2019, 87% of affected employees quit rather than relocate. A GAO report found the move did not improve services. It destroyed the workforce. Forest Service employees are already saying they expect the same outcome.
I am asking you to demand that the administration immediately halt the closure of research facilities and protect Forest Service employees from forced relocations until Congress has reviewed and authorized any reorganization of this scale.
And I am asking you to support binding protections for the Forest Service and all federal land management agencies in the next appropriations bill. The closures are happening now. The scientists are leaving now. The longer this goes without congressional action, the less there will be left to save.
The reporting behind this page.
