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Guest Column –
By Will Pattiz –
Officials with the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture swore the plan was not to gut the U.S. Forest Service. Then a federal court pried loose the plan the department spent a year hiding, and it proves agency officials lied. A federal judge in San Francisco could halt the whole thing.
A coalition of labor unions, scientific societies, national-park defenders, and local governments has asked a federal judge to halt the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. They filed on July 1 in federal court in San Francisco, and Judge Susan Illston will hear the request on August 21.
You can read the supplemental complaint and the motion to stop it in full.
On the same day, a federal court forced USDA to do the one thing it had spent a year fighting to avoid. It had to hand over its own plan.
The department burned a year of legal firepower in district court and at the Ninth Circuit to keep this document buried, and the moment you read it you understand the panic. It’s a confession.
For more than a year, officials with the USDA looked the American public in the eye and swore up and down it wasn’t gutting the Forest Service. This plan is the proof the department was lying the entire time.
We reported in April that the dismantling was illegal. What USDA just surrendered is uglier than illegal. It’s a deliberate scheme to hollow out the agency that guards 193 million acres of your land, and USDA hid it because it knew precisely how damning it was. This is the scandal the department has been fighting in two federal courts to keep out of the papers.
Here’s what USDA didn’t want you to see.
What USDA Buried
The document is the Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan, the ARRP, and it reads like exactly what USDA was terrified you’d think. It sets a target. The department wants to gut its own workforce by at least 23 percent, and 31 percent once you set aside the food-safety inspectors it can’t legally touch.
For the Forest Service, the number is a 15 percent cut, 22 percent with the public-safety carve-out stripped out. USDA dressed the whole thing up in a bloodless euphemism, “workforce optimization.” Translated into plain English, it means gutting the ranks of the people who guard your forests, on purpose, in writing, as official department policy.
And the method is where bad policy curdles into something shameful. USDA isn’t firing these people out in the open, because honest mass firings come with legal process and public scrutiny the department wanted to dodge. So it engineered a workaround.
It orders career employees to uproot their families and haul themselves across the country, and it’s banking on them to quit instead of go. The plan says so in black and white.
USDA “is anticipating that a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments,” and it states flatly that it won’t refill most of the jobs they leave behind. Force the move, pocket the resignations, leave the chairs empty for good. That’s engineered attrition, a purge dressed up as a relocation, and USDA put every word of it in writing.
Now hold that up against what USDA told you out loud.
Secretary Brooke Rollins put her name on a July 2025 memo that assured the public, in plain words, that USDA “is not conducting a large-scale workforce reduction.” Read the very next sentence of that same memo and it calls the reorganization “another step of the Department’s process of reducing its workforce.” She contradicted herself inside a single paragraph.
And the plan she spent the next year burying in federal court sets a target of cutting the workforce by at least 23 percent. It cannot all be true. One of these is a lie, and it isn’t hard to tell which one.
USDA spent a solid year fighting to keep this plan in the dark. That’s the behavior of an agency hiding something, and now the whole country gets to see what. Rollins told America one thing in public and wrote down the opposite in private, then sent her department to two federal courts to keep the private version away from you. Let’s call it what it is, a full-blown cover-up.
The Admission
By June 1, Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden dropped the pretense altogether. In a letter to Congress, he admitted the administration is reorganizing the Forest Service to “align its workforce size with available resources.” There it is, in writing, from the number two official at USDA. The relocations exist to shrink the workforce. He confessed it to the exact branch of government that had already ordered him not to do it, and the department barreled ahead anyway.
Remember Vaden. At his confirmation hearing, under oath, in front of the senators about to vote on him, he called USDA “a creature of statute” with no authority separate from Congress. He was right. Then he got the job and started running the exact play he swore to those senators he’d never run. Every one of them should be hauling him back to explain himself.
Congress said no. Twice. In writing.
This is where USDA’s story falls apart.
In November 2025, Congress passed the year’s Agriculture appropriations law and wrote Section 716 into it. Section 716 bars USDA from spending a single dollar to relocate offices or employees or reorganize its structure without notifying the Appropriations Committees and getting their approval 30 days ahead of time. It also bars the department from standing up any new office of five or more people without that same approval. USDA is closing all nine Forest Service regional offices and creating fifteen brand-new state director offices. Every one of those fifteen trips the provision on its own.
Two months later, in January 2026, Congress passed the Interior appropriations law and added Section 421. It bars USDA from moving Forest Service money around without advance approval, and it orders in plain words that the “Forest Service shall maintain staffing levels” to carry out its mission. Congress saw this coming and wrote the guardrails by name.
USDA drove straight through them.
USDA’s answer is one of the most brazen legal dodges you’ll ever see from a federal agency. Instead of waiting for a court to weigh in, the department’s own general counsel wrote an internal memo declaring these appropriations laws unconstitutional, and instructed the agency to file the required notice with Congress and then act as though the law didn’t exist. The memo leans on a 1983 Supreme Court case, INS v. Chadha, to brand the approval requirement an illegal legislative veto. The Trump administration is calling a law the President himself signed unconstitutional so it can ignore it.
The Supreme Court paused an earlier, broader injunction in this same case last July, on the constitutional claims. This motion sidesteps that ground entirely and rests on the appropriations laws Congress passed afterward, which the Court’s order never touched. The preliminary-injunction hearing is set for August 21 before Judge Susan Illston.
What USDA is Actually Buying
Strip out the docket numbers and here’s the ground.
Chief Tom Schultz went before the House Appropriations Committee and told them only about 500 Forest Service employees would have to move. The union that represents these workers puts the number of affected jobs at roughly 6,500. Forest Service whistleblowers who wrote to Congress say mandatory relocations could reach as many as 1,900 people. Somebody is lowballing, and it isn’t the workers.
The whole scheme depends on those workers quitting, and they’re telling everyone who will listen that they intend to.
When the union surveyed the USDA scientists ordered to relocate, 76 percent said they aren’t going. The Forest Service employees’ own union warns the agency will lose its ability to fight fire safely if this goes through. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again because it’s worth repeating. The last time this administration relocated a land agency, moving BLM headquarters to Grand Junction in 2019, fewer than 13 percent of the affected employees agreed to move. Three showed up. Three.
That’s the design. Empty the offices, slap the word optimization on it, and leave the forests to fend for themselves. And the timing crosses the line from reckless into cruel. More than half the mainland is in drought, the West is a tinderbox, and USDA chose this exact moment to scatter the engineers, the fire and aviation specialists, and the incident-command crews who run the response to the biggest wildfires in the country.
The coalition suing includes the groups closest to this ground. The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Western Watersheds Project are all plaintiffs, arguing that a hollowed-out Forest Service means degraded fire response and weaker stewardship on the forests their members hunt, fish, and hike. AFGE President Everett Kelley put the principle plainly, that no administration “gets to break the law to dismantle an agency that feeds this nation.”
And USDA didn’t only steamroll Congress. It steamrolled you too. When the department opened the dismantling for public comment, 46,845 people wrote in and 82 percent told USDA not to do it. The department collected every one of those comments, published a tidy summary in December, and answered exactly none of them. It had already made up its mind. The comment period was theater. That contempt for the public is now part of the plaintiffs’ case that the entire plan is arbitrary and capricious.
The same playbook, one more time
None of this is an accident, and none of it stands alone. It’s the same playbook we’ve traced across every public lands agency in the country. Starve the staff, engineer the dysfunction, point at the wreckage you caused, and sell the demolition as reform. We laid the whole pattern out in the seven deadly sins of public lands management, and the Forest Service is the clearest, ugliest case of it we have. If you want the backstory, we broke the dismantling in April, mapped it region by region, and fact-checked the White House when it called our reporting lies.
And it has names on it. Brooke Rollins runs USDA because the Senate confirmed her, and every senator who voted to hand her that power owns a piece of what she’s done with it. See exactly who they are, and how every member of Congress scores on public lands, on our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard.
What you can do before August 21
USDA built this entire scheme on a bet that you’re not paying attention. Make the bet expensive.
The most direct thing you can do takes a couple of minutes. The Forest Service has an open comment period right now on a proposed rule that would shrink your right to weigh in on how the national forests are run, the grazing, logging, and permitting decisions that shape this land. It’s the same instinct behind the dismantling, cutting the public out of the room. Add your comment through our Public Lands Action Network, PLAN, and it lands in the record that courts and Congress read later. Comment now through PLAN.
Then call the House and Senate Appropriations Committees and tell them to enforce their own law. Section 716 and Section 421 are on the books, and USDA is openly defying both.
Back the legal coalition dragging USDA in front of a judge. They’re the reason any of this is public at all.
And send this to anyone who still thinks reorganization is a paperwork story. It’s 193 million acres of your land losing the people who know how to keep it alive, and a Cabinet secretary who lied to your face about it.
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Originally published in the More Than Just Parks newsletter on Substack.
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