AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to major changes underway at the U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency responsible for managing 193 million acres of public lands, forests and grasslands located across 43 states, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. In late March, the Trump administration announced an extensive reorganization of the agency that will shutter 57 of 77 research stations across the U.S., while relocating the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah.

In a press release, the Forest Service chief, Tom Schultz said, quote, “This is about building a Forest Service that is nimble, efficient, effective and closer to the forests and communities it serves,” he said.

Our next guest describes the changes very differently. In an article headlined “Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service,” Jim Pattiz writes, quote, “[W]ith the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a 'reorganization.' An execution. … The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.”

Jim Pattiz is a conservationist and filmmaker. He runs the organization and newsletter More Than Just Parks together with his brother Will Pattiz. They track threats to public lands across the country, joining us now from Atlanta, Georgia.

Jim Pattiz, thanks so much for being here. Explain what’s at stake.

JIM PATTIZ: Yeah, well, Amy, you know, you said it at the top here. The Forest Service manages over 193 million acres of our public land. That’s larger than the state of Texas. It’s more than twice the amount of land that the National Park Service manages. You know, this is a critically important agency, and, you know, it’s kind of the backbone of our public lands.

What the Trump administration has announced that they’re doing, you know, when you move the headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, we need to keep in mind Salt Lake City, Utah, this is the state that is currently suing the federal government to take control of 18-and-a-half million acres of your public land. It’s an unprecedented lawsuit. And when you move the headquarters there, you’re sending a signal that you agree with what this state doing. Utah has already signed unprecedented agreements with the Forest Service to give them management control of their lands, of the Forest Service lands, within the state.

And then, you know, shuttering 57 of 77 research facilities. The Forest Service research program is the foremost forest research program in the world. It provides critical information for how we manage our forests, as well as fight wildfires. And then the regional offices, that’s another big one. They’re shuttering all nine Forest Service regional offices. This is really where the institutional knowledge of the Forest Service is housed. And when you get rid of those offices, you know, the goal here is to make the agency subservient to the resource extraction industry that the Trump administration is aligned with.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who you think the Forest Service is being given over to? I mean, first of all, obviously, sending from Washington, D.C., the Forest Service, to Salt Lake City, you’re going to lose a massive amount of experience, for people who cannot move. But then talk about who it’s in the hands of, who’s in charge now.

JIM PATTIZ: Yeah, I think something people need to understand is the Trump administration has done this before on a much smaller scale. In Trump’s first term, they moved the Bureau of Land Management, another very large public land management agency, from Washington, D.C., the headquarters, from D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado. That resulted in 87% of the affected staff walking out the door. Only three people showed up to the new office at Grand Junction. And, you know, you can talk to people who work at the Bureau of Land Management now, and did under the Biden administration. President Biden moved it back to D.C., but the agency has never recovered. I mean, you’re talking about so much institutional knowledge and key people leaving out the door because they simply can’t uproot their lives and their families to move to this far-flung, you know, new headquarters. Same thing is playing out here with the Forest Service, but on a much larger scale. This decision will impact up to 5,000 employees. And this is an agency that has already lost over a fourth of its entire staff since Trump took office last January.

And then, you asked me about, you know, what — who this hands it to. I mean, I think, you know, look no further than the state of Utah and the anti-public lands movement. You can look throughout the Trump administration, up and down in positions of leadership in land management agencies. These are people who are avowed proponents of transferring our federal public lands to states and private interests. The sitting chief of the United States Forest Service, his previous job was as the executive of a logging company. That’s unprecedented in the history of the Forest Service to have the chief as a logging executive. And so, you know, the current nominee for the Bureau of Land Management is former Congressman Steve Pearce from New Mexico, and this is a man who said Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to create national parks and national forests. So, the intent here is obvious. It’s to hollow out this agency and hand it to the resource extraction industry and prepare it for, potentially, the eventual transfer of our public lands to states.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve called it “asset stripping,” and you say it’s illegal. Explain, Jim.

JIM PATTIZ: Well, you know, “asset stripping” is a term that is used in private equity. And it’s basically where you have people come in — you know, this happened famously with Sears, right? Where you come in, and you strip out all the parts that are worth any value, and you sell them off, and then you leave a hollowed-out shell of the company.

And that’s what the Trump administration is doing with our public lands. The secretary of the interior famously calls them America’s balance sheet. And what they’ve been doing is raiding them and giving them to their allies in the resource extraction industry. So, that’s been the goal here with what the Trump administration is doing. And, yeah, when you do that, you know, you leave — you leave a broken agency. And I think, you know, what they want to do is break the Forest Service, you know, drain it of its ability to manage our lands properly, and then, you know, leave it, point — they can point at this broken agency and say, “You know, look, this thing doesn’t work very well anyway. We already now have these new state directors, which they’ve created, which will be basically political appointees and liaisons for the Forest Service to work with states in managing the forests. And they’ll be able to say, “Look, we’ve already kind of got this set up for the states to take over. Why don’t we just, you know, go ahead and do it?”

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds. You say it’s illegal.

JIM PATTIZ: Yes, it’s illegal, because in the appropriations bills that Congress passed, they explicitly forbade the reprogramming of funds for the Forest Service and the reorganization of its offices. It explicitly says you can’t move Forest Service offices, you can’t move the headquarters. And they’re proceeding with that anyway.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Pattiz, I thank you so much for being with us, filmmaker and conservationist, along with his brother Will runs an organization and Substack newsletter, More Than Just Parks.

That does it for our show. Again, tonight, I’ll be in Sebastopol at 3:40 and 7:00 for the screenings of Steal This Story, Please!, the documentary about Democracy Now!, tomorrow in Sacramento at the Tower Theatre, and then in Berkeley at the Rialto. I’m Amy Goodman — check our website at democracynow.org — from San Francisco.