In an extraordinary action taken on March 31, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that the Forest Service “will move its headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, and begin a sweeping restructuring of the agency to move leadership closer to the forests and communities it serves.”
While the USDA frames this decision as “a structural reset and a common-sense approach to improve mission delivery,” environmentalists see it as another fulfillment of the goals of Project 2025.
Project 2025 calls for significant changes related to management of Forest Service lands including: dramatically increasing logging, opening up protected forests, repealing the Antiquities Act, overhauling environmental review and restructuring the federal workforce. These and other initiatives to weaken environmental protections have been or continue to be implemented by the administration.
Josh Hicks of the Wilderness Society notes that “This administration’s plan to dismantle a 120-year-old agency will mean less access to the public forests people rely on, less capacity to reduce [the] intensifying wildfire risk, and more threats to clean air, clean water and wildlife habitat. Simply put, this reorganization will wreak havoc on the Forest Service management and organization, adding fuel to the unpopular narrative by officials like Senator Mike Lee that public lands should be sold off to private industry.”
Read more about these efforts at:
—This article by the Aspen Times
Keep Sedona Beautiful urges you to contact your elected representatives and demand they oppose the weakening of protections proposed in Project 2025 and being enacted by the current administration. Our public lands must continue to be protected.
You can reach your elected representatives through our Contact Your Elected Officials webpage.