Connecting Data to Wealth Creation
Connecting Data to Wealth Creation
On October 1st, visitors to the Mt. Hood National Forest website were greeted not by trail conditions or fire warnings, but by a stark red banner. Above a placid photo of a mountain lake, the text declared, “The Radical Left Democrats shutdown the government… President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open.” The message, which appeared across U.S. Forest Service sites, was a jarring piece of data. It was partisan, aggressive, and entirely at odds with the typical, apolitical function of a public lands agency. It was an anomaly that demanded a closer look at the underlying system.
While the agency’s public-facing servers were broadcasting political messaging, its personnel on the ground were concluding a project that stands in stark opposition to that digital chaos. Just days earlier, the Forest Service was being praised for its role in a massive infrastructure repair in North Carolina. After Hurricane Helene washed out entire sections of Interstate 40 through the Pisgah National Forest, the state’s Department of Transportation faced a monumental task: sourcing more than three million cubic yards of rock and soil to rebuild the highway.
The solution was a model of inter-agency efficiency. Working with NCDOT, specialists from the Pisgah National Forest—botanists, hydrologists, and archeologists—identified a nearby borrow site within the forest itself. By using local materials, the project saved taxpayers an estimated $100 million and shaved up to three years off the construction timeline. The agreement also secured over 1,000 acres of new land donations for the forest and funding for new wildlife passages. This was the Forest Service as it’s designed to be: a quiet, competent steward of resources, using localized expertise to generate enormous public value.
The discrepancy between these two events—a hyper-partisan digital tantrum on one hand and a masterclass in pragmatic governance on the other—is not a coincidence. It is the clearest signal of the war being waged on the agency, not from the outside, but from within its own parent department.
The Reorganization Variable
The context for these divergent signals is a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the cabinet-level department that oversees the Forest Service. In a July memo, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a plan to shutter the agency’s nine national regional offices and consolidate its seven research stations into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. The stated goal, according to the administration, is to make the agency more effective and less bureaucratic.
The data, however, suggests the opposite outcome is more likely. The success of the I-40 project was contingent on the very structure the reorganization aims to dismantle. It was the regional staff, the people with intimate knowledge of the Pisgah National Forest’s specific ecology and geology, who enabled the NCDOT to find a fast, cheap, and environmentally sound solution. Removing that layer of regional leadership and scientific expertise doesn't reduce bureaucracy; it eliminates institutional knowledge.
Consider the Pacific Northwest. The regional headquarters in Portland, slated for closure, oversees 24 million acres across 16 national forests in Oregon and Washington. Its research station, which will see its work moved to Colorado, provides the foundational science for wildfire management and logging practices in the region’s unique temperate rainforests. Timber groups and state foresters—groups not typically aligned with conservationists—have both raised alarms. In a letter to the Secretary, Oregon state officials warned that the loss of a “cohesive leadership structure would diminish the responsiveness required to increase timber production and reduce wildfire risk.”
The same pattern is unfolding in Alaska, where an unknown number of Forest Service offices are set to be closed. The agency’s research lab in Juneau will be shuttered. This follows a year where the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, already terminated about 3,400 Forest Service employees nationally, with over 100 of those positions in Alaska. The proposed budget for the coming year calls for a further reduction of about a third—34%, to be more exact—to the agency’s operational funding.
I've analyzed corporate restructurings for years, and the process outlined by the USDA lacks the basic hallmarks of a serious operational overhaul. A plan of this magnitude, affecting millions of acres and thousands of employees, was announced in a brief memo light on operational details. When questioned by a bipartisan group of senators, the USDA’s response was to set up a generic email address for public comment with a deadline of September 30th. This is not the methodology of an organization seeking to improve efficiency. It’s the methodology of an organization executing a political directive with minimal external review.
A System in Distress
While the administrative and scientific core of the Forest Service is being hollowed out, its frontline duties continue. In New Hampshire, with the state under a strict fire ban due to drought, the agency quietly stationed a wildfire response helicopter at Lebanon Municipal Airport. This is a small, tactical decision, but a telling one. It’s the kind of proactive, mission-critical work that the agency is supposed to do. It’s a data point that shows the field-level components of the machine are still functioning, even as the command structure is being dismantled and its public address system is commandeered.
The politicized banner that appeared on October 1st was not, therefore, an isolated glitch. It was a symptom. It represents the final stage of an administrative capture, where the agency’s purpose is subordinated to the political messaging of its temporary leadership. The USDA, which posted a nearly identical message on its own homepage, seems to view the Forest Service not as an independent steward of public lands, but as another platform for its political agenda. Other federal land agencies, like the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management (which are under the Department of the Interior), posted neutral, factual notices about the shutdown. The Forest Service was an outlier.
The picture that emerges from the data of late September 2025 is of an agency being pulled in two directions. Its field staff are still collaborating to rebuild highways, pre-positioning assets to fight fires, and performing the essential functions of their mandate. But its leadership is being consolidated, its scientific foundation is being centralized thousands of miles from the lands it studies, and its budget and headcount are being aggressively cut. The competence demonstrated in the Pisgah National Forest is a lagging indicator of the agency that was. The red banner is a leading indicator of what it is becoming.
My final analysis is this: the events surrounding the U.S. Forest Service are not about improving government efficiency. They represent a catastrophic failure of fiduciary duty by its parent department. The core asset of the Forest Service is not the timber in its forests or the minerals in its soil; it is the accumulated, localized, scientific expertise of its people. This is the asset that saved taxpayers $100 million on a single stretch of highway in North Carolina. The current administration is liquidating this asset at an alarming rate, not for any discernible operational gain, but to satisfy a political agenda. The crude, partisan banner on the website was merely the public announcement of a long-running, internal demolition.
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