When dead trees fall in Baltimore, the city doesn't pay thousands of dollars to dump them in landfills like some cities do. The trees are transported to a sorting and recycling facility that turns the old wood into furniture, flooring and other products.
The facility makes money for Baltimore and has become a model for other cities. But Shaun Preston, who runs the site, called Camp Small, said it might have imploded without operational research support from U.S. Forest Service scientists based in the agency's office in Baltimore.
"When this program started, the U.S. Forest Service was right there to offer expertise to help us with research, to help develop ideas," said Preston. "And then the Forest Service was like, let's look at how we can grow Camp Small and take it to the next level."
More than 1,000 Forest Service employees work in hundreds of Research and Development facilities and structures located across the country. Staff work out of greenhouses, laboratories and cabins in urban areas like Baltimore and in more rural offices near the 193 million acres of national forest and grassland that the agency manages. The employees work on a range of projects, from restoring native trees in Hawaii after invasive species take over to learning how to prevent wildfires in Montana. Those projects often include local partners like Camp Small, Forest Service employees said, and theirs is the largest forestry research network in the world.
But on March 31, the Forest Service announced a reorganization of the agency that would close facilities used for research, including the one in Baltimore. Three days later, President Donald Trump's 2027 budget proposed allocating $0 for Forest Service research, down from $309 million in 2026. More than 100 facilities are now being evaluated for potential closure, according to an NPR analysis.
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At a budget hearing on April 16, Forest Service Chief Schulz said the agency was "trying to achieve fiscal responsibility" and that the changes were meant to bring the people who work for the agency closer to the land they are meant to manage. As part of the reorganization, Schulz also proposed moving the agency's headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, and closing all 10 of the agency's regional offices, where employees work on permitting and land management.
"We are prioritizing the fundamentals of managing our national forest for their intended purposes and ensuring maximum value to the American taxpayer," Schulz told lawmakers at the hearing. "We've got to make sure that we live within our means."
229 employees work in the facilities slated for closure, according to the Forest Service Council of the National Federation of Federal Employees, the federal labor union that advocates for Forest Service workers. The Forest Service has denied that the pending closures are intended to force workers to quit and has suggested that employees in the facilities being evaluated for shut down would be consolidated into one location in Colorado.
But documents obtained by NPR, and interviews with current and former Forest Service researchers, show that much of the agency's research is already cheap and local – and closing research facilities could make it less so, while encouraging workers to leave the agency. The government already owns most of the facilities it is proposing to shutter, internal Forest Service documents reviewed by NPR reveal. Of the remaining buildings the Forest Service leases that are being evaluated for closure, some cost the government less than $1 in rent a year, leases obtained by NPR show.
"In my laboratory, we own the land outright and we own the buildings outright, so we're a pretty good deal," said Dr. Paul Hessburg, a Senior Research Ecologist who works in a Pacific Northwest Research Station lab in Wenatchee, Wash., one of the facilities being evaluated for closure.
The government does have to pay to maintain the buildings it owns. Deferred maintenance costs for those buildings amount to almost $3 billion, agency documents show. But the Forest Service also owns a range of other assets that it has to maintain that are more expensive. The deferred maintenance costs for those assets, which include roads, trails, bridges and dams, total more than $8 billion, according to the documents. Roads alone cost the agency more than double what it has to pay to maintain its facilities.
"Just because you're taking away the deferred maintenance cost of the research [buildings], it doesn't mean that area is going to become a zero-sum," said a current Forest Service employee who helps maintain the agency's infrastructure. "Because you still have the roads there. You could have a dam there. You could have a communication system there."
Current employees of the Forest Service requested that NPR not use their names because they are not permitted to speak publicly and said they feared retribution for doing so.
One of the buildings that the Forest Service does not own is the location in Fort Collins, Colo., where the agency has proposed to move researchers from facilities that are closing. That building costs the Forest Service $1 million a year in rent, documents reviewed by NPR show. Meanwhile, buildings the agency is proposing to shutter cost the Forest Service almost nothing in rental fees.
The lease that permits Forest Service scientists to use a 30,000 acre lot in Hilo, Hawaii, for instance, was signed in 2002, between the Department of Agriculture and the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources, and is valid through 2067. For renting the land located at the University of Hawaii for 65 years, the federal government paid a one-time fee of $1, the lease obtained by NPR shows.
The government does have to pay to maintain some of the buildings that it leases there, too, but there is no additional rental fee for the remainder of the term, the Hawaii lease states.
"They're only paying a dollar in rent to the university because they have a great agreement with the university," said Rachel Riemann, a former Forest Service research scientist who was based in New York and worked with the Forestry Inventory Analysis arm of the agency. "And yet that one's on the list for closure."
The Forest Service currently leases two properties in Michigan, from Michigan Technological University, in Houghton and L'Anse. Both are being evaluated for closure.
The lease for the five acre property in Houghton was signed in 1963 for a 49-year period, then extended for another 49 years in 2014. In 1963, the federal government paid Michigan Technological University a one-time rental fee of $1, "but no rental fee thereafter," according to the lease documents obtained by NPR. In addition, Forest Service researchers have access to Michigan Technological University's "instruments and laboratories at no cost" other than maintenance, the lease states. For the second facility in Michigan, in L'Anse, the Forest Service pays $600 a month to rent two rooms.
"All this tells me is that no one bothered to look at what we owned versus what we don't," said the Forest Service maintenance employee. "They picked locations that they wanted to move people to rather than looking where we already had assets and caused huge panic amongst staff by doing so."
Scientists say they won't move
Dr. Morgan Grove was one of the Forest Service scientists who supported Camp Small, the wood recycling facility in Baltimore. He also jumpstarted the cleanup of a 10-acre forest behind an inner city church and worked with other scientists to study the regeneration of white oak trees in plots at a public arboretum in Baltimore.
Oak trees were planted there three years ago and need about thirty years to grow, Grove said. The saplings can't be transplanted to new sites without disrupting the project, Grove added, since the intention of the research was to study how the trees survive for the next few decades under the specific environmental conditions in Baltimore.
"So how easy would it be to do that from Denver? Not happening," Grove said. "Remotely, it's really hard to provide sufficient support for how to manage a forest."
Then there's the relationships that are required between federal scientists and their partners, like the Baltimore pastors and the sawmill workers at Camp Small, said Grove, who retired from the Forest Service in 2025.
"It's important to recognize that in the Forest Service, we end up being kind of the convener of different interests," said Grove. "And if you're trying to convene from Denver or Salt Lake City, they no longer see you as being part of their community."
Moving to a new location would also disrupt and stop their research, four current Forest Service scientists from research facilities across the East and West coasts interviewed by NPR agreed.
"The research being done is hyperlocal. It's unique to the landscapes that it's supporting and then also the data sets that are in each of these buildings," said a current Forest Service scientist. "Closing these offices is going to result in the loss of irreplaceable data sets, which contain just vital information that has been gathered."
Some of the science the agency does is not optional. The agency's Forestry Inventory Analysis program is mandated by Congress to collect data to assess the condition of forests in the United States. About one third of all Forestry Inventory Analysis staff work at facilities being evaluated for closure, according to Forest Service research scientists. Those employees would have to travel to continue to monitor forests, which could cost the agency more than $2,000 per person per month if standard per diem rates for federal employees are followed, said Riemann, the former Forestry Inventory Analysis employee.
"Almost any lease would cost less than being in permanent travel status," Riemann said.
All four of the researchers NPR interviewed who are currently working for the Forest Service said they would quit the agency if told to move and said many of their colleagues feel the same way.
"I'm not moving to Fort Collins," said one researcher who works in a facility slated for closure. "The whole point was to do long-term, place-based ecological research."
Officials have said that they are still evaluating information about facilities slated for closure. When NPR requested an interview with the agency about that process, the Forest Service declined, but provided a statement.
"The transition will occur in phases. Employees will receive clear information about relocation timelines, available options, and resources to support their decisions," a USDA spokesperson said. "The number of relocations beyond those already identified in the National Capital Region is unknown at this time."
The union representing Forest Service employees argues the agency's proposed reorganization violates a law that states government funds cannot be reprogrammed without advance notification and approval by House and Senate appropriations committees.
"We had this language specifically put in there on purpose so that they wouldn't do any kind of reorganization and they're absolutely going against that," said Steven Gutierrez, one of the union's representatives, who said the committees were not notified in advance and did not authorize the Forest Service's proposal to close facilities.
The union is currently negotiating with Forest Service leadership, Gutierrez said. But if the reorganization of the agency's research division is carried out as it has been proposed, it will be the end of the Forest Service's strong science legacy, current employees believe.
One scientist called the proposed reorganization a "death blow" to research. Another scientist predicted that the proposed changes and the large loss of employees that would ensue, on top of the thousands of Forest Service employees lost last year, would cause the system to "entirely collapse." The reorganization would result in the public receiving less information about how to keep national forests healthy, protect communities from wildfires, and preserve green spaces in cities for people to enjoy, agency scientists said.
Hessburg, the researcher in the Pacific Northwest, has worked in forestry for 40 years. He said the cuts to research would cause long-term damage to lands that belong to the public.
"It takes an awful lot to manage nearly 200 million acres of national forest system land," said Hessburg. "If you eliminate the largest [forestry] research organization in the world, it has impacts."
NPR would like to hear from more people with information about federal agencies and the proposed reorganization of the Forest Service. You can send an email to the reporter of this article, Chiara Eisner, at ceisner@npr.org, or contact her on the end-to-end encrypted platform Signal, here. Her username is: ceis.78.
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