I loved the headline..

US Forest Service closing 23 research facilities as part of reorganization under Trump

Dear AP, I think everything the Executive Branch does is “under the current President” so I don’t think you need to say it every time.

What I think is interesting about this is that if you track what Chris French has told us,  that they were looking at the issue, and would probably come down with fewer than the original , it seems like Chris has been telling us the straight scoop.

The U.S. Forest Service is closing 23 research and development stations in more than a dozen states as part of an organizational overhaul under President Donald Trump that is intended to trim costs and concentrate the agency’s resources in Western states, officials said Thursday.

This is always confusing as “stations” were the Research Stations which were an administrative layer.  But these could be more accurately be called “buildings”.

The work being done at the research stations will continue at other sites, Forest Service Associate Chief Chris French said in an interview. An additional 41 research facilities that faced possible closure will remain open after local officials and members of Congress raised concerns about the reorganization, which was announced in March.

“Our primary goal was to get our facilities costs under control,” French told The Associated Press. “We’re not closing any ongoing science activities. We’re not closing any of the experimental forests that are important to our researchers.”

Chris has been consistent on what he says about this, from the transcript of the Q&A session Chris French had with NAFSR.

We do not intend to move researchers out of the locality of where they’re at. We do not intend to close experimental forests. What we do intend to do is consolidate our facilities into something more sustainable. And this is hard.
I think the messaging got really messed up on this. We’re doing our best to try to align that, and that’s on us. But we’re going through and evaluating those facilities. Some of those we’ve looked at and said, no, this makes no sense. You don’t close this. Th example I would give is like up on the Okanagan Wenatchee.
There are other sites we need to be looking at hard. As much as I think everybody loves the Stoneville research site in Mississippi, there’s 14 buildings there and we staff it with four people.
I have to manage our facilities somehow. And unfortunately, R&D has more examples like that than others.
I’ve got a district ranger office that is leased in that Stoneville site right up the road. We’re looking at it right now. Is it better to move that district ranger office to Stoneville and use the facilities there or invest in a better office for essentially the district ranger’s office and move the four people in Stoneville there? That’s what we mean by evaluating.  We have multiple sites where we have multiple facilities, NFS, state and private, and R&D, all within the same locality area, and most of them are underutilized.
And we’re trying to have frank conversations with our partners. We have experimental forests where we have facilities that we don’t staff anybody at, and they are primarily used by universities and others. And we’re saying, you want to take these on?
Because right now they represent tens of millions of dollars of deferred maintenance and other maintenance and utility costs that I can’t afford to pay. That’s the conversation we’re trying to have.
We’re not trying to move scientists. We don’t want to lose the data that they have, but we also have to make sound facilities decisions

Alex Friend, member of the Board at NAFSR and former Deputy Chief for R&D:

I, you know, certainly agree with Stoneville and similar cases, so that’s long overdue, and that’s a great anecdote. I hope the other cases are similar.

Even when I worked in R&D we had facilities maintenance and empty space issues, and some of the same sites cropped up-  and Alex agrees that there are issues.

Chris: Alex, in our working with the department, the initial messaging that went out on this was confusing and bad and it’s created this. Now, the silver lining is I think the outrage mixed with the president’s budget; we suddenly have leaders like the Secretary talking about the importance of science.

It could be that OMB was pushing on one of its bizarre green eyeshades crusades.. and the FS came out with this to create external pushback from legislators to the bad idea of getting rid of R&D. It should be noted that USDA also has NIFA and ARS, and they are apparently not the targets of equivalent OMB hatchet jobs.

As I pointed out at the time, the many times R&D has tried to close buildings, legislators and local officials predictably came out in force.  In this case, the FS made their announcement before they talked to these folks so.. the number was sure to shrink. This strategy is better as the research isn’t being closed out, and the scientists aren’t moving from the local area.  Win-win.  Meanwhile the legislators are now on their toes about FS R&D and (even more) likely to blow off any efforts to defund FS R&D, win win win! It’s actually pretty brilliant if that was the plan.

Bill Avey of the National Associated of Forest Service Retirees, an advocacy group, said the forest service has long struggled to pay for all its facilities and some opportunities for consolidation exist. But Avey, who worked at the service for four decades, said its current leaders including Chief Tom Schultz need to defend the importance of forest research more vocally.

“He should be doing a much better job of pushing back and justifying and explaining some of the research work,” Avey said. He added that the 41 facilities being retained likely would have closed as well if not for pushback from his group and others.

Honestly, as another retiree, and former NAFSR Board Member, I don’t think Bill knows what the Chief and Chris have actually done and said to those who matter in the Admin.  They might have run a complex operation as I described above.  So how does Bill know that the Chief “should have done” more? And what is this with retiree organizations criticizing current Chief’s  imputed actions or lack thereof, rather than policies? Whatever happened to “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” and “affirm in public, counsel in private?”

The 95 employees at the research stations slated for closure will be shifted to other sites within their commuting areas, Forest Service Communications Director Chad Douglas said. The closures — along with previously announced plans to shut regional offices in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Portland — will save about $16 million, officials said.