Wildfire season is weeks away.
The West is in record drought.
And the Trump administration just announced it is shutting down 57 of the 77 Forest Service research stations that tell us how bad it is going to get and what to do about it.
We already know how this ends.
When Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management out of Washington in his first term, 87 percent of the staff quit rather than relocate. The same thing is happening here. Scientists are not going to uproot their families and abandon university partnerships. They are going to leave.
And when they leave, decades of data, research, and institutional knowledge walk out the door with them.
The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres. It lost nearly 6,000 employees to DOGE cuts in just the first half of last year. Now it is gutting the research operation that tells land managers what is actually happening to those forests in real time.
California alone is losing six research facilities, right before fire season.
There is no version of this that makes the forests safer, the science stronger, or the taxpayer better off.
nytimes.com/2026/04/03/clima…