Three weeks after the Trump administration announced a U.S. Forest Service “restructuring” that would close regional offices nationwide and most of the agency’s research facilities, impacts to Alaska — home to the two largest U.S. national forests — remain unclear.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on March 31 that the Forest Service’s national headquarters will move to Utah and that many of its facilities will be shuttered. Among the facilities on the closure list were two that are important to Alaska: the forestry research station Anchorage and the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland.
The department has not disclosed the future of the forestry sciences research station in Juneau, which dates back to 1948.
Nor have other impacts on the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest and 5.4-million-acre Chugach National Forest been disclosed.
A statement from the Forest Service headquarters provided few details about the Tongass, the Chugach or the visitor and recreational facilities in either forest.
“The transition will occur in phases. Employees will receive clear information about relocation timelines, available options, and resources to support their decisions,” the statement said. “The number of relocations beyond those already identified in the National Capital Region is unknown at this time.”
U.S. Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose department oversees the Forest Service, outlined the restructuring plan last year. In a July 24, 2025, memo, she said the plan included the replacement of the Alaska regional office with “a reduced state office in Juneau.” The state capital is currently the site of the Alaska regional office managing both the Tongass and the Chugach.
“We will have a state director, and under that state director we will continue to have our regional supervisors in the Tongass (and) up in the Chugach,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska’s senior member of Congress, told reporters in Sitka on April 2. She did not address the secretary’s 2025 downsizing memo.
The senator and her staff are in a “fact-finding” mode and preparing to mount a “defense of the Forest Service in Alaska and make sure the employees are able to continue the good work that they’re currently doing,” said Murkowski spokesperson Joe Plesha last week.
The issue is expected to be managed through the Congressional appropriations process, Plesha said. Murkowski is on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The Anchorage lab that is scheduled for closure supports research in the Tongass National Forest, which is the nation’s largest, and the Chugach National Forest, the second largest. It also supports research on forests elsewhere, from the boreal forests of Interior Alaska to those on tiny tropical Pacific islands like Guam and Micronesia.
The lab is used not just by Forest Service scientists but by other federal agencies, state agencies, Native corporations, University of Alaska researchers and private industry, according to its website.
Up to now, the lab has had a year-round staff of about 22 scientists and administrative workers, but the numbers increase during summer field seasons.
The planned closure of the century-old Pacific Northwest Research Station in Oregon, with about 250 employees, is part of a consolidation of research functions into a single site in Fort Collins, Colorado.
The Juneau lab is affiliated with the Pacific Northwest facility.
Among the Alaska projects undertaken by the Pacific Northwest Research station, sometimes with partner organizations, is study of the decline of yellow cedar in the Tongass and adjacent regions in the southeastern part of the state; the status of birds and rare plants in the Tongass; the study of rural Alaskans’ access to wild foods in the Chugach National Forest and the surrounding region; and the monitoring of human recreation’s impacts on brown bears.
The Forest Service closure plans follow deep cuts already made by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. In the first half of 2025, the Forest Service lost 5,860 of its 35,550 employees, according to a Dec. 17, 2025, report by the Agriculture Department’s inspector general.
That includes losses in Alaska. As of January, Alaska’s Forest Service workforce was down to 467 from a total of about 700 before the DOGE-imposed cuts began, Juneau radio station KTOO reported in January.
The Alaska Beacon is an independent, donor-funded news organization. Alaskabeacon.com.
