The U.S. Forest Service USFS

The national forests exist because the Interior Department lost a bureaucratic fight. Forest reserves set aside from the public domain in the 1890s were run by Interior's General Land Office while the foresters who knew how to manage them worked in Agriculture. Gifford Pinchot, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and the country's first trained forester, persuaded Congress to move the reserves to his bureau, and the Transfer Act of February 1, 1905, created the Forest Service with Pinchot as chief. Roosevelt then tripled the system before Congress stripped him of the power to add to it.

Today the Service manages 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands, 193 million acres across 43 states and Puerto Rico, an area larger than Texas. Its governing idea, inherited from Pinchot, is multiple use: the same forest supplies timber, grazing, minerals, watershed protection, wildlife habitat, and recreation. More than 150 million people visit the national forests each year, far more than visit the national parks, to hike, hunt, fish, ski, and camp, and the forests supply drinking water to one in five Americans. The agency also runs the country's largest forestry research program and assists state and private forest owners.

Fire has come to dominate the agency's work and budget. The Forest Service fields roughly ten thousand wildland firefighters and spends well over half of its budget on fire in bad years, a shift that has starved the forest management it was created to do. A century of suppressing every fire left forests dense with fuel, and a warming climate has lengthened the season. Congress separated fire suppression funding from the rest of the budget in 2018 to stop the agency from borrowing against itself. Thinning and prescribed burning across tens of millions of acres remain far behind schedule.

The Service is run by a Chief who is a career official rather than a Senate-confirmed appointee, a structure Pinchot designed to keep forestry out of politics and one that has survived. About 35,000 permanent and seasonal employees work in nine regions. Debates over logging levels, roadless areas, grazing fees, and whether the agency belongs in Agriculture or Interior have recurred for a century. Staff cuts in 2025 fell heavily on the seasonal and support workforce that supports the fire crews.