What the hell are they thinking!

The U.S. House of Representatives has zeroed out the Forest Service’s entire research budget for Fiscal 2026.

Forest Service research is not code for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or any other social construct currently dominating news cycles and social media.

 IT’S SCIENCE for heaven’s sake! The rock solid foundation that gives credence to the Forest Service’s management goals and objectives. The decadal forest plans.

NONE of the lofty goals described in the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act now winding its way through the U.S. Senate can be reached if President Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" aka the 2026 Appropriations Act does not include the Forest Service's research budget.

It is thus up to the Senate reinsert this budget in the 2026 Appropriations Act.

What they hell were House members thinking? The Forest Service can’t magically restore dying National Forests if there is no money for research that supports the Fix Our Forests Act. Do House members realize vetoed their own forestry bill?

Here’s a list of what the House majority defunded - and here’s hoping the Senate restores the Forest Service's research budget.

Gone: The Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, Wisconsin. A world class facility that includes machines that replicate pulping and papermaking processes on a pilot scale, others that test the compression and tensile strengths of various wood species and a nearby three-bedroom house filled with monitoring gear that tests wall and roof assemblies for mold and moisture levels, concrete foundations poured on the ground versus poured foundations that have vented crawl spaces. Also roofing systems made from tile, asphalt and cedar shingles and non-slip walkways on playgrounds to help handicapped kids get around more easily.  

Self-adhering postage stamps were invented at the Madison lab. With special clearance, you can visit the in-house lab that did it. It works under the watchful eyes of U.S. Treasury agents. We’ve hosted several tours at the Madison lab when the late Chris Risbrudt was running it, so we know its work very well.

Gone: The Madison lab’s satellite research facility on the University of Minnesota campus in St. Paul. Only its Forest Inventory and Analysis [FIA] group survives, albeit with a much smaller and still unknown budget.

Charles “Hobi” Perry is Program Manager for St Paul’s FIA shop. When we were working on our FIA: The Gold Standard report in 2019 he spent two days walking us through FIA’s entire interactive map system.

These dazzling maps are available from every Forest Service Research Station and its satellite facilities in the nation. https://www.fs.usda.gov/ivm/ You are a mouse click away from huge data sets that describe every forest condition on every forest in the nation. The insect, disease and wildfire maps will be of particular interest since reducing wildfire risk at the heart of the Fix Our Forests Act.

Here’s a more complete rundown of the research labs and satellite facilities:

Northern Research Station https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/nrs Madison, Wisconsin, 21 labs in 20 Midwest and Northeast states.

Pacific Northwest [PNW] Research Station, https://research.fs.usda.gov/pnw Portland, Oregon, 11 labs in Oregon, Washington and Alaska

Pacific Southwest Research Station, https://research.fs.usda.gov/psw, Albany, California, with satellite labs in Fresno, Redding, Riverside and Davis.

Rocky Mountain Research Station, https://research.fs.usda.gov/rmrs, Fort Collins, Colorado, and its Fire Science lab in Missoula, Montana https://research.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/labs/locations/missoula-fire-sciences-laboratory and its FIA lab at Riverdale, Utah https://research.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/labs/locations/riverdale-forestry-sciences-laboratory

Riverdale and Missoula have been Evergreen’s go-to labs for 30 years. The Fort Collins lab assembled the prioritized risk maps showing which National Forests in the West were the most at risk from insects, diseases and wildfire.

Southern Research Station, https://research.fs.usda.gov/srs, Asheville, North Carolina. SRS deals mainly with private forest landowners because federal forests in the 13 state region account for only 6 percent of all forestland in the South. Forest diseases, prescribed burning, T&E species and product marketing are big deals at SRS.

Gone: The annual U.S. Forest Service/National Woodland Owner survey completed annually by Brett Butler, an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Department of Environmental Conservation. (www.fia.fs.fed.us/nwos/)

We’ve learned a great deal about private landowner management objectives from Butler’s annual survey. When we last interviewed him he told us that the woodland owners that he randomly surveys name three interlocking management objectives they pursue: growing and harvesting trees, fish and wildlife habitat conservation, forest health and protecting the beauty of their Tree Farms.

These objectives might seem to be mutually exclusive but they aren’t where woodland owners are concerned. These are our nation’s truest forest stewards. Their management objectives are much different from those of publicly-traded Real Estate Investment Trusts that annually pass their profits to individual shareholders. REIT’s harvest their trees between ages 20 and 40.

Woodland owners typically hold their trees for much longer periods before harvesting. The time cost of money principles observed by REITS mean next to nothing to woodland owners. We have pictures of woodland loggers sitting on logs at lunchtime reading their Bibles.

There are close to 10 million woodland owners in the U.S. This link https://www.stateforesters.org/timber-assurance/legality/forest-ownership-statistics/ leads to a National Association of State Foresters website loaded with information concerning all of our nation’s forest owners, including those who participated in Butler’s 2021 survey.

One of the many things you will discover from reading this survey is that timber is a byproduct of wider woodland owner commitments to forest stewardship. They are huge consumers of the research legacies that Forest Service scientists have developed over the last 90 years.

Prerequisite to this body of work are more than 350,000 survey plots located on public and private land from coast to coast – each inspected every 10 years. The “how to” instruction check list that surveyors pack with them is 96 pages long.

Many of the surveys are done by biologists or silviculturists who live in the woods for days at a time, cook on the tailgates of their pickups and sleep under the stars.

Some of the survey plots date from the 1930s but the first plots were laid out in 1909 by Thornton Munger, a Yale Forestry School graduate. Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the Forest Service, sent him west in 1908 to investigate a ponderosa pine insect infestation in Central Oregon. He was subsequently named the first director of the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland.

Gone: The U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Lab in Missoula, Montana – one of only two like it in the world. Dick Rothermel, who developed the Rothermel Fire Speed Model, is rolling over in his grave.

His analyis of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in which 12 smoke jumpers and one ranger were killed is titled The Race that Couldn't be Won. You can find it on the Internet. It has probably saved hundreds of wildland firefighters from fiery deaths.

Gone: The Forest Service’s Priest River, Idaho Experimental Forest, founded in 1911. Its earliest scientists studied fire behavior and silvicultural practices but its present day research program includes forest ecology, tree genetics and diseases and forest hydrology.

Harry Gisborne led this lab in its early years. To understand the impacts of wind on wildfire, he built a wooden platform atop a tall fir tree at the station so he stand there and measure wind speeds and monitor shifting wind patterns.

Gisborne died with his boots on walking down the trail that led from the Mann Gulch Fire to the Missouri River. He had hiked to the site in November 1949 to test his theory of what caused strong wind gusts to push the wildfire up a grassy slope where it swept over 14 smoke jumpers. A heart attack killed Gisborne on the same trail that rescuers used to carry the charred remains of 13 who were killed by the fire He was 56.

Gone: Funding for every research station and project in the nation. Their websites describe research programs that the House has zeroed out of the big but not so beautiful bill.

Why is this history important and why did the Forest Service’s research labs fall into the cross hairs of flinty-eyed House budget hawks?  Because they see their actions as a cheap and easy way to polish their election year bonafides. What the hell are they thinking?

The next general election occurs Nov. 23, 2026. It will be a day of reckoning for the GOP. If Democrats retake the House, a common occurrence in midterm elections, there won’t be any more happy talk about “fixing” our National Forests because Democrats living in urban and metropolitan areas don’t much care what happens in the rural West where most federal forestland is located

Budget hawks beware. You are practicing your bonafides on the backs of millions of RED state voters. But the nearby county level map reveals there is no such thing as a red state. There are only pockets of blue floating in a sea of red that stretches from sea to shining sea.

The red areas hold more than 90 percent of the nation’s public forestland. The Forest Service’s research lab customers live there. Most vote.

 Voters in the blue pockets are the ones who are dying by the thousands from breathing carcinogenic wildfire smoke.

And the lesson? First, do no harm.