Forest Service Reorganization Is Illegal. USDA Lawyer Told Them to Do It Anyway.

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Somewhere inside the US Department of Agriculture, there’s a memo.

It was produced by the USDA’s Office of General Counsel. It reviews the appropriations laws that Congress passed and the president signed, laws that explicitly prohibit the reorganization of the Forest Service without advance congressional approval. And it instructs the agency to treat those laws as unconstitutional and proceed with the reorganization anyway.

Not through a court challenge. Not through litigation. Not through any process that involves a judge, a hearing, or public scrutiny. Through an internal legal directive that tells federal employees to file the required notice with Congress and then act as if the law doesn’t exist.

The dismantling that’s happening right now — as scientists pack their offices, regional foresters are told their jobs no longer exist, and 193 million acres of American public land lose the institutional architecture that has managed them for over a century — is proceeding in open, knowing, documented defiance of federal law.

And the man who produced that directive was installed for exactly this purpose. But he didn’t act alone. And he didn’t do it for the first time.

They Already Got Away With It Once

In the spring of 2019, the USDA Office of General Counsel was run by a man named Stephen Vaden. Working under him was his deputy, Tyler Clarkson.

Congress had included language in the appropriations bill that year prohibiting the USDA from spending money to relocate offices or employees without advance approval from the appropriations committees. The language was clear. The intent was unmistakable. And the two men in charge of the USDA’s legal shop had a problem: The administration wanted to relocate two research agencies, the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, from Washington to Kansas City. Congress said no.

So Vaden wrote a legal memorandum. He cited INS v. Chadha, a 1983 Supreme Court case where the justices struck down a procedure that allowed one chamber of Congress to override an executive decision after the fact — a so-called “legislative veto.” The case involved immigration. It had nothing to do with how Congress attaches conditions to the money it appropriates. But Vaden took the ruling and stretched it to fit his needs. He declared the approval requirement unconstitutional and instructed the department to proceed without permission.

When the USDA inspector general investigated and concluded the relocations were illegal, Vaden’s response was a single sentence that should have ended his career in public service: “USDA is not required to abide by unconstitutional laws.”

The Government Accountability Office confirmed the relocations violated federal law. It didn’t matter. The agencies were moved. Seventy-five percent of the affected staff left rather than uproot their lives. Dozens of critical research projects on veterans’ health, the opioid epidemic, and food safety were delayed or abandoned. Millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted. The agencies never recovered.

Vaden and Clarkson had proven their concept. Defy Congress. Cite Chadha. Call the law unconstitutional. Move fast enough that the damage is done before anyone can stop you. Then dare Congress to do something about it.

Congress did nothing.

The Band Gets Back Together

In December 2024, Donald Trump announced he would nominate Stephen Vaden, the man who told the inspector general that the USDA doesn’t have to follow the law, to be deputy secretary of agriculture. The number two at the USDA. The person who would oversee day-to-day operations and, as it turned out, the person Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins would put in charge of the most sweeping agency dismantling in modern history.

To get him, Trump pulled Vaden off a lifetime federal judgeship on the US Court of International Trade. A lifetime appointment, traded for a political position. That’s how badly they wanted him back.

Vaden has been a Federalist Society member since 2005 — the conservative legal network that has served as the pipeline for virtually every major judicial and legal appointment in Republican administrations for decades. Its core constitutional project is concentrating power in the executive branch and stripping Congress of the ability to check it. Vaden didn’t just attend their events. He served on the Administrative Law and Regulation Practice Group executive committee — the working group dedicated to the exact legal theories he’d later use to overrule Congress.

At his confirmation hearing in April 2025, sitting in front of the senators who would vote on his nomination, Vaden was asked directly whether he would commit to working with Congress on any reorganizations. His answer:

We carry out the will of Congress. USDA has no independent authority separate from Congress. It is not established by the Constitution; it is a creature of statute.

Remember those words. You’re going to need them.

The Senate confirmed Vaden on June 10, 2025, on a party-line vote of 48–45.

Seven weeks later, on July 24, Rollins signed the memorandum laying out the blueprint for the Forest Service dismantling.

Seven days after that, on July 31, the Senate confirmed Tyler Clarkson, Vaden’s former deputy during the 2019 Kansas City relocation, as USDA general counsel. The agency’s top lawyer. The same office Vaden ran when he wrote the memo declaring congressional law unconstitutional. Clarkson was confirmed on a strict party-line vote of 52–45. Every Democrat voted no.

Clarkson was president of the Federalist Society chapter at the University of Virginia School of Law. Between administrations, he worked at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House’s nerve center for deregulation, on “regulatory enforcement reform.” Then he went to the private sector. Then the administration brought him back.

And Rollins told us why. At Clarkson’s confirmation, she said he “will serve a critical role in implementing USDA’s farmer first reorganization.”

That’s not what you say about a lawyer you hired to provide departmental legal advice. That’s what you say about a lawyer you hired to remove legal obstacles. The secretary of agriculture told the American public that the general counsel’s job was to implement the reorganization — not to evaluate whether it was legal, but to make it happen.

And that’s exactly what he did.

The Laws They Were Brought Back to Break

While Vaden and Clarkson were being installed, Congress was writing the laws they would be asked to circumvent.

In November 2025, Congress passed the agriculture appropriations bill. Section 716 lists six things the secretary of agriculture cannot do without written approval from the appropriations committees, 30 days in advance. Two of them are “relocates an office or employees” and “reorganizes offices, programs, or activities.”

You want to relocate an office, you need Congress to sign off. You want to reorganize a program, you need Congress to sign off. You cannot spend a dollar on either without advance written approval from the appropriations committees of both chambers.

Section 716 also prohibits creating any new organizational entity with five or more people without committee approval. The administration is creating 15 new state director offices. Every single one triggers this provision on its own.

And the law includes a standstill clause: During the 30-day notification period, the secretary cannot take any action to begin implementation and cannot make any public announcement “in any form.” The administration rolled the reorganization out with a press release, a fact sheet, a memo from the chief to all employees, and a dedicated webpage on fs.usda.gov. The standstill was blown the moment they hit publish.

Two months later, in January 2026, Congress passed the interior appropriations bill, the law that actually writes the checks for the Forest Service. Section 421 says none of those funds can be reprogrammed without advance notification and approval from the appropriations committees.

And the explanatory statement of Section 421 defines what counts as a “reprogramming” with extraordinary precision. It covers “reorganizations, workforce restructure, reshaping, transfer of functions.” The threshold is 10 staff members. And Congress included a phrase that destroys the administration’s most obvious defense: The guidelines apply “even without a change in funding.” They can’t argue this isn’t a reprogramming because the budget lines stayed the same. Congress saw that coming and killed it.

Two laws. Both signed by the president. Both prohibiting exactly what the administration announced on March 31. Both requiring advance approval that was never obtained.

And these aren’t partisan documents. They’re bipartisan appropriations bills that passed with overwhelming Republican support. The interior-environment package cleared the Senate 82–15. Republican committee chairs helped shape the restriction language. Republican appropriators approved it. This is a Republican Congress telling a Republican president’s own agency: You do not have permission to do this.

The president signed those words into law. And the two men he installed at the USDA told the agency to ignore them.

The Legal Fiction

The argument Clarkson’s office is using comes directly from the Federalist Society’s intellectual project: the unitary executive doctrine. The theory goes like this: Article II vests all executive power in the president, and therefore Congress cannot condition executive action on committee approval because it amounts to a “legislative veto.” The citation is INS v. Chadha, the same case Vaden cited in 2019.

The problem is that Chadha was about something completely different. In that case, one chamber of Congress tried to override an executive decision on its own — no vote in the other chamber, no presidential signature. The Court said that’s not how lawmaking works. Fair enough. But Sections 421 and 716 aren’t one chamber acting alone. They’re laws. They passed both chambers. The president signed them. They’re the process the Chadha ruling said you have to follow. Clarkson’s argument is that the Constitution prohibits Congress from attaching conditions to the money it appropriates — which is like saying Congress has the power of the purse but isn’t allowed to hold the strings.

If Clarkson’s reasoning holds, it doesn’t just void these two parts of a spending bill. It voids every appropriations rider, every reprogramming restriction, every spending condition Congress has ever attached to any bill. The power of the purse becomes a suggestion. The constitutional architecture that gives the Legislature control over federal spending completely collapses.

Vaden got away with it in 2019 because Congress chose not to fight. Clarkson is getting away with it now for the same reason.

The Full Cast

Vaden and Clarkson are the architects. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you the full picture of this cast of crooks at USDA.

The Forest Service chief is Tom Schultz. A former logging industry executive. The man now overseeing the agency that manages 193 million acres of public forest was, until recently, in the business of cutting them down. Prior to Schultz no Forest Service chief had ever been chosen from outside the agency.

Schultz reports to Michael Boren at the USDA, the undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment, the highest civilian authority over the Forest Service. Boren is a billionaire Idaho rancher, co-founder of Clearwater Analytics, and Trump megadonor with zero prior government experience. He was confirmed on a party-line vote with every Democrat voting against him.

Boren’s relationship with the Forest Service, prior to being handed authority over it, consisted primarily of fighting it. The agency accused a company he controlled of building an unauthorized cabin on national forest land. Federal officials documented an unauthorized diversion of a geothermal stream from public land onto his private ranch. He built a private airstrip in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, on land Congress designated as nationally significant, over the objections of hundreds of his neighbors. When the Blaine County Commission tried to restrict the project, Boren sued his critics, including a sitting county commissioner and Olympic athlete Dick Fosbury, for defamation. The suits were dismissed. The message wasn’t.

At his confirmation hearing, Boren dismissed these conflicts as “disagreements” and called the Forest Service “very aggressive.” Before he even arrived at the USDA, the administration parked him at the Interior Department, where Secretary Doug Burgum gave him authority to reorganize and fire staff across Interior’s agencies. The Center for Western Priorities noted he had “no relevant experience managing public lands” but was handed “free rein to reorganize and fire thousands more employees.” He was sworn in at the USDA on January 22, 2026, two months before the Forest Service reorganization was announced.

And then there’s the White House connection. The USDA’s White House liaison, the conduit between the department and the West Wing, is Dominic Restuccia. His previous job: legislative assistant to Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. Yes, that Mike Lee. The man who slithers land transfer amendments into must-pass bills the way pickpockets work a crowd. The one whose state is suing to seize 18.5 million acres of federal land, and whose governor celebrated the Forest Service headquarters move to Salt Lake City as “a big win for Utah.”

The Forest Service’s official response (which continues to change) to our original reporting on the dismantling said land transfer “has never been discussed.” Not much of a denial right? Sounds more like the answer of someone who isn’t ready to announce it yet, not someone who hasn’t thought about it. Especially when your White House liaison came directly from the office of the senator who has made stealing public lands his life’s work.

A logging executive as chief. A billionaire crook as his boss. A Federalist Society lawyer producing memos that declare the law unconstitutional. The architect of the last illegal USDA reorganization running the operation. And Mike Lee’s former staffer as the conduit to the White House.

Every one of them was installed for exactly this purpose.

How This Can Be Stopped

Last summer, the Supreme Court made it harder.

In Trump v. CASA, the court’s conservative majority ruled 6–3 that federal courts lack authority to issue nationwide injunctions, the kind of sweeping court orders that had been used dozens of times to block this administration’s executive actions. Under the new rule, a court can only protect the specific plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit, not everyone affected by the policy.

That means no single judge can freeze the Forest Service reorganization for the whole agency with a stroke of a pen. The administration designed this dismantling knowing that the legal backstop had been removed.

But the door isn’t shut. The court explicitly left open two paths. The first is class-wide injunctive relief — if a union or organization files suit on behalf of its members and gets the class certified, the court can protect the entire class. The National Federation of Federal Employees represents 20,000 Forest Service workers. There’s your class. The second is narrower but potent: If a court finds that the only way to make the plaintiffs whole is to stop the entire policy, it can do exactly that with what amounts to a nationwide injunction.

The merits aren’t a close call. The text of the law is unambiguous. The reorganization triggers every provision of both laws. The required approval was not obtained. And the administration’s own lawyers have internally documented both the existence of the requirement and their decision to treat it as void. That’s not a case where the government can claim ignorance or good-faith compliance. It’s an admission.

The harm is irreparable, and we have the proof, because we’ve watched this happen before. When the Bureau of Land Management was relocated to Grand Junction, CO, 87 percent of affected staff left. Three people showed up. The Biden administration spent years trying to reverse the damage and never fully succeeded. That’s the textbook definition of irreparable harm: damage that can’t be undone by a later court order, no matter how favorable.

A lawsuit needs to happen now. Every day without a filing is another day of scientists packing boxes, regional offices going dark, and an agency being destroyed in violation of the laws that fund it.

Where Is Congress?

These are Congress’s own laws. The Appropriations Committee wrote Section 716 and Section 421. They defined what a reorganization is. They set the threshold. They required approval. They included a standstill clause. They did this months ago, knowing the Forest Service reorganization was coming, because the Rollins memo had been public since July 2025 and the Senate had already held hearings on it.

And now the administration is executing that reorganization in open defiance of the provisions Congress wrote to prevent it, with the USDA’s lawyers declaring those provisions unconstitutional by internal memo.

Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, said it best in a recent interview with The Guardian:

Trump’s moves are illegal, because this kind of activity was explicitly prohibited in fiscal year 2026 appropriations. The Republican Congress is allowing the White House to break the law and violate the constitution, without so much as a peep from our big, brave, so-called freedom-seeking Republicans. They won’t even uphold their own oaths to support and defend the constitution from tyranny.

This is a direct challenge to Article I of the Constitution. To the power of the purse. To the foundational principle that Congress controls how federal money is spent. If the executive branch can void an appropriations condition by memo, then every rider in every bill is unenforceable. Every condition the president signs into law can be erased the next morning by the department that doesn’t want to follow it.

Where are the Appropriations Committee chairs who wrote these laws? Where are the senators and representatives who voted for them? Where is the Republican leadership that passed these provisions and is now watching the White House tear them up?

What You Can Do

Call your senators. Both of them. Tell them the Forest Service reorganization is proceeding without the congressional approval required by Section 716 of the Agriculture Appropriations Act and Section 421 of the Interior Appropriations Act. Use those numbers. Say them out loud. Staffers write down what they don’t recognize, and these are the provisions their bosses voted for.

If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: You voted for a law that requires the USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. The USDA didn’t get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?

If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: The legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is the USDA’s general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?

Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.

Jim Pattiz is an award-winning filmmaker and conservationist who serves as the co-founder of More Than Just Parks. Jim has spent his career traveling to America’s most wild & precious spaces telling the stories of public lands. This story has been shared with the author’s permission.