Let us be among the first to welcome the headquarters of the United States Forest Service to its new home in Salt Lake City.

We will be watching you.

The Trump administration, as part of its ongoing fascination with monkeying around with everything governmental, has announced that Smokey Bear’s agency will be moving from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City.

The official reason, which makes sense, is to get the people who run the Forest Service closer to the forests they serve. It will also create some good jobs hereabouts.

The nefarious reason, which is worthy of concern, is that it’s all a fiendish plan to pull forest experts away from the center of influence and to hope that many current employees, holders of decades of experience and institutional memory, will quit rather than pack up for the Wasatch Front.

That’s kind of what happened when Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management offices from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado, several years ago. It was a move that didn’t stick.

It is altogether possible that the idea is to disempower forest experts and make it easier to sell off or otherwise exploit the service’s acreages in ways that use it and lose it.

Of course, Utah is also home to many knowledgeable and active friends of the environment, folks who might also be happy to have the top bears of the Forest Service close to hand when making important decisions.

(And an office for Forest Service officials would be a much better use for that building in west Salt Lake City that the feds just bought for use as an ICE detention center. It certainly wouldn’t use as much water.)

A Forest Service based in Salt Lake City would indeed be closer to our forests. But it must not be allowed to forget that those forests are owned by all of the American people, even those who live way back East.

Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.