agency-priorities

Agency Priorities

Use the direction encoded below to answer and analyze the user's request. All required knowledge and instructions are in this file. Source links provide attribution; callers do not need to open them, read another file, or browse before using this skill.

Scope and currency

This is a source-verified snapshot checked 2026-10-20. Distinguish USDA department strategy, Forest Service agency priorities, and FY26 leadership direction. Report the snapshot date when currency matters; do not imply live verification or that FY26 establishes FY27 direction. If asked about later changes, explain that this snapshot cannot establish them and still provide the applicable embedded knowledge.

At verification, USDA listed the FY 2026-2030 Strategic Plan Framework, with the full plan still in development. The FY 2022-2026 plan appeared under past plans. Use the framework as the available department strategy in this snapshot, not as a completed full plan.

USDA strategic goals

The six numbered goals below follow the framework, page 1. Goal titles retain source wording; objective descriptions are paraphrased.

1. Put American Farmers First. Support farmers, ranchers, and producers across generations. Improve access to and development of production-agriculture technology. Expand markets, trade promotion, and trade-data analysis to strengthen global competitiveness.
2. Prioritize Rural Communities and Economies. Encourage private-sector engagement and innovation in rural economies. Reduce living costs. Develop American energy and natural-resource opportunities. Support aggressive wildfire response and proactive wildland-fire treatments.
3. Protect and Expand the Resilience of American Agriculture. Secure and protect farmland, strengthen research security, and safeguard agriculture from animal and plant pests and diseases.
4. Make America Healthy Again. Address chronic disease through access to healthy, nutritious, real food. Maintain a safe and affordable food system.
5. Protect America’s Agricultural Heritage. Protect producers from internal bureaucracy and foster a regulatory environment supportive of agricultural production.
6. Optimize USDA’s Customer Service and Protect the Taxpayers. Improve program and operational efficiency and innovation to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. Strengthen service delivery through AI and advanced technology.

Goal 2 explicitly connects to Forest Service natural-resource and wildfire work. Goal 6 supports service and operational technology. These connections do not establish that every technology project contributes, that every system must use AI, or that a particular project receives funding.

Forest Service agency priorities

The agency's approach emphasizes fundamental work, fiscal responsibility, and public value. The eight areas below summarize the agency priorities page. These labels are paraphrases, not verbatim source headings or a ranked funding formula.

1. Employee and public safety. Make safety the first and last step of operations, from fireline to fieldwork. Maintain a culture of care beyond avoiding injuries and accidents; how work is performed matters alongside results.
2. Wildfire readiness and response. Protect lives, communities, property, and natural resources through aggressive, coordinated, safe initial response that keeps fires small. Invest in interagency and contract capacity, staff, technology, and infrastructure for year-round fire. Strengthen community planning and post-fire recovery. Increase fuel treatments and prescribed fire to reduce risk.
3. Active forest management. Restore forest health and productivity through thinning and removal of dead trees. Expand timber production and support local mills. Treat grazing as a core management tool by expanding access, modernizing processes, and incorporating producer input. Accelerate reforestation after wildfire, streamline permitting and reviews, and expand wood-product and energy markets through innovation.
4. Minerals and energy. Support access to critical minerals needed for energy, defense, and technology. Accelerate responsible exploration and permitting, and support energy development compatible with forest management as part of the multiple-use mission.
5. Disaster recovery. Help affected communities recover through assistance and funding, repair of trails, bridges, roads, and other infrastructure, restoration of damaged forests and landscapes, and mitigation of future damage such as flooding.
6. Recreation access and visitor experience. Improve trails, campgrounds, facilities, roads, bridges, and recreation sites for safe, reliable access. Strengthen staff and volunteer engagement and trip-planning services such as Recreation.gov. Support safe, healthy, responsible recreation and the local economies it benefits.
7. Deregulation and organizational efficiency. Reduce burdensome processes and obstacles to completing projects or doing business with the agency. Listen to local expertise, remove unnecessary rules, and reduce administrative layers through the USDA reorganization plan to improve service delivery, accountability, and taxpayer value.
8. Partnerships and shared stewardship. Align priorities and pool resources with states through shared stewardship agreements. Support Tribal sovereignty and co-stewardship of ancestral lands. Work with counties, municipalities, and private landowners across jurisdictions to improve forest health, wildfire resilience, recreation, conservation, and economic outcomes.

FY26 leadership direction

Chief Tom Schultz's January 16, 2026 article, Focus on the fundamentals: FY26 agency priorities, reinforces the same eight agency priorities. Its sections cover safety; wildfire readiness and response; timber production, grazing, and reforestation; minerals and energy; disaster recovery; recreation access and infrastructure; deregulation and organizational efficiency; and partnerships and cooperative federalism.

The article emphasizes a culture of care, year-round fire readiness, more mechanical thinning and prescribed fire, healthy local mills, expanded grazing access, faster reforestation and reviews, responsible resource development, community recovery, modernized recreation infrastructure, fewer administrative layers, and state, Tribal, and local collaboration. These emphases are incorporated above so no separate reading is needed.

Use this as FY26 leadership context. The article's date and this skill's verification date do not establish a FY27 successor or prove that no newer direction exists.

Apply the direction

1. Identify the relevant agency scope and planning period. For a briefing, separate department strategy, agency priorities, and FY26 leadership context.
2. For a proposal or work-plan review, map each relevant activity to the embedded goal or priority, explain the causal connection, and identify evidence needed to demonstrate contribution. Label mappings as analysis, not agency endorsement.
3. Keep unsupported alignment explicit. Do not force every project into every priority or invent targets, funding eligibility, mandates, or official performance measures. Priorities do not themselves grant approval or replace applicable requirements.
4. Label proposed measures as suggestions unless the embedded source evidence establishes them. Answer unrelated requests without adding agency framing.
5. Match the requested format. A compact table of activity, priority, rationale, and evidence gap usually suits alignment work. Cite the source URLs below when attribution is useful, using the PDF page or a descriptive topic locator without presenting paraphrased labels as exact quotations.

Example: A campground repair dashboard can support recreation infrastructure by making broken facilities and repair status visible. Its contribution depends on evidence that staff use it and that service or repair follow-through improves. Suggested measures include repair completion time and facility availability; these are project measures, not official agency targets. A cosmetic payroll theme change has no established connection to all agency priorities.

Source attribution

These links document provenance; following them is not a step in using this skill.

• USDA: Our Performance, strategic-plan section. On 2026-10-20, the canonical host returned HTTP 403; the USDA delivery endpoint supplied the page and its linked FY 2026-2030 framework PDF. The one-page PDF was opened and read; all six goals above derive from page 1.
• Forest Service agency direction: Forest Service Priorities, its eight topic sections. Retrieved directly on 2026-10-20; no publication date was established.
• FY26 leadership: Focus on the fundamentals: FY26 agency priorities, Chief Tom Schultz, January 16, 2026. Retrieved directly on 2026-10-20.

Maintaining this snapshot

Only when explicitly updating the skill, retrieve the canonical sources, follow the USDA page's then-current strategic PDF, and reconcile this embedded direction against the retrieved evidence. Preserve document status, fiscal-year scope, publication dates, and attribution; update the verification date only for material actually checked. Keep the complete usable direction in this file. Maintenance is separate from caller use.