The Forest Service has the kind of problem that most of us wish we suffered from. It has more money than it can spend. Thanks to exceedingly generous appropriations by Congress to fix the Wildfire Crisis (sic), the agency is awash in cash.
So what could be the problem with too much money? Just hire the people and do the work, right? Ahh, but that’s not proven so easy. In 2006, President Bush’s Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns decided to implement “the most significant change to [Forest Service] business practices since its founding in 1905 by centralizing many of its business operations, including human capital management, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Creation of this Albuquerque Service Center is widely regarded as the single worst administrative decision in Forest Service history. Its stultifying and ineffective bureaucracy has made hiring all but impossible (not to mention payroll, travel, and just about everything else that should run smoothly behind the scenes but bollixes everything up when it doesn’t).
To the Forest Service’s credit, it appears to have recognized that it is simply incapable of solving its internal administrative problems. The problems are so baked-in that solving them would require razing the entire edifice and starting over (one more reason to move the Forest Service into Interior, where it can be parted out to the Park Service and BLM).
So instead of solving its morass, the Forest Service has decided to outsource the work of managing our national forests to the private sector. In an unprecedented move, the agency is shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars out the door to non-governmental organizations, states, and tribes to do the jobs formerly done by Forest Service workers. You can see the ripple effects in the Help Wanted ads of its grantees.
The nonprofit National Forest Foundation is advertising for an “Umpqua Reforestation Coordinator” to “coordinate the advancement of reforestation activities on the Umpqua National Forest.” This NFF employee will work in the Forest Service’s office doing tasks formerly done by the Forest Service’s own workers.
NFF is now also carrying out the on-the-ground management of thinning, road maintenance, noxious weed control, and other day-to-day tasks on the Tahoe National Forest, at a cost of $117 million “to treat over 21,000 acres and produce over 55 million board feet of timber from forest thinning treatments.” NFF also gets to keep whatever proceeds it can earn from selling this timber.
NFF isn’t the only private corporation to assume the Forest Service’s work. The National Wild Turkey Federation, also a nonprofit, received $50 million to cut trees, set fires, and “promote commercial use of forest products, including transporting wood fiber from over-supplied areas to areas where it can be used,” quoting from the Forest Service press release. Trout Unlimited got $40 million “to improve watersheds on national forests and grasslands.”
Of course, outsourcing happens all the time in every sector of our society. Sometimes an outside specialist, contractor, or consultant is just what an organization needs to get a task done better or at less cost. But that’s not what’s going on here. This outsourcing is happening because the Forest Service has become incapable of doing anything other than shovel tax dollars out the door to someone who can do the work. Now that this camel’s nose is under the Forest Service tent, there will be no going back.
