DOGE - Pins and Needles

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Reader warning: Liberal use of a certain swear phrase - to emphasize the collective response of frustration and indignation with the current state of affairs.

Is it just me, or is the whole world on pins and needles?

With one exception, everyone I work with looks like deer in headlights. Being 81, I do my damndest to never look at myself in a mirror, so it's possible that I also look like deer in headlights - but don't know it.

The fast moving Trump Train has most of us on pins and needles - especially the DOGE effort to downsize the federal government without much thought about who gets pitched off the train.

I am reminded of Gene Wilder's one-word of indignation in the 1976 movie, Silver Streak, every time he fell or was pushed from the train.

"Son-of-a-bitch!"

DOGE wants to eliminate thousands of Forest Service jobs.

Jim: "Son-of-a-bitch!"

A country newspaper reporter we know:

"Trump wants to increase the federal timber sale program by millions of board feet annually but DOGE is firing so many Forest Service employees there won't be anyone left to do the work."

The President: Son-of-a-bitch!

The deer in headlights in unison: "Son-of-a-bitch!"

DOGE's pickax approach to what it euphemistically calls "RIF" - the abbreviation for Reduction in Force - looks like a cheap way for the President to plumb the depths of public opinion.

But it is a fool's errand.

The Left yells: "Son-of-a-bitch!"

The Right yells: "Son-of-a-bitch!"

The President moistens his index finger, sticks it into the political wind and says:

"Yup, that's about right."

How else to explain federal employees being fired and rehired in the same week, sometimes in the same day?

I understand it that this is President Trump's style, but forests live and die on a much longer time schedule.

Members of the House and Senate and the Forest Service have an enormous amount of work to do to put the agency's derailed train back on the tracks.

New Forest Service Chief, Tom Schulz, is definitely the right person in the right place at the right time. We know him well from his Idaho and Montana days.

We don't know his boss - Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins - but we've heard good things about her. She gave a terrific interview to the Wall Street Journal's 3.7 million digital readers a couple of weeks ago.

When was the last time we heard a Secretary of Agriculture say this:

"My broader mission is the restoration of rural America."

Never.

Recently, I had an email note last week from "The Voice of Reason." That would be my long time colleague, Michael Rains. He did not say, "Son-of-a-bitch!" but he did share his frustration with the pickax approach DOGE has taken to the Forest Service.

Michael's 50-year Forest Service career gives him an inside-out perspective few can claim. He is a former Deputy Chief and the author of a quite remarkable 2014 think-piece titled - A Forest Service Vision During the Arthropocene.

I share Michael's DOGE concerns - and his frustrations - so we're republishing his latest Call to Action from last November. His years of devotion to The Call offer an easily understood explanation of the cause and effect relationship between the slow motion collapse of federal forest management and the dramatic increase in the frequency, size and destructive power of the West's wildfire pandemic.

After reading this and its supporting documents, we hope you will take a moment to call or email your Congressman and your U.S. Senators and urge their support for the Fix Our Forests Act and, more broadly, what Tom Schultz, Brooke Rollins and their teams are trying to do to help breathe new life into the West's National Forests and their rural communities.

There are DOZENS of Forest Service websites that explain, document and illustrate wildfire risk in the West, which has us wondering who the hell is doing DOGE's research.

The interactive maps developed by the Property and Environment Research Center [PERC] in Bozeman, Montana are very good because the maps include links to lots of supporting data.

But the Forest Health Fuels Emergency Lands map below is straight out of Forest Service's Washington Office is the best. It was assembled from an earlier Rocky Mountain Research Station study that prioritized areas in the West that urgently needed treatments to reduce wildfire risks.

Did anyone from DOGE ask about maps?

Did anyone read the Workforce Capacity study prepared in 2019 by the National Association of Forest Service Retirees - but ignored by the previous Secretary of Agriculture?
This is the best roadmap DOGE could ever hope to find.

Did the pickax crowd notice this stuff?

Bruce Westerland, the only forester in Congress and Chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, certainly noticed. His Fix Our Forests Act passed in the House on a bi-partisan 213-204 vote. The fact that anyone would vote against H.R. 471 attests to the death grip radical environmentalists have on members of Congress. How unfortunate that they didn't consult the Citizens' Climate Lobby before voting.

Here are the links to Fix Our Forests and the Citizens' Climate Lobby. Tons of information that should answer all of your questions.

Fix Our Forests Act | House Committee on Natural Resources

This comprehensive, bipartisan legislation restores forest health, increases resiliency to catastrophic wildfires, and protects communities by expediting environmental analyses, reducing frivolous lawsuits, and increasi…

House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman

Supporting the Fix Our Forests Act

Learn about the Fix Our Forests Act, a bipartisan bill that has passed the House of Representatives and is under consideration in the Senate.

Citizens' Climate LobbyDana Nuccitelli

Last but very significant are the Forest Service's marching orders from Chris French, the agency's Deputy Chief.

We asked one of our Evergreen Foundation Directors - a retired Forest Service Line Officer - what he thought of what French wrote. He was very impressed but he said implementation will take longer than French's timelines and he hopes the agency will focus on the low hanging fruit. That would be the 90 million National Forest acres in the West that are dying - or dead.

This is why the Chief Schultz needs to name an Advisory Board composed of retirees he trusts who bring essential skill sets to the agency's last ditch effort to reinvent itself before it falls off a cliff.