The good, the bad and the ugly

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Four members of our Evergreen Foundation Board of Directors are U.S. Forest Service retirees.

They all held high level field positions within the agency for more than 40 years, so when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins unveiled the Trump Administration’s plan for reorganizing the Forest Service we asked for their evaluation. 

Without straying too far into the weeds, here’s a sampling:

·       The same things that have plagued the agency for years will now escalate exponentially.

·       There are inconsistencies between unit organizational structure and there is no strong focused effort to address public service or natural resource management.

·       It’s essential that we get in front of catastrophic wildfires. Building a bigger fire department isn’t going to do it. What will, is a faster response time using smoke jumpers, Heli tack crews, and pre-positioning the correct aviation assets across the rural West.

·       Working at the field level with no experience and no guidance and no regional offices constitutes the perfect storm.

·       The Administration asked for our advice but didn’t listen. It was all lip service. Our natural resources are going to pay dearly. So will the public, especially in rural timber communities that have borne the brunt of the wildfire pandemic and the loss of social, environmental and economic cohesiveness.

·       The agency's mission and objectives need to change drastically but you do not trade the organizational design and makeup - for a blank slate. That would be like destroying the very fabric of our military. You fix it. You don’t blow it up - and you don’t walk away.

·       We are leaving 193 million acres in 154 National Forests to their own devices.  It’s a prescription for ecological disaster.

·       The Forest Service is a very professional organization. It has been plagued by political interference and loss of budget for 25 years. The lack of experience, training and leadership is killing the agency.

·       The Forest Service is suffering from a lack of oversight and an abundance of ideologically ignorant ideas implemented by political appointees. This has been exacerbated by a string of weak Presidents and a bloated bureaucracy. In addition, the agency has allowed bad actors to misuse funding and the intent of DEI.

·       Trump and DOGE took a pickaxe to things that needed a scalpel. The President isn’t getting the experienced advice he needs.

We’re far enough into the weeds now...you get the picture.

We don’t know a single Forest Service retiree who is comfortable with the Trump reorganization plan.

Some have offered constructive alternatives, among them our own Phil Aune.

Aune believes the time has come to create a Department of Natural Resources – a cabinet level office with its own Secretary. DNR would oversee the Forest Service and the major agencies within the Department of the Interior. Interior would be absorbed by DNR and lose its Secretary.

“I believe that lumping ecologically common National Forests into Provinces for planning and accountability is a useful way to reorganize,” Aune wrote in an email note last week. “The key would be to make sure the Ranger Districts are given full authority to manage their individual districts under the Provincial Plans.”

Follow this link to Rebuilding the Forest Service: Part 2 our January 2025 interview with Aune.

Aune fears that there are too few people working on Trump’s reorganization plan who have on-the-ground experience managing federal or state natural resources.

“We may be falling into the trap of reorganizing for reorganization’s sake without clear organizational objectives.”

Our retiree directors are all tightly focused on mission and objectives.

It was the key to their success for a combined 167 years.
It is why they oppose phasing out nine regional offices with no thought about the ramifications or what comes next.

Evergreen has been advocating for creating ecoregions with common natural characteristics for years.

Opponents – mainly timber associations - have argued for the status quo, believing that the devil you know is better than a new devil you don’t know.

How's that working out?

We believe the responsibility for managing and protecting the nation’s 193 million acre Federal Forest Estate rises to the Cabinet level.

The Forest Service was part of the Cabinet level Department of the Interior until 1905. Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the Forest Service, convinced President Teddy Roosevelt that the newly minted Forest Service should be moved to the Department of Agriculture because he believed the Department of the Interior was corrupt.

TR was happy to oblige. The Forest Service lost its Cabinet level cache on February 1, 1905, the day the Transfer Act required moving 63 million acres of forest land from Interior’s General Land Office to Agriculture and the Forest Service.

Interior’s General Land Office was corrupt but much has changed over the last 120 years. The Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture now oversee about 170,000 federal employees working in some 6,900 locations!

The Forest Service and its 35,000 employees are lost in the fog of conflicting rules and regulations that have made it impossible for the agency to fulfill its stated mission:
"To sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations." 

It isn’t working. Not even close. It's too wordy - and words mean things.

The old Forest Service motto was easily understood:
"Caring for the Land and Serving People."

Now for a little good news:

At this writing, Forest Service Research and Development budgets have been rescued from the chopping block - including the Missoula Fire Science Lab, the Madison lab, the four major Forest Inventory and Analysis stations and their satellite offices.

It’s also good news that the House and Senate aren’t interested in creating a separate Forest Service Fire Department. The agency already oversees the largest fire department in the world.

There is no evidence that a Forest Service Fire Department as stand-alone organization will make things better - and it may well make things worse. We do know that the Biden era "managed fire for ecological benefit" has made things worse. It has been a colossal failure. Hundreds of thousands of acres of forest have been lost because fires that could have been stopped much earlier were allowed to burn.

It would be wise to address what we already know isn't working before adding another layer of oversight.

More good news:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to shoot some 500,000 barred owls over the next 30 years has collided head-on with significant public and congressional resistance.

As we predicted, animal rights groups created a political firestorm. Good for them.

The Fish & Wildlife Service is attempting to cover its tracks following the federal government’s controversial 1990 decision to grant threatened species status to the northern spotted owl to "save" it from extinction.

Spotted owl populations were said to be declining rapidly, though the search for them was limited to old growth forests in western Oregon and Washington and Northern California.

We now know that spotted owls are habitat generalists – meaning they may nest in old growth forests though not always. But they hunt in old wildfire burns or recently logged areas where mice and voles live.

Logging in old growth forests ended with the listing decision but owl population numbers are still falling. We believe this is because several million acres of owl habitat have been lost in catastrophic wildfires that should have been extinguished much sooner than they were.

No House or Senate member campaigning for re-election in next year's mid-term elections wants to be pressed to explain this travesty to an inquiring journalist. 

In case you’re wondering, 2.4 million Americans work for the federal government. Add our armed forces and the total rises to 3.7 million.

The Forest Service is tasked with pleasing all of them, so we best get this reorganization business right.