GREENWIRE | The Trump administration is gearing up to redirect the Forest Service’s scientific work toward timber and wildfire and away from pests, diseases, forest ecology and the effects of climate change.
I’m not sure about this.. it seems to me that traditional organismal biology positions such as entomology, pathology, physiology and genetics have been downplayed for some time. In fact, the Forest Service seems a bit like some universities. In the case of some universities, user-oriented disciplines like entomology and pathology are now only found in Extension, whereas in the Forest Service they are found in Forest Health (part of State and Private). This is not the fault of FS R&D, with limited budgets, they felt they had to go for bigger science bucks like climate change or other Big Science fads like sequencing genomes. I remember sitting with a Station Director at the SAF Convention in Rochester, NY in 1988 who blithely said “we’re tapped into the bucks for climate now and we’re never going back to helping you (NFS).” I’m not blaming them.. given the conditions it was the choice to make.
Also, about wildfire research, I am wary of proposals such as the Wildfire Intelligence Center in FOFA that could be seen as NOAA and NASA poaching wildfire research funding. Let’s face it, FS R&D is a minnow among the sharks of the Big Science world. It’s interesting that Nick Smith’s news roundup today had precisely that, NASA working with DOD on prescribed fire. One of the most amazing things to me about the way federal R&D works is that no one ever checks for duplication. Perhaps that’s what the Wildfire Intelligence Center will do.. but I have my doubts.
The realignment of the forest agency’s research priorities has been in the works for weeks and reflects staff reductions — some already completed through deferred resignations, others on the way — as well as forthcoming spending proposals that would be left to Congress to decide, according to employees and outside organizations familiar with the administration’s thinking.
The fallout of the shift in the Forest Service’s focus would ripple not just through national forests but on state and privately owned land across the country, where the agency’s research guides land management practices.
Preliminary budget-related communications within the Agriculture Department and the ever-changing internal roster of employees and their jobs offer clues about where the research mission may be headed, said an employee who shared some of the materials with POLITICO’s E&E News.
Three agency employees familiar with the administration’s thinking said the approach aligns with long-simmering views within the Forest Service and in Congress that the agency’s research mission is overdue for some tweaking, if not an outright overhaul.
Congress has long been concerned that federal R&D in ag and forestry has departed from utility. Hence (in the distant past) the Fund for Rural America and other efforts. Tensions within the Department about “listening to stakeholders too much” led to the firing of my boss at the time, the head of the Fund for Rural America. Putting stakeholders on panels! Some folks had come over from NSF, and earnestly believed that R&D direction and funding needed to be of the scientists, by the scientists and for the scientists. I acknowledge that formula funds at the land grants could be a Dean’s slush fund, but some universities also had councils of stakeholders to advise on R&D priorities with their USDA research funds. So slowly and subtly the connection was broken and research has slowly drifted away from stakeholder involvement.
But outside organizations and some employees said there’s a danger that the administration will go too far, losing seasoned researchers and weakening the Forest Service’s ability to apply long-term research to current, everyday problems.
That’s true not just on the 193 million acres the Forest Service manages but in privately owned forests across the country that depend on the agency for up-to-date science on everything from disease outbreaks to the likely consequences of the warming climate. Challenges await cities large and small as well, where Forest Service research — and grants, up until now — support urban tree-planting programs.
A USDA spokesperson declined to comment on forthcoming restructuring or spending proposals, saying in a statement it would be inappropriate to speculate on future restructuring or funding.
But, the spokesperson said, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people,” adding, “Secretary Rollins is committed to ensuring critical research and essential services remain uninterrupted.”
Research on long-term issues can include forest ecology over 30 years, said Richard Guldin, a former research official in the Forest Service’s Washington office and a board member at the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. While the administration may be focused on more immediate problems — like wildfire — short-term needs and long-term trends go hand in hand, he said.
“We need to figure out how to help the national forest land managers begin to apply what we are learning,” Guldin said. “You do the long-term research, and it has to be good — but it has to be good for something.”
For those who haven’t followed this, there has been a long-standing tension between what (some) R&D scientists want to study, and what NFS managers think would be useful. This led to folks like forest health folks with Ph.D.s doing their own work (so-called “administrative studies”) because R&D scientists (and university folks) weren’t interested (nor funded). I have never been a fan of the “we scientists will determine how to frame the problem, what and how to study it, and then tell you all what to do.” In my view, that’s not what FS R&D nor the land-grants institutions should be doing. It tends to divide, when finding out knowledge should bring people together, in my view.
A vast research mission
Federal spending on forest research and development has climbed slightly in recent years, from $296 million in discretionary appropriations in fiscal 2022 to more than $300 million the past two fiscal years. The Biden administration requested increases, citing the need for more information about climate change and expansion of markets for wood products, among other priorities.
Do we need “more information about climate change?” Or do we deal with the impacts as they manifest themselves in real time? For some time, current problems are not funded in pursuit of predicting future problems.
The Forest Service is the world’s largest research organization, the Biden administration said in its budget request for the current fiscal year. The mission includes 76 experimental forests, four experimental ranges and four experimental watersheds.
I don’t know what “largest” means in this context.. certainly not in funding. Maybe acres? All of USDA (ERS, NIFA, FS, ARS) is a drop in the science bucket. See the chart at the top.
A forest products laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, explores alternative uses for wood, such as in tall building construction. The Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montona, has a 66-foot-high combustion chamber that allows for burn tests in controlled conditions, according to the Forest Service.
The budget also covers five research stations, distributed in each region of the country. And the agency’s forest inventory and analysis program — which the administration has signaled will remain a top priority, according to employees — provides crucial data about the condition of the nation’s forests.
One of the reasons FIA is so popular is that it has a strongly supportive group of stakeholders, and regularly listens to their feedback.
Still, research accounts for just 4 percent of the Forest Service’s budget, according to the agency.
A 2017 report by the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities said the number of researchers in federal land management agencies has plummeted in recent years, particularly in areas such as plant pathology and entomology. Even the forest products lab — which the Trump administration has marked as a higher priority — lost most of its workforce in the decades after World War II, the report said.
Corporations, too, have retrenched on research, the report said, and universities don’t spend as much on applied forest research as they once did.
My research colleagues in industry lost their jobs when the tax changes encouraged forest products companies to sell their land. And universities are subject to the same science market forces.. practical work isn’t cool nor funded.
Deep cuts at the Forest Service research probably couldn’t be made up by universities or other nonfederal entities, researchers and other people close to the programs said.
In part, that’s because forest research that takes decades to play out on the ground doesn’t translate into quick profits for the wood products industry, said Peter Madden, president and CEO of the Endowment for Forestry and Communities, based in Greenville, South Carolina.
But forest health — which may take a hit in the President Donald Trump budget — can’t really be separated from forest products, Madden said. The emerald ash borer has clobbered markets for ash trees, and in Canada, a bark beetle outbreak “literally wiped out a lot of those markets, a lot of those communities that depended on timber.”
Biodiversity and forest health are big issues, Madden said, “but I don’t really see private industry spending the money.”
Having watched the demise of industry R&D, it was never about “quick profits”.. forest genetics has never been very quick. And then there is NCASI, which had done much good work.
Realigning Forest Service research could go along with the priorities of some congressional Republicans. In recent years, Republican appropriators have called on the agency to refocus research on wildfire and wood products.
Like I said, I don’t see R’s as the danger to wildfire research. And wood products..both sides of the aisle are interested in uses for biomass, if that’s the same thing. I wonder exactly what the appropriators said?
Gaps and concerns
A study by the National Academy of Public Administration in 2021 also pointed to organizational troubles in the Forest Service’s research and development, including a lack of coordination and conflicting views about which science takes priority.
Research is critical to the agency’s mission, the report said. “However, pressure to undertake more applied research and focus on delivering existing science to meet near-term needs raises concerns about how to maintain support for basic research.”
The study added, “Moreover, for many of R&D’s internal agency partners, station research is associated with a university-style approach to research with little attention to addressing mission challenges.”
Does the FS need to do “basic research”? Isn’t that NSF’s job? And “little attention to addressing mission challenges” is fairly standard over the past 30 years or so, but to be fair if you tell your scientists to get their own funding, and Big Science doesn’t care about small landowners or the national forests, what were they supposed to do?
Focusing on one type of research without paying enough attention to others overlooks the complexity of forest science, said Matt Betts, a forestry professor at Oregon State University and lead scientist for an ecological research program at the school’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. The program is cooperatively managed with the Forest Service.
I don’t think, technically speaking, the Andrews belongs to OSU.
“It’s hard to do research in isolation,” Betts said. Someone who invests in forests to make wood products, for instance, needs to know how fast certain trees grow based on conditions, as well as how wildfires spread, he said.
If the Trump administration is serious about boosting timber harvests by 25 percent, Betts said, forest research will be even more critical — and some of it is more suited to the government than to industry.
Sometimes, forest science and business practices don’t exactly overlap. To meet demand for wood, timber companies often don’t want to wait until a Douglas fir tree, for instance, has hit its target of 80 years for full maturity. Instead, they cut it at 35 or 40 years old, he said.
Last I checked, economics was also a science. Hopefully we’re not back to de-emphasizing the social sciences- so 20th century. After all, both Rs and Ds want to use small diameter woody material from thinnings rather than burn it. Why have we been unsuccessful for the last 30 years of trying? What can we do about it? FS economists and some university folks are studying that.
Gaps constantly emerge in forest knowledge, too, Betts told E&E News. A generation ago, many people believed old-growth forests were a waste, he said. Now, he said, researchers believe protecting old-growth forests is a way to balance environmental needs with maintaining the timber industry — a point Betts and others made in a paper in Science magazine Thursday.
“We still don’t really know how forests work,” Betts said. “The more I learn, the more I realize we don’t know about forests.