The above is a screenshot from USAspending.gov. You can click on it to make it easier to read.
Update on Questions From Last Week
Dave Mertz has heard back that the Forest Service will answer the questions he posed last week. So we can look forward to that.
Suggestions for the Forest Service in Communicating
I’d put out a table that shows the agreements thus far, and how much has been obligated over what time period. Once specific agreements for each project are approved, I’d have each funded project with a project description, how much money, timeline, and accomplishments when they are finished, located somewhere they can easily be searched (not USAspending.gov). (the above link is to American Forests, which appears to be $50 mill for Urban and Community Forestry, which also appears to be already obligated, that’s also the screenshot above). It would be great to have maps also for specific projects, so we can see where the $ are going. I’m sure Congressionals and others will be curious. Maybe like the GAOA site.
My Apology to the Forest Service and to Dave Mertz:
I’d like to apologize to Forest Service folks and Dave Mertz. When Dave and I were working up our list of questions, I added:
(4) Are the Keystone Agreements being used to avoid Federal Acquisition Regulations and federal hiring difficulties?
It wasn’t until I read it in his post that I realized how it might have come across as their ill intent, which I never meant. I meant it in a broader sense (which I could have expressed more clearly) “are there specific aspects of the FARs and hiring that make it difficult to fulfill the intent of Congress in the BIL and IRA?” Now, I haven’t heard about contracting, but I continue to hear about issues with USAJobs and the Albuquerque Service Center. On the other hand, vast infusions of money are probably not best used with temporaries, so perhaps the real question is about contracting vs. grants and agreements.
My intent was to see if there were obstacles that could be removed in order to proceed with success in meeting the goals of IRA and BIL, and maybe use that Congressional energy to make some fixes of a generally positive nature beyond BIL and IRA, but maybe that’s a question for Congress to ask. Or maybe they should have asked before sending the money out. Or maybe they realize that Federal hiring and contracting are cans of worms that they don’t want to get involved with. Easier to send out the money and hope for the best. Gee, I sound a little like Andy.
What I Think About All This
Partners are very important and can be critical to the Forest Service carrying out its mission. This is nothing new, about 15 years ago I recall a Region 2 Regional Foresters Honor Awards banquet with a video entirely composed of the Regional Forester (Rick Cables) talking about “partners” and “partnerships”. The SERAL project on the Stanislaus, as we covered here, was successful due to master agreements with the County and others.
As I said about SERAL partnerships, “Various master agreements, including with the County, enabled finances to be transferred and work to be done without federal hiring or FARs difficulties. Counties and others can hire locally, so that issues like housing affordability may be less pressing.”
It makes perfect sense, in my view, for the Forest Service to have larger scale agreements so that each Forest doesn’t have to reinvent the grant-making wheel. Also, because of the temporary nature of BIL and IRA, the Forest Service couldn’t actually add people. And these agreements provide handy ways to stash the funding so that Congress can’t get it back (at least that’s how it appears).
Still, two things raise questions for some of us.. transparency and accountability, and that’s what the rest of our questions were about. Some of us are also curious about whether work contracted versus granted have to follow the same rules and have the same degree of oversight and accountability. Folks with differing perspectives are equally curious about this, as we shall see in the E&E News story.
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While I was exploring the USAspending.gov website, I looked under the contracts tab by accident and found an $89.4 million contract to Sierra Tahoe Environmental Management, LLC. for stewardship work on the Plumas. So large-scale contracts are also possibilities. As one Anonymous pointed out, though, both contracting and grants and agreements shops might be overwhelmed by the influx of funding.
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Agreements where the partner is contracting out work do have to have a competitive process to determine whom to award the contract to (at least that is my experience with the agreements I have had). The oversight and accountability is challenging at times due to short-staffing or lack of experience in the FS – while the FS doesn’t need as many CORs because the FS is not contracting out the work, there is still a need for appropriate FS oversight. There are ways to do that, but there is definitely a learning curve and (IMHO) not much information-sharing within the FS on how to avoid those problems.
That’s very interesting. A side by side of contracting directly vs. contracting via NGO’s might be handy. Which fed contracting rules have to be followed? What’s the difference in oversight? Maybe take a fuels reduction or reforestation contract as an example.
The partner doesn’t have to follow federal contracting rules, but they cannot do “sole source” contracting – they have to consider multiple contractors. Most of the agreements do not have contract specifications like the FS would have in a contract – the wording tends to be fairly general in the ones that I have dealt with. Forest Service planting or noncommerical thinning contracts, for example, have inspections to determine the quality of work or the level of payment (90%+ quality = 100% payment; <90% quality = <100% payment or no payment), but that is not included in the agreement. Forest Service Contract Inspectors/CORs have to have a minimum level of training and work for a Contracting Officer with a formal training requirement, but partners do not have those requirements.
This is very helpful, thank you! It is kind of as I suspected, that the partner has to follow some loose guidelines outlined in the agreement but nothing as complex as in a federal contract. Maybe that is ok in most cases, I don’t know. Without proper oversight and reporting, I guess it would be hard to know. These keystone agreements are dealing, in some cases, with many millions of dollars. With that much money, it seems to me that there should be some fairly robust oversight in place. That is interesting about the sole source aspect. I wonder what their criteria are for selection with several contractors.
fwiw, GAO described the basic differences between contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements here (e.g.):
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-04-459.pdf at pdf pp10-11.
Chapter 10 of GAO’s Red Book (appropriations law manual) covers this material in excruciating detail:
https://www.gao.gov/assets/2019-11/202819.pdf
I don’t remember if the Red Book specifically notes this, but one purpose of the Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act was to prevent federal agencies from using grant agreements to bypass federal contracting requirements.
I think (and hopefully the FS will tell me I’m wrong) is that this is more about money-parking than contract-avoiding. My experience with grants were mostly research grants, and in that culture basically you give out the money and bug the grantees for reports. Some did, some didn’t, especially the more porky (known as “special”) grants. So perhaps the amount of oversight depends on the subculture of who is sending out the bucks.
Lots of manual direction here, for sure. I could be wrong, but I am just not sure that there is still the culture of adherence to manual and handbook direction within the Agency. In the past, when I would ask my supervisor for some direction on a given task, the response would be “what does the manual and/or handbook say?” Towards the end of my career, you just didn’t hear that anymore. I just wonder how much manual direction is actually being followed in these agreements.
Well, I agree that maybe the question could have been phrased differently. It was a little adversarial. I guess I didn’t expect that they would answer yes; they were trying to avoid FAR and hiring issues, even if that was some of the motivation. FAR is in place to ensure that the government deals with contractors fairly, which is pretty important. Getting the best value is also important and what I think taxpayers expect, and that someone is not playing favorites. Maybe these agreements have systems in place to make sure that happens. I just don’t know enough to know the answer to that, but I think it is not unreasonable to expect the FS to ensure that things are above board and identify how that is maintained.