The last time the Forest Service employee directory went down, in 2022, we reported it to them and they put it back online.
This time I received this email:
Subject: RE: [External Email]Broken links
Hello, the Forest Service made the decision to remove the employee directory. People looking for service can search by staff area and function versus specific employees. Staff areas and units are responsible for keeping their contact information up to date and shared inboxes staffed.
I think this individual is more sanguine than I about how some units are at keeping their contact information up to date. Does this decision help with transparency and accountability? How can the public hold units accountable for keeping their websites up to date and shared inboxes staffed? Perhaps a “citizen complaint hotline”? Otherwise it’s not clear what accountability mechanisms there are.
The rumor mill says that perhaps this decision was a response to an unauthorized use of the stripped emails. I completely understand that that would be a problem. At the same time, this appears to be an example of the well-known organizational response of punishing everyone, including the innocent, instead of finding and focusing on the guilty.
The Press Office said they were getting back to me with a more in-depth explanation, so I’ll post that when I receive it.
Anyway, here is the new “contact us” site. It helps you look up a forest on the map and go to their website. I think they’re trying to be super-helpful to people, and maybe they had focus groups of users help them to design it. I know it’s not cool these days to make it easy to talk to a human being who knows stuff about the topic.. but still..
Great work, Sharon. Keeping them honest.
Making it easy to talk to a human being who knows stuff about whatever it is one is calling about is VERY COOL. I just hope agency people realize that soon.
Good grief! How “inclusive” of them…..
If it was a priority to be responsive, transparent, and accessible, the agency would have kept the employee directory as well as the “new” way of making contact.
This is a multi-layered issue. Yes the public can no longer see contact info for FS employees but it also extends internally when trying to find contact information. Part of it I believe is due to security/safety concerns. Part of it is the IT systems/policies/procedures instituted by the USDA (all USDA agencies IT services are now managed at the Department level not the agency level.) The outcome is no public access to individual FS contact info and internally we cannot see duty location information (Forest/Unit and state only) when looking in available online address books (email and other MS services). Most FS employee will have detailed location/contact info on their email signature lines, but if you haven’t received an email from them you are out of luck.
Do I think the FS is trying exclude the public from contacting employees? No, they are trying to balance individual concerns for safety in todays super charged political environment, and being hampered in maintaining correct/accurate contact information and keeping employees from being bombarded by the public. Yes the old way of looking up an FS employee online is fast and easy but anyone can call an FS unit for information. Granted some information may be funneled upward to the Region or WO office for certain highly charged issues 🙂
I simply don’t know if I understand the security/safety concerns that are being addressed but omitting an external employee directory. So when employee email addresses, phone numbers, and position/location information was previously available, these public employees were somehow at risk? Perhaps—but it seems like a stretch.
In the Forest Service they used to have your work location visible to other FS employees – for example, when someone typed in my email address it would convert to this on screen:
Smith, John – FS, Boise, ID. But in the interest of personal safety, that was changed a few months ago to only show the state – Smith, John – FS, ID.
I do know some employees personally who are being stalked by exes or others (people who are mad at the federal government or have revenge for receiving a ticket or a fine) and would prefer to not have their location visible.
So it’s not a stretch.
I did a poor job of articulating my thoughts in my previous comments….
I have no doubt that there have been employees stalked or receiving unwanted contacts by email, perhaps obtained from the previously-available employee directory online…Just as there have likely been employees of numerous agencies, public and private, who have received similar contacts.
The larger question, at least in my mind, is what should public employees expect? Should they expect that their name, email address, position, and place in the organization be readily available to the public they serve? Or, in the interest of safety and security, should that same information be closely held by the agency? And, furthermore, if that information is closely held and protected, are employees truly safer? Once could certainly advocate either way.
Title 18 provides protection for all federal employees from harassment, intimidation, and similar attacks. I have always taken comfort in that, knowing the federal government has the ability and authority to protect its employees. And yes, I have been physically threatened a time or two on the job, and I have also received lots of nuisance emails as well. For me, it has always been part of the responsibility and duty I accepted.I can respect that others may not share that sentiment.
Anon, I think there’s another question here.. violence seems to only occur in physical places, so if I am hunting for someone for my purposes.. the State is kind of helpful but I don’t need their physical address. I’ve been told by various employees in RO’s that many people never come to the office, and may even live in other Regions.
Now if you used the employee locator, you already knew the person’s name. Conceivably you already know why you want to get in touch with them…so you have some idea of their job or area of expertise. Because you already know their name (at least their last). If they go by RB or Wendy Jo or whatever, you could look up their last name and narrow it down. Now the only difference is -if you still know the last name- you can try a couple of variations and annoy other employees.
I just think that it would have been better to ask employees and the public how they use this information, and develop something that is sensitive to everyone’s needs. Like don’t have people with bad exes or lots of threats included in the locator! Our county manages to do that for property records, law enforcement peoples’ property is not on the map.
Bravo. Well said.
Carl… as a former FS employee who worked on a series of unpopular schemes, I totally understand “individuals’ concerns for safety”. But I have to wonder if sometimes “today’s politically charged environment”, like “climate change” is something that’s both true, and also can be used to keep people from asking about other reasons. Because it’s hard to argue that the environment is more politically charged than two years ago, when the answer from the same organization was “sure we’ll put the link back”.
I’m assuming no real negative intention here, but I know how things that make sense to individual departments (silos) can lead to decisions that are not ultimately in the best interest of anyone. Especially people who didn’t participate in the decision. And it could be I’m just not good at finding things that are obvious to others.
So for example, I was on the NOGA webinar today and wanted to email a person to ask questions. They stated their first and last names, which I could use to email them. Let’s take one person who identified himself as “senior advisor” but I happen to know works in EMC. I can go to EMC on the web, but there is no place to contact anyone there that I could find. If I go to “contacts”.. I can find Junior Ranger, but not NEPA. But I guess I can fill out a contact form and then someone has to sort out where it’s going. Is it a person? Is it AI? Will he she or it understand what I’m asking?
I also tried Region 5, here’s the link to “contact us.” It turns out if you’re media, there’s a handy list with emails! It’s even updated as of July 2, 2024. The rest of us get a contact form.
Also, we have also been told that “everyone’s on a detail” so we may not know what unit they are on at any given time. And yet employees don’t leave their knowledge, experience and wisdom behind when they go on a detail, so we might want to contact them. Maybe we want to offer them a job!
I think this system might work well if every question that the public had was related to a known Forest or District, but sometimes the questions we have are not. Finally, I should note that while R-5 has a handy updated list of forest media contacts, Region 1 does not. Here’s their contact page.
Also when I go to a forest there, the BD, there are phone number but no email address for the Districts (or contact form?).
I get that people interested in talking to RO and WO people might be a minority. Still, I think legitimate questions can be asked about “is responsiveness to the public working as well as it should?”
Sharon, LOL (with a smile) “AI” in the FS??? No, we haven’t advanced that much in the IT arena since you left 🙂 so yes the first touch of your inquiry will be a person but probably not with the expertise that can answer your question and then it’s a matter if they route it to the appropriate person.
The point of my post is that it sucks both internally and externally. The tools and processes that I have internally to find FS employees really suck. But looking at each of the decision points in the last couple of year I understand why we are here. The real world issues of the USDA/FS IT infrastructures/systems, IT security demands, and dollars/personnel allocated to the FS has created sub optimal “responsiveness to the public” (also internally) when it comes to finding and contacting individual FS employees.
Not to defend the outcome but “everyone’s on a detail” is a problem (no, everyone is not on a detail.) The issue is for those detailed there are no convenient process to keep track of them (are they still on forest, working remote, email stays the same but other duty location info????). It is basically word of mouth.
Andy, my point was not to blame the USDA, it is just that with the $/resources available to the FS, a decision was made to stop maintaining the People/Contact data base used in the past and spend the $/resources elsewhere. Yes, other USDA agencies do maintain online people/contact info for the public, and go figure the FS R&D shops still have a people/contact page for each station. I think it was a plain old economic decision and where to spend the money to support the core mission of the agency.
Again, I’m not trying to defend the decisions made to discontinue the People webpage. But give our current budget would I spend money to maintain the old system, maybe not. Is there a better way so the public can contact FS employee….? Yes and at what cost?
I understand what you are saying, Carl, so thanks for responding. Like you said, if R&D can do it… and as Andy said, other USDA agencies can do it, then we would have to think the difference is the much larger number of employees in NFS. Conceivably, though “security demands” would be the same for R&D as for NFS. Also it could be argued that due to having so many more employees, it’s more important for them to be able to keep track of each other and not rely on “word of mouth.” Just out of curiosity in the new budget structure, does IT have its own line item? Because I can think of other budget items that could be de-prioritized..
FSEEE would be delighted to host and maintain a public, searchable FS employee database AT NO COST to the federal government. If anyone with decision-making authority is reading this note, please email me at [email protected] and we can make this happen.
FSEEE already has most of the employee data, “scraped” from the FS’s on-line directory before it was removed. We use it to send our newsletter gratis to over 30,000 FS employees. Those who don’t want the newsletter (they don’t know what they’re missing 😉) can hit the delete key or opt-out easy-peasy.
Andy, thanks. That’s a cool offer. Still, in the interest of transparency, etc., I’d like to see the USFS do it. They had a directory for years, so why not continue it. There are pros and cons, sure, and maybe some folks here have insights. If so, do tell!
In my region the questions that come in online get routed quickly (I receive several a year) and the person that routes them to me checks back to make sure I have responded. I don’t know how it goes in other regions, but that is the expectation in my region. I will say that they have tried to maintain an employee directory (and even a Line Officer directory) in my region recently and it is always out-of-date immediately after each update. When you move to a different office it is very time-consuming to update your job and location – I know one person who did not update it for 10+ years – his directory entry still said that he worked in a different region doing a totally different job. A lot of basic processes in the Forest Service don’t work anymore and haven’t for several years.
A- I see that as a different thing.. that’s when you know the question, but you don’t know the person. No one ever used the employee locator to figure out who is doing what.. that’s definitely a phone call or an online form.
“who can I talk to? I have a question about why there are so many trees dead in prescribed burn X?” then a human being calls that person back hopefully, not a canned response.
Employee locator was for people who knew the last name, but not the email. And yes, if it’s Raul Mendoza, it’s probably [email protected] (apologies to you Raul or Rauls!). But what if there’s more than one person with the same first and last name? Or someone goes by X, but his official first name is y. That’s all employee locator did is help people who already knew the last name find the first name, or maybe the unit – but that tended to be out of date. It was useful to many of us. So it seems like security concerns could be reduce by just putting the state instead of the unit, which would still be likely to be out of date, but some of us didn’t care.
I’m interested in what basic processes don’t work in the FS if you are comfortable sharing either here or via email.
I email Forest Service officials on a daily basis because I represent their employees in matters of personnel actions and equal employment opportunities. For years I’ve had access to Rangers, Forest Supervisors, Chief/staff, and Secretary/staff. The problem with not having access to the directory any longer is that employee movement is continual and I no longer have the ability to type in a name and discover their email, phone number, or title. I think that is one of the reasons they did it. It makes it difficult to contact officials. For example, today I needed to send an email to the FS FAM Director about a contract equipment whistle blower issue. My email kicked out. I don’t know what his email is or maybe he left the agency. I will need to find an employee and have the employee look it up. Another problem is that the agency is not available by phone. I contacted the R5 office to ask who the new HR Director was. They answer now with a voice mail to leave your number. Three times now I’ve done that and I do not receive a call back. It’s intentional isolation from the public.
“It’s intentional isolation from the public.” You bet it is! Which begs the question, why would the FS want to isolate itself from the public? Hypothesis: The FS has embraced a victim’s mentality. Nobody likes me, everyone hates me, so I’m going to eat worms.
Lesa, I don’t know if it’s intentional. Perhaps we should write a formal letter asking that it be reinstituted. I can imagine that a group of IT folks figured out it was too hard to keep up without involving anyone using it, and Comms came up with some post-hoc rationalizations. So many layers, so many departments, right hand, left hand.
I find it hard to believe that today’s technology is unable to keep track of where people are and how to contact them and make that available to the public. It seems more likely that a decision has been made to not do so. My only question is whether that is because it’s not a priority to do so, or a priority to not do so.
I doubt blame or credit for removal of the FS email directory can be laid at USDA’s feet. Other USDA agencies, e.g., NRCS, continue to have on-line employee email directories available to the public.
This may be institutional change affecting all of the Federal government. Most likely a security move to prevent or slow down intelligence gathering by foreign or domestic entities. I see that even at departmental level (USDA) no longer identifies anyone by name and location. They’ve even removed email references to webmasters usually at the bottom of a web page. All agencies are not able to react quickly to a directive or recommendation and may take years to implement.
That would make sense, except for notable outliers (example, https://research.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/people). So it differs within departments and agencies. People might wonder whether removing webmaster addresses simply keeps people from giving the agency helpful advice to… update their website or fix broken links or remove incorrect and outdated links.
There is definitely a tension between public transparency and trust, and employee and digital infrastructure security concerns. I think the readers at TSW are mostly concerned that the tension would always be resolved to the detriment of transparency.
This agency doesn’t function as a cohesive unit. Some staffs react faster than others some may never react. I was trying to find the email syntax for a civilian friend employed by the Air Force and it took me quite sometime before I could find any kind of email address. It’s not that they’re trying hide anything or avoid the public, they’re most likely being directed to do it.
I guess my point is that the agency (or somewhere else above them, the department or ???) has to actually be responsible for the decision to balance transparency and security and make that direction, dare I say, transparent to the public. Faceless unaccountable bureaucracies should be a nightmare, not a goal.
Just FYI –
https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2024-20694/privacy-act-systems-of-records
That’s interesting but I have no clue what the records were or how they are changing, so how can I comment? Do you know something about this?
Ah. The lovely new contact page has no category for FOIAs. I would wonder why? Could it have something to do with the systematic stonewalling that characterizes the agency? Example A: my neighbor submitted a FOIA regarding the 2022 Tunnel Fire and the agency spent two years hiding behind the patently false assertion that the requested records were exempt under the Law Enforcement exception. Meanwhile, my FOIA to the Kaibab, seeking records relating to the newly proclaimed National Monument that ate the Tusayan District goes unanswered for a year and a day. This is simply one more example of the Agency being far more concerned with itself than its mission or the public it serves.
😀
I call Bullsh!t! There is no excuse why the employee directory is offline. Contact your Congressman and Senator and demand the employee directory be operational again. Contact your Congressman and Senator ask them why the directory is offline. This is a coverup.