All, I am going to write a formal letter to the Forest Service Chief asking to have the employee directory put back online.
Ideas for text, or willingness to sign, please let me know in comments or email me.
As Lesa noted in her comment, “I will need to find an employee and have the employee look it up,” not having it means that we have to do detective work to figure it out, including bothering other employees. For members of the public who need to contact employees, we are not going to simply go away and forget about it because it’s too difficult. So perhaps the FS was not aware of this unintended consequence.
And, as Andy noted, other agencies in USDA have such directories.
I think this is a good idea, but based on a similar experience with BLM, I am not optimistic. During the Obama administration the BLM detailed Field Office, state and National office directories were removed. There are directories for BLM national , state, district and field offices but they only contain leadership names and their contacts – and not always contacts. I contacted BLM national leadership in both Obama and Trump asking why the change and suggesting a return to the past practice. I was told this was done to protect employees safety- to avoid harassment or more. I was not convinced that this made sense in the context of government employees serving the public. We need to be able to “petition” the government- if we can’t get the right name and contact information for the government official in charge of a particular area that constitutional provision is made more difficult to use. These directory policies are wrong and need to be changed. Good luck with USFS.
I will sign it.
Hi Sharon, I’m totally in support of your effort. I have found it frustrating that seemingly all government contact now has to go through portals. I would prefer to be able to send emails with attachments to particular people. I will sign your letter.
I hope Anonymous the Philosopher is around to see this. A quote from Hannah Arendt from On Violence.
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
I don’t know what Arendt means by “fully developed bureaucracy” but the point is clear nonetheless regarding the hazards of unaccountable and “faceless” public workers.
I would sign the letter and help draft it. Removing the public’s ability to access public sector workers is antithetical to open, transparent and responsive government, or government for the people.
Hey now, I’ve been on an Arendt kick lately, so this is spot on. I once got an old ranger I worked for to read Eichmann in Jerusalem, but that’s a different story.
So, to speak in a very different style but similar tenor: the FS appears to be committing an unforced error here. The unforced error is (unnecessarily) creating the appearance of a bureaucratic stonewalling with no accountability when it might just be inaptitude (a word?). Not that this doesn’t mean I don’t think accountability is a problem or that no directory is a bad move, but it’s almost darkly humorous that something so simple could get dropped. An employee directory is not a complex concept. It’s a little thing that goes a long way. But by neither having one nor providing anything but oblique gibberish in response, they in effect make-true the criticism that the organization is avoiding accountability to the public.
To take a pivot I imagine few saw coming, government audit standards: “Independence in appearance is the absence of circumstances that would cause a reasonable and informed third party to reasonably conclude that the integrity, objectivity, or professional skepticism of an audit organization or member of the engagement team had been compromised” (https://gaoinnovations.gov/yellowbook/independence.html#section-3.21b). Why cite this? Appearance and presentation matter. This is an example of a rigorous statement of why.
Now, disparate threads, together: Arendt points out that bureaucracy constrains others and subsists / self-preserves through diffusion and deflection. The FS appears to be diffusing accountability and deflecting (but may or may not be in reality) to no real end here.
And government audit standards (in some ways the consummate expression of bureaucratic guidance on how to be a bureaucrat) bluntly acknowledge that appearance matters, and something that appears to compromise or bias can, in some cases, be tantamount to being compromised or biased.
All this fluff, boiled down: one wants to ask the FS why cutting this basement-floor level of public responsiveness and access could possibly be construed as a good move.
Appreciate the invitation to pontificate, as always. An aside, you may enjoy Byung-Chul Han’s “The Transparency Society”. A very short relevant point would be that efforts to appear transparent can be used to actually obscure. Han is aphoristic and ‘continental’ in the extreme but still worth the read.
Maybe being more responsive to the public would deflate some support for getting rid of professional federal employees: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/25/project-2025-trump-plan-fire-civil-service-employees
Speaking about federal employees last month, the former president said: “They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.”
Getting rid of executive branch personnel and some branches completely (like education) is a part of the Project 2025 plan. This is not a political post, I am just stating facts. In his first term trump started implementing some of it in the VA and overall for unions and employee due process job rights by a few EO’s. Biden restored them. Particularly impactful for me was the changes in representing employees who were disciplined. It made it more difficult to address the actions against them. Federal employees need to do what they can to prevent P2025 in order to maintain their due process rights and in some cases keep their jobs.
It seems also like the current Admin is fine with funding NGOs to hire non-feds to do fed work without the competition, protections, and oversight of federal contracting.
So perhaps those of us interested in the FS federal workforce are between a rock and a hard place?
Yes. With the talk of serious budget cuts right now it I foresee a major downsizing coming that will force out a bunch of folks. The union should be preparing for that right now.
I get your point about even less accountability to the public with contracted work, but is the Biden Administration using this to replace current federal workers? (I could imagine it being used to do that as part of implementing Project 2025, though.)
Not contracted but given to partners for them to hire people to do the work. I don’t think it was intentional to reduce the federal workforce, because they are now playing Washington Monument with 2025 temps and hoping to get the money back. Or just another opp to blame the House for all problems (perhaps associated with this years’ election?).
Don Moynihan, a public administration and policy scholar that I admire, wrote a good piece on Trump’s proposed Schedule F reforms and how it may be keeping us from the real conversation we need to be having with both parties about state capacity and evidence-based government reform: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/a-bipartisan-group-of-government.
There are many think tanks talking and writing about state capacity and Sharon has quoted some of them here. However, many of them are not public administration scholars and may be recreating old patterns by focusing on policy and not thinking enough about policy implementation when there is a vast body of research on what makes for “good government”.
The closing statement on Schedule F from an ad hoc group of preeminent PA scholars reads:
“We believe that the proposed revival of Schedule F will not assist an Administration to lawfully and effectively execute its policies, or help meet the forward-looking goals enumerated above, and in fact would dangerously undermine them. Government workers will not take justified risks or innovate if they feel they are being judged on the basis of political loyalty rather than results. In the coming weeks and months, our group will elaborate how the federal government must evolve in order to meet these challenges and truly become a government of the 21st century.”
Chelsea, that is very interesting and relevant. I’ll post that and we can discuss more after I get done with the Mother of All Forestry Bills.
If the Forest Service has limited IT staff I can understand why the directory isn’t a priority.