Some of this is similar to Frank’s previous post. One idea that is new and likely controversial is his idea of bringing in disruptors- management/business types at the top.
Leadership change is elemental for an entirely new Agency refit and performance expectations. The new Chief must not be from the ranks, nor should the Chief be one of the industry or environmental gladiators who spar over minor adjustments to a $10 billion budget. We need a disruptor, a person in a hurry, and a change agent on an epic scale, like the Secretary of the Navy. The safe but ineffective home office comfort zone, the shattered and scattered agency employees and organizations, and the days of working from home in a place far removed from a physical duty station are ending. The communities we serve do not telework. They don’t have duty stations five States away from the town square. Neither will we. It’s time to rejoin the circle of life in rural America, where our people and natural resources struggle for help and support.
If you disagree, please comment below or send in your own post of “what I think should be done by the next Admin.” I haven’t turned anyone down who wants to submit a guest post yet. And anonymous posts are fine.
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Among the most challenging roles for government change agents (and the least understood) is finding new leaders immune from the administrative state’s enticements. Most agency employees and those who would influence agency employees have worked closely together, for good or ill, over many years. They are known to each other. Their positions are well understood. Hiring officials look for operatives in various issues areas who have labored for decades to obtain sufficient power and network credibility for leadership positions in the new administration.
My message to the 47th and Second President Trump administration and the transition team: Do not hire these talented and skilled personnel! They will not fix anything!
The USDA Forest Service took decades to outsource core agency functions, such as public involvement and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis, to contractors and NGOs. It took more decades to “offshore” essential work to people more than a thousand miles removed from the ranger districts where their help is needed most. It took six Presidents in five administrations to allow the essential Forest Service to devolve into an irrelevant, disconnected, fractured, scattered, and furtive shadow of its former glory and purpose. It will take a new and courageous level of disruptive change to redirect the former “best federal agency” from bureaucratic inertia and destruction to intimate public service and hands-on natural resources management and stewardship. It’s a Herculean task as challenging as slaying the nine-headed Hydra of Lerna or killing the Nemean Lion. It will take unknown heroes with impeccable credentials and histories working tirelessly in thankless jobs without pause, recognition, or mercy.
It’s time to clean house in the ranks of the USDA Forest Service. The just concluded election offers an opportunity to do so. As in life, so in government, the status quo requires a reset periodically to recognize and adapt to changed conditions. There is precedent for executive action to rewire government agencies to be responsive to the realities of an incoming administration and radically new approaches brought on by profound changes in the world, spiritual and temporal, that demand the sort of revolution in the head experienced once in a couple of generations.
To aid post-Civil War Western settlement, the government made a solid effort to coax an agricultural Eden from the vast, arid, Western wilderness by building and operating water impoundments to irrigate fields and provide power to newly rising communities. By mid-century, dam builders like C. J. Strike in the USDI’s Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) found themselves without a portfolio and faced bureaucratic extinction. Strike and other nimble thinkers in politics and government recast the BOR as a flatwater recreation outfit and changed its mission and political support base to reflect the new reality. This new social license gave BOR a popular water sports constituency and left the Agency intact, complete with engineering professionals and technical staff to maintain the complex systems.
For over 90 years, Forest Service Chiefs sought to operate above the fray of Senate confirmation hearings and apart from wrangling for political appointments. Agency leaders asserted their leadership as a professional class of neutral expert foresters overseeing the greatest good for the greatest number over time. It worked for almost a century. Career Chiefs were tolerated and even encouraged. When the Agency’s mission, workforce, and ecosystem services were fully functional, clearly understood, and socially licensed by a supportive public, there was no need to shake up the sober and highly respected foresters and range scientists who made sure trees and grass grow sustainably.
Today, the Forest Service is a mess, both spiritually and in fact. Deeply in debt (a billion dollars this fiscal year alone) and reduced for its social license to dependence on its role as a wildland fire department, the Agency is badly off course. Lacking accountability and poorly led and managed, the decentralized model that once made the outfit among the most effective in government has fallen into a caricature of past competence. The Chief has abandoned his role in sustainably managing our natural resources. He has given millions of dollars and inappropriate management responsibilities to outside non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to manage what he will not or cannot.
As with much of government, many employees no longer report to the office to share the synergies of working together, to provide immediate access to the public, to build esprit de corps and corporate knowledge, or to raise new generations of employees by mentoring and daily example. There is no water cooler or pickup cab where rookies and veterans share knowledge, skills, and common sense, and become the beating heart of their local communities. No champions have risen in the ranks since the pandemic to redefine its role in the larger government, society, and institutions. Without a solid footing and a firm base of public and cooperator support, no likely future path would compel the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to keep the Forest Service going in its current state.
The Forest Service never recovered from the profound effects of the upheaval around agency management prerogatives following the Forest Wars of the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. Spotted owls and the greater good suffered from myopic political compromises that ended traditional community relationships with the National Forests and Ranger Districts and subjected the Agency to narrow political and environmentalist interests for which the Chief had no social license. Top-down decrees sought to “save spotted owls” at the price of sustainable rural economies. Agency strength and capabilities dwindled as increasingly restrained leadership searched in vain for a new place to land.
As Service leaders teetered on the brink of irrelevance in their search for a path forward, the disruptive power of the late pandemic struck like lightning on a summer afternoon, further isolating, confusing, and shredding any hope of leveraging the synergies of people and communities that long served as the bedrock of ecosystem services and public confidence in the Agency. The forest and grassland bureaucracy found itself stumbling into its old white-hat standby, wildfire management, as its raison d’etre.
Fear of the pandemic engendered low morale in transitioning from natural resources management to virtually full-time wildfire management. Agency lawyers refused to back up line officer decisions supporting the Agency’s multiple-use mission against often-frivolous lawsuits. Forest Service communities of interest lost confidence in the government. The nail in the coffin of an otherwise rudderless agency has been catering to employees’ personal work preferences over production, performance, or service. Current leadership’s conspiracy of circumstances and intentional choices to scatter the Green Machine and her people to the wind left personnel and assets randomly falling wherever whimsy might lead, usually wildfire use instead of sustainable management.
The Chief and the Executive Leadership Team surrendered management priorities and future direction to a Fauchian cabal of misinformed CDC initiatives and weak OGC attorneys, focusing on work consolidation for its own sake and enabling employee-centric remote work and telework. After all, any duty station will work in an Agency without purpose and direction. Agency leaders prioritized employee safety and comfort over any other consideration, including public safety and service. Chief Moore promised to keep employees safe and protect their salaries as his preeminent mission. “The goal of the agency,” he wrote, “[is] to ensure we continue to pay and take care of all employees currently working for the Forest Service.” Caring for the land and serving people is a dim memory from a formerly reliable provider of a wide array of ecosystem services that enjoyed a 75 percent public approval rating.
As the pandemic unfolded, absent scientific evidence and without the courage of their convictions, fearful leaders first cajoled and then intimidated the workforce into accepting the medical judgment of people no one trusted and management advice from people no one knew. Employee confidence hit rock bottom, replaced by the fiction that any activity was better than no activity and that any path would be acceptable in the crisis. Employees retreated to their homes, sealed the doors, and joined the Laptop Class of teleworkers now under universal condemnation. Excesses of illiberal bureaucratic power resulted in wrong-headed and corrosive boons granted to those who do not directly contribute to the financial health and capacity of the Nation. Tax spenders are less cautious with our collective bank accounts than taxpayers who make a living from private efforts and sacrifice.
Suppose telework and remote duty stations were a good idea but on a limited basis. In any case, they are now anathema to a Nation resurgent in its need to strongly support and sustain rural and urban communities where our National Forests or offices reside and to ramp up economically vital industries, including our War industries, to mitigate the international interventionism of the past four years. A new sheriff has arrived with a new message: get back to work. As Van Elsbernd wisely observed, when the Agency decides to do something, you’d best figure out how to get it done or get out of the way before you find yourself under the bus.
As in World Wars One and Two, the urgent priority for our precious natural resources is to provide raw materials for our weakened but rising industrial base. Focused on intentionally using wildfire to “restore fire to fire-dependent ecosystems,” Forest Service leaders have neither recognized nor pivoted to the most urgent change in National priorities in the current century. The lack of a coherent policy and compelling leadership on issues related to the new priorities, like healthy and efficient ecosystem services, means the Executive Leadership Team has been asleep at the wheel.
A new Chief and senior staff will have urgent priorities to address in the first two years of the Trump administration.
- No reform will occur unless a champion of disruptive change fearlessly wades into this most traditional and sluggardly Agency and changes almost everything about workforce dynamics, conditions of employment, leadership expectations, and the locus and focus of the work. Already, political leadership is eyeing the same old gang for leadership roles. At the front of the list of names for the new Chief are the executive directors of various forest products industry lobbies and associations. It’s a mistake to think people who are already captives of the multiple compromises within existing systems would be able to make fundamental changes. The just past administration brought their interest group loyalists, environmentalists, and various radical activist groups in to run agencies like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). They made few changes and accomplished little lasting effect. We can expect the same result if the Forest Service chooses timber industry lobbyists or cowboys as leaders. We need an ELT of DOGE-style leaders and managers, perhaps on loan from SpaceX or the Boring Company, who will turn the place upside down, shake it hard, then put the pieces back in a way that benefits the American people and restores the Agency’s social license and organic purpose. Applicants need not have strong opinions about natural resources management; they must be biased toward action and purpose (hint: enabling employees to be comfortable living at home and working from a screen is irrelevant).
- Immediately restore the seasonal workforce. Plans to cut seasonal positions to save a billion lost dollars are DOA. The Forest Service is swarming with special “teams” comprised of Senior Executive Service employees, a government efficiency program instituted under President Carter that has now lost any utility other than distributing wealth to often undeserving bureaucrats. A warren of GS Fantastics who live wherever they want, commute to duty stations at considerable expense, and spend endless hours on Zoom and Google Meet calls pretending to be in close touch with the people on the ground play redundant supporting roles for the imperial SES ranks. This aspect of current Forest Service human resource practices infuriates employees on the ground and is expensive to maintain and support. The arrangement frustrates the public, who can’t find Smokey anywhere when needed and have to meet with virtual employees and contractors online in areas where internet access is often untenable. Human Resource officers are packed together in a single centralized space at the Albuquerque Service Center in New Mexico…well, they’re supposed to be there. More often than not, these HR pros are at home in (pick a state) and work by answering voice messages left on personal/government phones. Contrast this unresponsive reality with past practices when HR personnel were right down the hall, always available, and always responsive. HR is broken. It’s time to lead a Reduction in Force (RIF), targeted buyouts, directed reassignments, and new conditions of employment requiring employees to report to their physical offices (ranger districts, regional offices, Washington headquarters buildings, work centers, fire bases, Job Corps Centers), a new emphasis on wearing the Forest Service uniform, and many other Draconian demands aimed at forging a strong, unified, service and management-oriented Agency from scratch. Paint the vehicles Forest Service green. Eliminate the creep of nepotism through the ranks. Return to the policies of the 1970s and 80s that ensured related employees would not have conflicts in form or fact. Employees are marrying each other in ways that create economic advantages for couples with little oversight of ethical and practical considerations.
- Leading by example, these and other specific actions will reduce the workforce by 25 percent. There are now four regional foresters at the SES and GS-15 level at each of the nine regional offices, up from three pre-pandemic. None of these employees are reliably found working in their offices. They are leading by bad example. Cut their numbers in half, and they could still effectively serve by coming to work every day. Cutting specific numbers of SES and GS-13-15 employees at all levels through retirements, RIFs, directed reassignments, changed duty stations, requirements to physically report to and work from duty stations, and other measures designed to bring continuity and purpose to the Agency are crucial to success in the first two years of the new administration. Get rid of the army of senior philosophers and hobby enthusiasts in special programs and hire the army of doers who clear trails, clean campgrounds, fight fire, patrol rivers and lakes, and interpret the natural world to the public.
- Whether the new Chief and senior line officers and staff are foresters or range scientists or not, whether they have solid academic and research chops, and whether they can fight fire like nobody else are immaterial to the qualifications for effective, efficient leadership. The new Secretary of the Navy has never served in the military or commanded a ship at sea. He has bent and formed large business operations into entirely new ways of operating for shareholder and public benefit. We don’t need a Naval Commander. We need a business titan with the vision to reform and rally a badly underperforming Department and its business operations. What’s good for the Navy is good for the National Forests.
- Forest Service wildfire management policies aimed at sustainable outputs and outcomes in perpetuity (living functional forests) have been replaced by “alternative suppression strategies,” including “monitoring” and let-burn and light-it-up tactics. New leaders must quickly pivot to a purposeful, transparent, and accountable fire suppression policy prioritizing public safety, agency accountability, and environmental protection. There is no legal basis for intentional wildfire use nor adequate or comprehensive efforts to document and disclose cumulative effects. Alternative arrangements from CEQ have now fallen away along with the Chevron deference, both of which provided cover for current opaque policies. The new Chief must reassess the entire basis for intentional wildfire use, prepare strategic and programmatic plans, disclose cumulative effects, and perform an authentic and rigorous public planning process to build informed consent for this significant federal action affecting many property owners besides public National Forests.
- End lawsuits over firefighting practices. Standard fire-retardant chemistries pose environmental and health concerns due to their composition, which contributes to nutrient pollution, threatens water quality, inhibits plant growth, and poses potential health risks to the public and firefighters. Phosphorous and magnesium chloride are famously ill-suited for safe and effective use in either ground or aerial operations. Over the past 15 years, lawsuits have increasingly threatened the viability of what should be one of our most effective suppression and prevention tools. The EPA Safer Choice program has identified new chemistries that are more effective, much safer, and require much less handling and maintenance than current products. They can be sprayed or dropped in advance and work bone dry until washed away in fall rains.
- An otherwise promising agency contracting system, VIPR Virtual Incident Procurement, has been preempted and neutralized. The Agency organization in charge of VIPR insists on forcing a potentially effective, computer-based system that would quickly order equipment and services for emergencies into a 1960s-style review and authorization maze of old-school, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Urgent reform of the incident management system for wildfire response is needed by separating emergency and non-emergency operations, promoting district-level contracting, and increasing efficiency through proactive planning and resource management within 8 to 20 months. As it stands, VIPR is far removed from improved service, embracing instead a slow and unresponsive jobs program for underemployed SES and GS Fantastics who work from home in scattered teams and stove-pipe organizations who answer to no one. A suffocating and employee-centric management scheme has derailed the entire premise for system success that all contracting would proceed directly from the Ranger District to the contractors.
Leadership change is elemental for an entirely new Agency refit and performance expectations. The new Chief must not be from the ranks, nor should the Chief be one of the industry or environmental gladiators who spar over minor adjustments to a $10 billion budget. We need a disruptor, a person in a hurry, and a change agent on an epic scale, like the Secretary of the Navy. The safe but ineffective home office comfort zone, the shattered and scattered agency employees and organizations, and the days of working from home in a place far removed from a physical duty station are ending. The communities we serve do not telework. They don’t have duty stations five States away from the town square. Neither will we. It’s time to rejoin the circle of life in rural America, where our people and natural resources struggle for help and support.
As difficult as this sounds, a prescription to heal the Forest Service will work. All will be well. Future employees can and will sign up confidently for the Agency and their integral purpose to care for the land and serve people. Current employees will get it figured out through attrition, resignations, voluntary transfers, and dedicating themselves to becoming personal friends of the United States Forest Service in the Clan of the Smokey Bear.
While there is one good element in your too wordy thesis overall it is a simplistic view of the trends and solutions to modern governance. The one good element is that public servants at the Federal level and for the matter all levels of government should return to the office for a full work week. They are “public servants” and should be in the office to respond to people and to as suggested profit from interaction of colleagues and supervisors.
Otherwise, this Trumpian thesis is just that. It is naive to suggest that even if Trump’s billionaire cronies could make changes that they would even want to. The DOGE billionaires, one of whom earns $56 billion – yes billion a year, want to dismantle every regulation that interferes with their and Wall Street’s desires.
The idea that someone from within the agency should automatically be ruled out from acting as chief is offensive.
What is impacting the Forest Service is not unique. It is a problem in trying to have a governmental agency responsive to the diverse citizenry and more complex issues such as global warming that we are now facing.
Do not throw the baby out with the bath water.
One ‘solution’ that I could see the new Administration might (eventually) turn to is an outsourcing of most of the field work the Forest Service does, towards resource extraction projects. Of course, it would seem cheaper to some Republicans, but it would really be more costly, including mandated inspections by USFS personnel. However, that would fit right in with the MAGA dislike of DEI issues within the Forest Service. *micro smirk* Maybe they will also want a new glass ceiling installed, too.
Who is Frank? What’s his background, please?
Op-eds often say things such as, “Frank is the yahdah yahdah of x,y, z” so reader can get sense of author’s perspective.
I agree the agency is a far cry from what it was when I was a full time forester in the 1980’s and that change is needed. I disagree that going back to lots of logging, as implied by author, is the way to go. The whole notion of serving local communities has always ignored the reality that if these truly are “National Forests” then a person in Cleveland, Ohio has as much right to talk about management direction as a person in Seiad Valley, CA in the Klamath NF.
Interesting that the author made no mention of climate change; it’s certainly an influence on our forests and the role they can play in ecosystem services, etc.
Simply thinking that a business person could do the trick as the Chief overlooks the fact that there are many, really bad business people. Not all them are loved, sometimes because their policies are harmful to people and communities as highlighted by the recent shooting of the healthcare CEO. Perhaps he was very successful from a shareholder perspective but the company was really bad for lots of its policyholders. Is that what we want the USFS to be?
Sorry, Old Woodsman, Frank has posted here before so I didn’t put his info at the bottom. Here it is.
Frank Carroll is managing partner of Professional Forest Management, LLC, PFMc, a full service forestry and grassland consultancy. Frank has been working since 2012 to understand and help shape wildland fire policy. FPFMc has helped over 600 clients recover almost $600 million in damages from wildfires across the West. http://www.wildfirepros.com [email protected]
To blame remote work and the pandemic on changes in the USFS staffing, is ignorant at best.
Remote work and the other grievances here were a last gasp effort to keep employees, namely well educated and dedicated ones, who inevitably have all left, save the ones who live in communities they are more attached to than their jobs.
There was already a cancer in the USFS, and it started with the District Rangers and District timber/fire shops that have almost never been diminished /talked down to/told to say ‘how high’ as they are the ones who say “Jump!”, and went to the Supervisor Offices, Regional Foresters and Offices, and then National Leadership.
The USFS was once a great agency sought after by many for employment, including myself. You can’t fix something so broken by those who came before, and no one wants to stick around now to play that game. State, local, NGO, non-profit, and private jobs are sadly far more lucrative and inviting now.
“communities they are more attached to than their jobs”
Getting those kinds of employees in charge sounds like it could be a goal of the “local control” faction – as opposed to the “national” forest faction alluded to by OldWoodsman above (which is what our legal framework points us towards).
I meant that line as a positive comment about individuals at the USFS who remain, and work hard for the mission, instead of leaving for a more rewarding, less frustrating job, but have community attachments that keep them in the Service. I say that in part due to multitude of personal examples I know of throughout Region 5 and 6, that likely can be expanded on.
With that said, I do absolutely agree that employees like that who remain could instead lead to such a situation. Local knowledge is great, local control maybe less so, when it doesn’t come with the best knowledge or intentions.
Among the strongly suggested reforms, I noted a lack of solutions for the many lawsuits the Forest Service has to contend with. These lawsuits drain budgets and rob precious time from all employees and public. There has been a cumulative effect on most Forests.
Where I live, we have a new Forest Supervisor, who I met with today. He is interested in improving aspects of recreation, which have been disregarded for 20+ years by our previous environmentally focused administration. But now there isn’t money for NEPA or funding of projects.
Additionally, anlmost every time I’ve attempted to contact district employees, they unfortunately have been working from home. As a National Forest user, I get it.
I think much of this is spot on—lack of vision, weak leaders, bad decisions, loss of autonomy on local levels.
The root cause of all of this has been the diminishment of local districts, but since we’re not going back anytime soon, I think we do probably need some big picture shake ups. From my seat as a district-level forester, I sure don’t have much confidence in the WO or my RF.
Telework isn’t the cause of our problems, though it isn’t perfect—remote positions rarely make sense, and leaders do tend to telework too much. But flexible work is the major attractant of our best people. Its impacts on offices also varies widely. Rather than throwing it out carte blanch, return that discretion to the local level, and allow rangers to find a balance for how much telework is right for their district.
Remanding lands in the public domain to the tribal communities from whom they were seized can’t happen soon enough. But as much as this interested party would like to see a Forest and Land Management Service within the Interior Department a Trump administration consolidation will cause catastrophic damage to both agencies. Pending budget cuts are already putting essential recreation and conservation work putting tribal communities at risk.
I agree with a lot of this, including the need for a new chief. The fact that Moore is still in the post is shocking, given the self inflicted budget deficit.
One thing you’re leaving out on the need to double down on our presence in rural communities is that out west, these duty locations are simply not remotely affordable to anyone receiving a Forest Service paycheck. A giant issue that is largely outside the scope of what the agency can influence.
And we could go back to compounds in expensive areas, but I wonder whether that fits with the current ideas of young employees and families?
I’m imagining a manufactured home cluster at below-market rents.. might actually make living in popular places attractive.
Two prongs of difficulty occur here: affordability for popular places, but also desirability for more affordable, less popular places, and a related infrastructure problem for both. As much as the nostalgia boys may protest, single male breadwinner families aren’t much a thing anymore among the middle class and those adjacent, even less so on FS salaries. To say nothing of the larger reasons FS can’t staff locations. Do you have / want kids and work for the FS? Do you want them to have a half-decent education, or your spouse to have half-decent medical care? That wipes a good portion of FS duty locales off the map out the gate. Rural areas suffer from extensively degraded infrastructure of all sorts. Brain drain, drug problems, bad education, and few to no working options for a spouse. Even popular rural areas frequently have few and expensive options for education. They’re not good investments for a family, in one way of framing it. Below-market housing is nice, yes, but that won’t attract and retain people that want their kids to grow up in a place where they have options and quality of services.
Thank you for the guts to keep it real. In days of yore staff were so yoked to the outfit they’d put up with all kinds of family hardships. The disappearance of the “working Dad/Mom at home w kids” model really changed things, and I understand the need to make concessions like 5/4/9 scheds, virtual offices, and remote duty stations. I think this makes it more difficult to sustain a coherent “Office”, but not impossible.
I agree with Jim, but just to be historic, in the 80’s my husband (non FS) was working in Albany OR and I was working out of Bend. A genetics position- a lateral transfer- came open at Dorena. My forest supe couldn’t convince the Umpqua Forest Supe to lateral me, or to select me for the position. So the Mom and Dad model hasn’t really been true for 40 years at least. I would like if young families or old families wouldn’t have this stress, and at the same time we could think about what the problems really are with the current system, and how to overcome them.
Frank’s odd obsession with telework continues, and it’s not based in reality. I don’t know what the ROs and WO are doing, but my district has been 90%+ back in the office since September 2020.
Since you are a pseudonym, it is impossible to give your claim any credibility. I’m not sure what an RO or a WO is or any idea where your claimed “District” may be located. Your statements don’t jibe with my own experiences and observations in western Oregon, but so far as I know you may be a fiction writer or in a district from another country. Frank is a real person based in reality. You are a nobody making unsubstantiated claims. Who to trust?
No two offices are alike. As another anonymous, my district and forest have also been well above 90% back in person, and I also totally believe you that that’s not the case for yours. Just shows just how big an organization we have. I tend to agree with Forester that telework is a generally red herring for much of the agency, with certain exceptions (ie ROs)
A- why do you think the ROs are an exception?
Sir, if you can’t understand why current employees are not personally identifying themselves here there’s not much anyone can do for you. I suppose we should just leave the smokey wire as the place where grouchy retirees come to tell us about the good old days!
Hey, don’t leave, Bob is speaking for himself, not for the rest of us. I for one, as I have said, continue to appreciate your being here. For myself, I have pet peeves that I hope other people can overlook.
I was in your boots, a while back, and I learned not to use my name when posting my forestry opinions on the web. I was actually reported to The Chief about my postings. I had to at least inform my supervisor about the possible repercussions. I was advised to stop posting, but nothing else ever came from it. I’m retired now, and I see nothing wrong with keeping your identity safe. This place is more about content than identity.
I agree with Larry, this also happened to me. A very annoying FS supervisor of mine blamed on of my employees for what is now The Smokey Wire and refused to transfer her to a forest that she and I and the forest wanted. Because the WO had told him to, but got the actual target (me) wrong. Despite the fact that we learned in management training that if you hear something about an employee, talk to them first.
So it’s best to be careful. I also think it’s important for employees to be able to express their opinions. Being anonymous strikes the right balance IMHO.
I completely understand. I once donated money towards a FS friend’s legal defense when he was being punished for speaking out publicly on his own time about a FS decision using his private computer. What he did was protected by Constitutional law. As a FS mentor to me once said, “Free speech may be protected by law, but that doesn’t always make it smart to speak out.” I’m fully supportive of people staying anonymous on this site. Bob has an important voice too, but he gets grumpy. Ignore it. Sticks and stones….
Thanks Mike: I do admit to being grumpy occasionally, but see it as one of the few privileges of advancing age. In my defense, it is only when people use their anonymity to publicly discredit known others or call them names that I feel a need to yell at them. Especially when their insults are directed at me, because I’m also sensitive at times.
When Anonymous posters offer interesting opinions and insights, or ask good questions, I’m all in favor — I just wish they’d use a numbering system or consistent pseudonym or something to tell them apart. Also, in addition to being occasionally grumpy or sensitive, I was likewise ignorant of the fact that such negative consequences could be dealt to USFS and other government employees for publicly speaking out or participating in a discussion. None of these qualities seem to be improving with age.
Many people can’t find affordable anywhere housing near their required work station. Many others have mortgages or leades and can’t suddenly start 8 hour days 3 hours round trip from their office. Telework is essential if these offices plan to have more than 10% of their employees in many many locations. It is impossible to afford rent or a mortgage on less than 120k anymore, especially if you have a kid, a car payment or a school loan you are paying off. People need to be allowed to telework at least half time.
A- I agree, the situation is much more complicated than “the FS should stop allowing it.” For me, I just care if I get someone on the phone or to answer emails.. I really don’t care where they are as long as they’re responsive.
I respect Sharon’s willingness to include a wide range of voices but must say, at this point, that I’ve got to get a bit more blunt and point out that Frank is, as usual, offering a strange blend of insight and delusion…
Perhaps point by point this time.
1. “Today, the Forest Service is a mess, both spiritually and in fact. Deeply in debt (a billion dollars this fiscal year alone) and reduced for its social license to dependence on its role as a wildland fire department, the Agency is badly off course.”
This sentence is half fact and half gibberish. The fiscal mismanagement is, indeed, a problem. Social license is in, seemingly, a perpetual ebb for various project types. As to what the ‘spiritual’ mess might be, I haven’t the foggiest idea what this could even begin to mean. If somebody responds that the agency lacks “esprit du corps” or whatever, well, again, you’ve replaced one nearly-meaningless abstraction with another.
2. “Lacking accountability and poorly led and managed, the decentralized model that once made the outfit among the most effective in government has fallen into a caricature of past competence. The Chief has abandoned his role in sustainably managing our natural resources. He has given millions of dollars and inappropriate management responsibilities to outside non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to manage what he will not or cannot.”
Ditto to the above. There may be a kernel here, though it seems more likely that long standing trends played out under the chief than him causing these. But is this an endorsement or condemnation of decentralized management? The semantic ambiguity here makes it tough to tell.
3. “As with much of government, many employees no longer report to the office to share the synergies of working together, to provide immediate access to the public, to build esprit de corps and corporate knowledge, or to raise new generations of employees by mentoring and daily example.”
Starts to get weirder here. I don’t recall long-standing praise of government customer service before the pandemic, and many agencies have had telework programs in numerous forms for better part of 20 years. But Frank doesn’t strike me as one to let facts get in the way of a good polemic. Let me start to offer a polemic in turn: this is the worst, worst sort of argument carried out by reliance on pernicious abstractions. Nearly none of what Frank said here *actually means anything*. I’m kind of pulling the logical-positivist move here, but I’m sticking with it. Can you point to a “synergy”? Is the synergy in the room with us now? Seriously. As employed here synergy does not mean anything. It literally does not refer. I took a stab at esprit du corps above and I’ll do it again. It’s a vague way of making a collection of feelings sound like a more robust piece of a conceptual framework. The feelings in question are largely this: liking the people you work with and sharing an understanding of mission. That’s it. It has nothing to do with sharing space, or whatever. It’s being in French doesn’t make it more rigorous. Same with raison d’etre. I can do it too: J’en ai jusque-là.
4. “There is no water cooler or pickup cab where rookies and veterans share knowledge, skills, and common sense, and become the beating heart of their local communities. No champions have risen in the ranks since the pandemic to redefine its role in the larger government, society, and institutions.”
I have, in no career, ever had a meaningful “water cooler” interaction. This is another trope, and it’s frankly (heh) BS. Project and program mentoring via purposeful delegation? Yes. Absolutely a means to learn from more experienced folks. Casual interaction? Not really, no. You learn the tropes and mannerisms common to a culture, sure, but I don’t know why these are worth reproducing. They’re adiaphora (koine Greek, whoa watchout!) that have jack to do with accomplishing the mission.
5. “The Forest Service never recovered from the profound effects of the upheaval around agency management prerogatives following the Forest Wars of the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. Spotted owls and the greater good suffered from myopic political compromises that ended traditional community relationships with the National Forests and Ranger Districts and subjected the Agency to narrow political and environmentalist interests for which the Chief had no social license. Top-down decrees sought to “save spotted owls” at the price of sustainable rural economies. Agency strength and capabilities dwindled as increasingly restrained leadership searched in vain for a new place to land.”
This, alternatively, is probably more true than not in the functional sense (i.e. it’s what happened, but ignores why it happened), e.g. there’s the point that “traditional community relationships” aren’t enshrined in law whereas ESA obligations are. Conservatives often rightly point out that environmental groups often use procedural hurdles to fight battles against, say, timber production even though multiple use and sustained yield are well-established legal objectives for the FS to meet. That said, take your own medicine here: social license doesn’t overrule standing law, and the FS has no stand alone mandate to sustain rural economies over and above the other legal mandates the agency is subject to.
6. “The nail in the coffin of an otherwise rudderless agency has been catering to employees’ personal work preferences over production, performance, or service. Current leadership’s conspiracy of circumstances and intentional choices to scatter the Green Machine and her people to the wind left personnel and assets randomly falling wherever whimsy might lead, usually wildfire use instead of sustainable management.”
There’s Frank’s real hobby-horse, in the last sentence, though the leadup is, well, confusing. Not sure that “whimsy” is the reasoning behind wildland fire use, regardless of how one feels about it.
7. “The Chief and the Executive Leadership Team surrendered management priorities and future direction to a Fauchian cabal of misinformed CDC initiatives and weak OGC attorneys, focusing on work consolidation for its own sake and enabling employee-centric remote work and telework. After all, any duty station will work in an Agency without purpose and direction. Agency leaders prioritized employee safety and comfort over any other consideration, including public safety and service. Chief Moore promised to keep employees safe and protect their salaries as his preeminent mission. “The goal of the agency,” he wrote, “[is] to ensure we continue to pay and take care of all employees currently working for the Forest Service.” Caring for the land and serving people is a dim memory from a formerly reliable provider of a wide array of ecosystem services that enjoyed a 75 percent public approval rating.”
What’s the current public approval rating? This data point in a vacuum means nothing. I don’t believe in coddling folks and there is some of that culture but rendering it as part of the CDC malign influence is, well, put the copy of “Plandemic” down, Frank.
8. “As the pandemic unfolded, absent scientific evidence and without the courage of their convictions, fearful leaders first cajoled and then intimidated the workforce into accepting the medical judgment of people no one trusted and management advice from people no one knew. Employee confidence hit rock bottom, replaced by the fiction that any activity was better than no activity and that any path would be acceptable in the crisis. Employees retreated to their homes, sealed the doors, and joined the Laptop Class of teleworkers now under universal condemnation. Excesses of illiberal bureaucratic power resulted in wrong-headed and corrosive boons granted to those who do not directly contribute to the financial health and capacity of the Nation. Tax spenders are less cautious with our collective bank accounts than taxpayers who make a living from private efforts and sacrifice.”
Minor points of correction: no one you knew or talked to trusted them Frank, but be careful that you look outside the bubble.
9. “Suppose telework and remote duty stations were a good idea but on a limited basis. In any case, they are now anathema to a Nation resurgent in its need to strongly support and sustain rural and urban communities where our National Forests or offices reside and to ramp up economically vital industries, including our War industries, to mitigate the international interventionism of the past four years.”
Has international interventionism increased in the past four years, compared to say the previous 20? Yes, things were relatively quite for a period late teens through 2019/20 ish, but it’s mind bogglingly historically illiterate to take this as some kind of high point of neoconservative military policy (or whatever Frank means by interventionism, one reckons he listens to Mearsheimer)
Two, rural and urban? See, remote duty almost certainly supports smaller urban areas in the FS orbit as they provide means for folks to get their kids a half decent education and have their spouse able to work. Probably not so much for rural areas, true. However, Frank is using a tacit assumption that the FS exists to support rural economies first and foremost, and I’m not aware of any interpretation of the organic act and other relevant statutes that makes that the case. What is *owed* to rural areas?
10. “As in World Wars One and Two, the urgent priority for our precious natural resources is to provide raw materials for our weakened but rising industrial base. Focused on intentionally using wildfire to “restore fire to fire-dependent ecosystems,” Forest Service leaders have neither recognized nor pivoted to the most urgent change in National priorities in the current century. The lack of a coherent policy and compelling leadership on issues related to the new priorities, like healthy and efficient ecosystem services, means the Executive Leadership Team has been asleep at the wheel.”
What? I’m getting less patient here, but this is almost gibberish. Raw materials for our industrial base? Wood prices are down, dude. Paper hasn’t resurged. House starts are middling. Do you mean minerals? There’s cases to be made there but that’s a few portions of the 154 forests. Superior in MN with rare earths, parts of Nevada for lithium, maybe parts of the Kaibab have uranium?
11. Skipping some, but : “Applicants need not have strong opinions about natural resources management; they must be biased toward action and purpose (hint: enabling employees to be comfortable living at home and working from a screen is irrelevant).”
Here’s a hint Frank: if you want folks to not be doing screen work, you need to get rid of the requirements that created that work. I love typewriters but I don’t think anyone is going to do a BA or planning docs on those. Can you get NEPA, ESA, NFMA, and others repealed or neutered enough that they don’t generate “screen work”? If so, please share. There’s a catch: you can’t hang your argument on some meaningless faff like “synergy” or “esprit du corps.”
12. “Immediately restore the seasonal workforce. Plans to cut seasonal positions to save a billion lost dollars are DOA. The Forest Service is swarming with special “teams” comprised of Senior Executive Service employees, a government efficiency program instituted under President Carter that has now lost any utility other than distributing wealth to often undeserving bureaucrats. A warren of GS Fantastics who live wherever they want, commute to duty stations at considerable expense, and spend endless hours on Zoom and Google Meet calls pretending to be in close touch with the people on the ground play redundant supporting roles for the imperial SES ranks.”
SES isn’t on the GS pay scale, but whatever. Frank, as I think I’ve mentioned, retired as a 13 PAO right? Something like that. I mean, get yours while the getting is good and get out and criticize right? The hypocrisy is astounding. That said, do restore seasonals, but don’t expect that to be a panacea.
13. “This aspect of current Forest Service human resource practices infuriates employees on the ground and is expensive to maintain and support. The arrangement frustrates the public, who can’t find Smokey anywhere when needed and have to meet with virtual employees and contractors online in areas where internet access is often untenable. Human Resource officers are packed together in a single centralized space at the Albuquerque Service Center in New Mexico…well, they’re supposed to be there. More often than not, these HR pros are at home in (pick a state) and work by answering voice messages left on personal/government phones. Contrast this unresponsive reality with past practices when HR personnel were right down the hall, always available, and always responsive. HR is broken. It’s time to lead a Reduction in Force (RIF), targeted buyouts, directed reassignments, and new conditions of employment requiring employees to report to their physical offices (ranger districts, regional offices, Washington headquarters buildings, work centers, fire bases, Job Corps Centers), a new emphasis on wearing the Forest Service uniform, and many other Draconian demands aimed at forging a strong, unified, service and management-oriented Agency from scratch. Paint the vehicles Forest Service green. Eliminate the creep of nepotism through the ranks. Return to the policies of the 1970s and 80s that ensured related employees would not have conflicts in form or fact. Employees are marrying each other in ways that create economic advantages for couples with little oversight of ethical and practical considerations.”
This point would be frustrating if it weren’t hilarious. Almost the entire agency would probably be overjoyed at HR and IT folks being down the hall. Such bold vision.
The nepotism is probably less than it was in the past, and the issue with hiring is almost certainly the preposterous level of procedural hoops and stilted processes that take forever and drive out qualified candidates or don’t hire them before they go elsewhere.
Employees marrying each other? That was probably more in the past. The idea that ethical standards are lower or something is quite entertaining. When I was around I saw the behavior of, and heard stories from, the old guard types that Frank is so nostalgic for and, uh, not sure that he’s remembered things outside of rose-colored glasses.
14. “Whether the new Chief and senior line officers and staff are foresters or range scientists or not, whether they have solid academic and research chops, and whether they can fight fire like nobody else are immaterial to the qualifications for effective, efficient leadership. The new Secretary of the Navy has never served in the military or commanded a ship at sea. He has bent and formed large business operations into entirely new ways of operating for shareholder and public benefit. We don’t need a Naval Commander. We need a business titan with the vision to reform and rally a badly underperforming Department and its business operations. What’s good for the Navy is good for the National Forests.”
Maybe, maybe not. Curious as to how. Side point that the navy doesn’t have shareholders, but whatever.
15. “Forest Service wildfire management policies aimed at sustainable outputs and outcomes in perpetuity (living functional forests) have been replaced by “alternative suppression strategies,” including “monitoring” and let-burn and light-it-up tactics. New leaders must quickly pivot to a purposeful, transparent, and accountable fire suppression policy prioritizing public safety, agency accountability, and environmental protection. There is no legal basis for intentional wildfire use nor adequate or comprehensive efforts to document and disclose cumulative effects. Alternative arrangements from CEQ have now fallen away along with the Chevron deference, both of which provided cover for current opaque policies. The new Chief must reassess the entire basis for intentional wildfire use, prepare strategic and programmatic plans, disclose cumulative effects, and perform an authentic and rigorous public planning process to build informed consent for this significant federal action affecting many property owners besides public National Forests.”
Wonder if Frank wants rigorous NEPA on timber sales? (assuming that’s what the last sentence is getting at, sounds like the classic “do more NEPA” argument)
Said it before, say it again: why the magic Chevron word? What did Loper Bright change for forest management? What might it change in future suits?
And to add, there is no real legal basis for some of the things Frank is asking for elsewhere. The FS has no legal mandate to be the “beating heart” of rural communities. The FS has no legal ability to prioritize “social license” (famous weasel word) over legal mandates under, say, ESA. FS has no legal requirement to sustain rural economies, at least not over top of other legal requirements.
16. “An otherwise promising agency contracting system, VIPR Virtual Incident Procurement, has been preempted and neutralized. The Agency organization in charge of VIPR insists on forcing a potentially effective, computer-based system that would quickly order equipment and services for emergencies into a 1960s-style review and authorization maze of old-school, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Urgent reform of the incident management system for wildfire response is needed by separating emergency and non-emergency operations, promoting district-level contracting, and increasing efficiency through proactive planning and resource management within 8 to 20 months. As it stands, VIPR is far removed from improved service, embracing instead a slow and unresponsive jobs program for underemployed SES and GS Fantastics who work from home in scattered teams and stove-pipe organizations who answer to no one. A suffocating and employee-centric management scheme has derailed the entire premise for system success that all contracting would proceed directly from the Ranger District to the contractors.”
Mostly rehash, but I want to point out that anyone who unironically invokes the “soviet” card in this circumstance is being a crank. Procurement could absolutely be better. But instead Frank slides into a predictable screed about SES and high GS etc etc et
17. On to the conclusion:
“We need a disruptor, a person in a hurry, and a change agent on an epic scale, like the Secretary of the Navy. The safe but ineffective home office comfort zone, the shattered and scattered agency employees and organizations, and the days of working from home in a place far removed from a physical duty station are ending. The communities we serve do not telework. They don’t have duty stations five States away from the town square. Neither will we. It’s time to rejoin the circle of life in rural America, where our people and natural resources struggle for help and support. As difficult as this sounds, a prescription to heal the Forest Service will work. All will be well. Future employees can and will sign up confidently for the Agency and their integral purpose to care for the land and serve people. Current employees will get it figured out through attrition, resignations, voluntary transfers, and dedicating themselves to becoming personal friends of the United States Forest Service in the Clan of the Smokey Bear.”
Let’s just be honest – this is one of the stupidest, crankiest things I’ve ever read. Leaving aside the earnest use of meaningless terms gleaned from business blogs or whatnot: “the communities we serve do not telework”. Someone should tell Frank about rural outmigration due to telework (e.g. https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america). Can attest from experience it’s one of the only things brining new activity that isn’t drugs into the washed up little town I grew up in. The final sentence, ugh. The FS, like any other civilian agency or private company, is an employer. A source of income and benefits in exchange for labor. It’s nice to like where you work. It helps to care. But the arrangement is primarily one of money for services rendered. The idea that it requires some kind of cultish devotion is just creepy and sad.