Direct Contracting Bad, Contracting by Grantees Good?: E&E News Story

The headline of this E&E News story is “Trump downsizing may speed Forest Service outsourcing”.  Now, if our source is correct, and it’s really a $1 bill deficit achieved under the Biden Admin, is it too early to be blaming Trump? I’ve heard of pre-bunking, but is this pre-blaming?

Already struggling to close a multibillion-dollar maintenance backlog on lands it manages, the Forest Service may have to rely more on private donors and contractors to care for the national forest system under the second Trump administration, people who work with the agency say.

Congress created the NFF in the early 1990s to provide a way for nonfederal partners such as corporations to support work on national forests. It also receives direct funding from the Forest Service and saw a big boost from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Since 2020, the NFF has received $587 million in grants, contracts and related funds from the Department of Agriculture for tree planting and various conservation work. The organization in turn contracts with other groups such as Conservation Legacy for work on the ground.

Interesting that the maintenance backlog is mentioned, but not the self or political-generated(we don’t know) financial crisis.  And to paraphrase the old quote (attributed to Everett Dirksen but apparently printed in the NY Times in 1938).. “half a billion here, half a billion there, pretty soon it begins to add up to real money.”

My view on this is that  “both things are true”; partners do useful work that is helpful (yay!, thank you!), AND we can question whether this is the most effective tool for getting it done.. versus hiring people, and contracting directly. Especially when there is no match requirement.

If the short-term problem is not enough Contracting Officers and an atrociously inept government-wide hiring system, there are a variety of different solutions that could be imagined. If hiring and contracting requirements are necessary for good government, why should we allow grantees to effectively evade them? Maybe all the requirements the FS has aren’t necessary and some are ideas that sound great on paper but aren’t working in practice.  Thinking that “bad” contractors need to be watched carefully and “good” partners hardly need to be watched at all might lead us into accountability issues, leading to Congress not wanting to give the FS more bucks..and a funding death spiral.

Big corporate donors to the NFF in 2023 included Polaris Industries and Tellurian, each of which contributed $1 million or more, according to the foundation’s 2023 annual report.

Other corporate supporters included the recreational vehicle maker Airstream, REI Co-Op, Verizon and Exxon Mobil.

Government support still outpaced such contributions, with the organization reporting $30 million in government grants and contracts, compared to slightly more than $20 million in contributions and pledges. Together, the funding helped the NFF issue 311 grants or contracts for work on 3,114 miles of national forest system trails, among many other jobs. One of those recipients is Conservation Legacy, based in Durango, Colorado, where President Amy Sovocool told POLITICO’s E&E News the organization performs almost any task in the forest other than fighting wildfires.

(my bold)  Inquiring minds might ask, “why didn’t the FS fund Conservation Legacy directly?”. Is there 10% overhead for each organization? So maybe 20% total?

Advocacy and lobbying groups such as the Nature Conservancy, the National Wild Turkey Federation and Ducks Unlimited have seen their roles expand, too, through ongoing arrangements with the Forest Service to thin forests, conduct prescribed burns and harvest timber.
The NWTF has a 20-year master stewardship agreement signed with the Forest Service in 2022 and has been among the leading purchasers of timber from national forests.

There are two things I think are interesting about the discussion below.  The most massive transfer of work outside the Forest Service, with reduced accountability compared to contracting, was the Biden Admin’s Keystone and other agreements (like the Coconino-Southern Baptist Convention project).   Yet the article seems more worried about future Republican-generated contracting.

And Andy Stahl and Jim Furnish weigh in:

But officials’ growing reliance on outside groups for a multitude of jobs is drawing scrutiny from some people close to forest policy.

The new administration, with a Republican congressional majority to back it, may seek to accelerate privatization in national forests, said Andy Stahl, executive director of
Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. It’s tempting to support such moves, Stahl said, given the agency’s management challenges in juggling wildfire and other priorities. But there’s also a danger of “mission creep” as the type of work the Forest Service hires out expands.

I’d add “knowledge and expertise loss.”

Groups like the NWTF support forest management targeted at maintaining hunting grounds, which sometimes means clear-cutting to create more favorable habitat. That’s drawn criticism from environmental groups. Relying heavily on contractors “creates these sort of perverse financial incentives for logging,” said Ellen Montgomery, public lands campaign director for Environment America, an environmental group based in Denver.

I think these folks have to pick a lane also.. if you think the NWTF might influence the FS to do things it wouldn’t otherwise do, why not Trout Unlimited?

Others question whether outsourcing actually saves the government money. In 2012, the Center for American Progress published a report suggesting the federal government could save money by bringing some contract employees on as federal hires.

So CAP thinks contracting not good, granting is good.  At least we can infer that CAP thinks that because they seemed to be running the Biden Admin, which encouraged the FS to flood NGOS with BIL and IRA megabucks via grants.  And the grantees generally contract to do the work, so it’s still contracting, though not directly. So CAPs analysis would still fit? Puzzling.

To Furnish, the former deputy chief, the Forest Service lost some accountability in turning over so much work and money from the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act to outside groups. The Inflation Reduction Act alone provided $5 billion to the agency, but the agency now finds itself in the budget squeeze that’s resulted in reduced hiring.

Forest Service officials blame lower-than-expected job attrition, mandatory cost-of- living increases for employees and inflation, among other factors. And they’re predicting more need for help from outside. Furnish said he has a hard time making sense of the situation. “It just kind of boggles my mind to think how things went from a pot of gold to a budget shortfall.”

I agree with Jim on all those points.  Maybe someday, as Rich J. suggested in a comment, we’ll get some kind of story about what happened to cause the budget crisis that makes sense.