‘Litany of problems’ awaits Forest Service leaders in 2025: E&E News

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore hasn’t revealed his plans, but a new agency head would face tight budgets, reduced hiring and ongoing challenges.

GREENWIRE | The Forest Service enters the new year with an array of headaches: worsening wildfires, destructive storm damage to Southeast forests and a budget gap so deep that the agency’s stopped hiring seasonal workers to help maintain its 193 million acres of forest.

And if history is a guide, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore will soon hand off those challenges to a successor.

As the second Trump administration prepares to sweep in later this month, the Forest Service faces a transition as well. Groups and lobbyists who follow the agency say the top tasks include fixing the agency’s finances, righting some bureaucratic stumbles and managing forests for wildfire risks. Some former Forest Service employees, as well as lawmakers, suggest a reorganization may be in order.

“The reality is, things aren’t going swimmingly,” said a representative for an outside group that works regularly with the Forest Service, requesting anonymity to speak openly about the agency’s struggles. “It’s a litany of problems.”

Dave Mertz, a retired Forest Service natural resources employee in the Black Hills National Forest who’s been critical of the agency’s fiscal management, laid the troubles at Moore’s feet.

“I guess I feel that Randy Moore has not done well,” Mertz said, adding, “It’s certainly not all his fault, but he’s the captain of the ship.”

Looking forward, Mertz said, the Forest Service “desperately needs some strong leadership and from someone that knows the agency.”

Others give Moore some slack, noting that he inherited an agency that wasn’t fully staffed to handle the unprecedented rush of billions of dollars in new appropriations from Congress.

“That’s what fell in his lap,” said Steve Ellis, chairman of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees and a former deputy director at the Bureau of Land Management, who cautioned against sweeping changes at the agency. “You need to look at the picture of the whole thing.”

Moore hasn’t publicly stated his intentions, and a Forest Service spokesperson declined to speculate on his plans. But outside groups said Moore, a career Forest Service employee, was already drawn away from potential retirement as a regional forester to take the top job early in the Biden administration.

Forest Service chiefs — who aren’t political appointees — have left the position just months into new administrations since at least the Clinton administration, more than two decades ago.

In a post on the Forest Service website, Moore said he’s looking forward to an all-employee call in the new year — a normal annual practice that might shed light on his direction — but such a call hasn’t been scheduled, said an agency spokesperson, Alan Abernethy.

Moore said in the post, “As always, this year was filled to the brim with achievements, all made possible by the work you’ve accomplished in conjunction with our partners and communities,” citing work from reforestation to improving firefighter pay and benefits and tackling wildfire risks.

A career or political appointment?

A Forest Service chief would typically be named after a new Agriculture undersecretary for natural resources and environment is nominated; the undersecretary slot wouldn’t be filled until a new secretary is confirmed by the Senate.

Brooke Rollins, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Agriculture secretary, hasn’t run into any obstacles on Capitol Hill. For the undersecretary’s position — which oversees the Forest Service — several outside groups have written to the Trump transition team and Rollins endorsing Thomas Schultz, chief of staff and vice president of resources and government affairs for the Idaho Forest Group, a wood products company.

Schultz was formerly director of the Idaho Department of Lands and worked for 14 years at the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.

For years, the Forest Service chief has been a career employee for the agency. Administrations often tap regional foresters like Moore, who ran agency operations in California for years ahead of the promotion. But there’s no guarantee the tradition will hold; outside groups said the ranks of regional foresters are thinner on experience than in the past, and the Trump team is anything but traditional in filling leadership roles.

In the Senate, incoming Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee (R-Utah) has called for ditching past practice entirely and making the job a political appointment subject to Senate confirmation. There’s been no indication his recent introduction of a bill to do that will gain traction this year, however.

A discussion of Lee’s proposal on the forest policy blog “The Smokey Wire” started with the headline “The Worst Idea Ever?”

The blog, popular with former Forest Service employees, has also hosted recent discussions about reorganizing the Forest Service’s leadership structure and possibly consolidating some of the agency’s nine regional offices (Alaska is Region 10, but there there is no Region 7, which was eliminated in the 1960s).

Ellis said a wholesale restructuring would be too disruptive and costly, and probably not fix the problems it’s meant to address.

“The question you’ve got to ask is, ‘What’s broke?’” Ellis said. “When employees hear ‘reorganize,’ they want to duck and cover.”

Budget gaps and criticism over spending

Whoever leads the agency will immediately confront tight budgets and criticism that the Forest Service fumbled money from the Biden administration’s big spending packages: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Officials have scrambled to plug a budget gap estimated at $750 million, mainly through reduced hiring. That includes suspending hiring of non-fire-related seasonal and temporary workers, whose duties include maintaining national forests — an area that’s been stuck in a backlog for years.

Moore has attributed some of the trouble to mandatory cost-of-living increases for employees, although other federal agencies have absorbed those costs without such dire outcomes.

The agency’s use of Infrastructure Act funds has faced scrutiny, too, that could carry over into Forest Service practices in the new administration.

The biggest discrepancy was over money spent on salary and other overhead expenses in state and private forestry accounts. The USDA’s inspector general in August reported that the Forest Service exceeded a $9.16 million annual limitation on such spending by as much as $37 million, or about three times as much as was allowed.

Forest Service officials disagreed with the inspector general’s interpretation and with auditors’ recommendation to implement new accounting controls.

Then, in December, the Office of Inspector General questioned $13.2 million in Forest Service spending in Region 6 — the Pacific Northwest — on roads and trails with funding from the infrastructure law. The agency couldn’t verify that it spent the money on projects in line with the law’s requirements, the OIG said. Auditors recommended the agency recover as much as $632,427 that appeared to be spent on work that wasn’t eligible for Infrastructure Act funding.

This year, the Forest Service will begin to direct billions of dollars — recently appropriated by Congress — toward Southeast forests damaged by storms. The biggest hit was to the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina, where Tropical Storm Helene in September brought catastrophic flooding that will take years to recover from.

The Forest Service, for its part, pointed to accomplishments during Moore’s term.

“Chief Moore and his team led the agency through a complex and challenging year that resulted in the agency making substantial contributions towards USDA’s top priorities,” said Forest Service spokesperson Wade Muehlhof in a statement.

Those priorities include reducing threats of catastrophic wildfires in high-risk firesheds, improved health and resiliency of forests, providing the nation with timber and wood products, and working toward better wildland firefighter pay and benefits, Muehlhof said.

Under Moore’s leadership, the Forest Service exceeded its acreage goals for forest treatments — such as thinning and prescribed fire — to reduce potential fuel for wildfire. The agency sold 2.88 billion board-feet of timber in the most recent year, Muehlhof said, although questions linger about how trees cut for firewood should be counted in such statistics.

Ellis said Moore’s long Forest Service resume before he came into the job should set an example for the selection of a new chief, whenever that happens.

“The Forest Service, they’ve got a really complex mission, and you’ve got to have someone who’s been around,” Ellis said.