First, the grapevine says that Christine Dawe is acting Undersec over the FS at USDA. I couldn’t find the announcement online, but if I’m wrong, let me know.
Jim Petersen did an interview with her at Evergreen here. The folks I know all say that she is a great choice, and not to be parochial, but she has always been helpful and clear in her communication with me at TSW.
From the interview, this sounds like the kind of thing that DOGE could possibly help with, if the charge isn’t too much for them. Many generations of FS employees have broken their pick against “analysis paralysis”; and I think the FS only reflects part of a wider cultural change that cultures like wildfire have somehow avoided. I suppose some public administration scholars have examined this.
Dawe: I agree. This may sound trite, but we need a bigger bang for our buck. We need to come up with better approaches to getting work done than we have had in the past. Analysis paralysis has been a real challenge for us, and it has affected both efficiency and measurable success. And that has hurt employee morale and our external relationships. Our Region’s leadership has recognized the need to change and we are working hard at that.
Evergreen: Easy to describe, hard to do.
Dawe: It has been hard, but we are doing it – the work of integrating resource management is going well, and we have some very talented and dedicated collaborative groups in this Region that see an integrated approach as key to their success and ours. It’s an exciting time, full of opportunity
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BLM Acting Director
The appointments are temporary roles for Senate-confirmed positions or presidential appointments, and each is authorized to fulfill the duties of the post as outlined by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. The temporary assignments expire May 31 unless a new person is assigned to the post on an acting basis or the post is filled by a Senate-confirmed appointee.
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Raby, the new acting BLM director, was appointed as head of BLM’s Nevada office in December 2018, during Trump’s first term. He’s a career bureau employee, having worked at BLM for more than 25 years. He has also worked at the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service.
The BLM Nevada office manages 48 million surface acres and 59 million subsurface acres of mineral estate. It oversees the agency’s largest mining program, its largest wild horse and burro program, and some of the most important sage grouse habitat on federal land.
The state was also the epicenter for the Biden administration’s efforts to expand utility-scale solar power development on federal lands.
“He has lots of field experience and is well respected by career employees,” said Steve Ellis, who served as BLM deputy director of operations during former President Barack Obama’s second term. “This was a good move.”
Christine was my Deputy FS, on the A-S back in the day. I have a few stories…..🤣. However, very smart, articulate and always thinking. The RF at the time, (Corbin Newman) told me to load her up on duties and find her breaking point. We’d just had a 500,000 + acre fire, was in the midst of a Forest Plan Revision, Travel Management, largest stewardship and land exchange in the FS, etc. I walked into her office one day as asked if she could take on one more thing. She looked up at me, frazzled hair, panic in her voice and said “I think I have all I can do for now”…..🤣🤣🤣
Great choice!
That seems like a mildly creepy management approach to me..”find their breaking points”, but OK.
Yeah, didn’t realize the RFs went to the bond villain school of management. Maybe middle leader was different back in the day.
Middle Leader? We passed that a long time ago. If you read my other response it may make more sense. I don’t remember how many district rangers, or Forest Sups came out of my mentoring but it was many great folks!
Oh no, it was all in fun; that’s how I rolled anyway, if we weren’t having a great time in what we were doing it was boring! 🤣
Christine was a PMF and Capitol Cities Coordinator (may have been a different name in Region 3) before coming to the Forest, and just full of energy!
I don’t think analysis paralysis is caused by what many think it is caused by. I often find USFS analyses to be 10 times longer than they need to be, but then not include the actual information needed. The result is a time suck for everyone involved. I believe the cause of the problem is often (but not always) a combination of inexperience, poor training and writing skills, and complicated laws. It is extremely common to have GS 7 biology/forestry/fire techs work up to GS11 specialist positions and then be tasked with writing documents more complicated than anything they wrote in college, documents that will be picked apart by the public and other agencies, and potentially litigated. It also doesn’t help that many USFS GS11s are supervised by people outside of their discipline, along with being given totally unrealistic timelines to complete documents. It takes real effort, and it takes personal knowhow, to train staff, and some staff are not cut out for the work. Few studied a natural science with the intent of sitting in front of a computer 3/4 of the year to draft regulatory documents.