New Administration: Need for Moderation Policy Experiment

I understand that the new Admin has raised a great many fears and anxieties, as well as hopes, among the population here in the US. There’s a wide panoply of actions the new Admin has taken or attempted to take, or saber-rattled about, just in the last few weeks. Hoping to return to a non-moderated space, I listened to Jon’s concern that this requires something different of us and reflected/prayed/thought about what to do. How can we have open minds, open hearts, be curious and learn from each other, without going into generic what feels like “hate and fear” space? The more I reflected, the more I thought that we can’t strictly stay away from the political, but we can stick to a spirit of appreciative inquiry (that’s a term from the environmental conflict resolution literature) and not generalized castigation.

Below are my predictions for this Admin. My experiences with Admins over time has brought me the lesson of deep humility.
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The Admin will have good ideas and bad ideas, within our area of interest, and with regard to other kinds of policies. We will disagree among ourselves as to whether these are good or bad ideas.

Here and there, they will pick good appointees and well.. less good appointees from our points of view. Some we will agree are good or bad, and others we will disagree about, just as we did in the last three Admins. We may well be surprised by how they actually perform compared to what we thought, although most of us won’t have direct experience dealing with them.

Congress and the Courts will weigh in to keep some of these ideas from being implemented, regardless of whether we consider them good or bad. Indeed, regardless of whether we contact our Congressfolk and weigh in.

Some policies will be implemented well, and some poorly. The spectrum is likely to be.. no, it’s fine the way it is; yes it needs change, but not that change; yes it needs change, but not via that mechanism; yes it needs change, and that mechanism might work, but they are implementing it too quickly.

At the end of the four years, we’ll have some idea of how it all worked out. I would guess in some areas things will be better, in other areas things will be worse. But we’ll disagree about better and worse, and how important the different areas are.

But I don’t know, you don’t know and pundits and the media don’t know how the story will turn out, for our own area, or others.

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Our goal here is to have discussions of the ideas, policies and implementation from a wide diversity of views and experiences.
We need to stick to the topic and not more general issues. This is a slippery slope, for sure.

Here’s an example:
I wonder why Fix our Forests bill lost the part about the arbitration pilot?
vs.
Congress is a bunch of scum-sucking sleazeballs beholden to special interests.

We need to be respectful of each other and to some extent, people who are not here. This is also a slippery slope.

I’ve argued for this, with a notable lack of success thus far. So we’re going to try something different. For the next week or so, I am going to moderate all comments. It’s not fair, when there are many gray areas and slippery slopes, to ask a bunch of us to make calls on this the same way. And if we didn’t moderate the same way, it wouldn’t be fair to you commenters. The downside of this is that approval of comments won’t happen as quickly, so I ask for your patience. I’ve pointed out the two slippery slopes above, but at the end of the day, we want to hear your views and why you hold them. At the beginning, I’m probably going to be a bit stricter, to force a bit of a reset.

Hopefully, this will be only needed in the short term.

If you have heard of something you would like covered and discussed here, use the tab on top (at least on computers and tablets) New Topics or Questions and we will discuss it. There are many things coming out from the new Admin and elsewhere now, maybe too many to cover here, so I need your help.

I believe that we can do this thing.. we can make it together through this time as a community focused on learning from each other, in an atmosphere of curiosity and mutual respect.

9 thoughts on “New Administration: Need for Moderation Policy Experiment”

  1. Sharon, you are being thoughtful about all that is going on, and that is appreciated. I think that those of us with a lot of federal experience would agree that we are in uncharted territory. My friend Blaine Cook, has always told me that administrations come and go, and by and large, life at the Forest Service doesn’t really change much. Sure, every new Chief has something they want to focus on, but nothing earth-shaking. Largely, I agree with him, until now.

    I worked in Region 6 during the Spotted Owl days and left before the RIF began. I remember when Al Gore wanted to reinvent government. There was talk about reducing the number of employees and I was worried about my job. I wrote to my Senators and Representative. Eventually, there was a buyout and I was relieved. The Salvage Rider also occurred under Clinton’s Administration. An interesting fact from that time is that Clinton was the last President to balance the budget.

    So, yes, things come and go under both Republicans and Democrats but this time feels different. I personally have never seen employees being subjected to the kinds of things that are going on now. Interesting that the Administration repeatedly claims that they only want “the Best and the Brightest” to work for the federal government. I wonder how many Best and Brightest are looking at what is going on and are thinking “I want to be part of that!” I would argue that they may not be the brightest if they do.

    I completely agree that over the next four years, there will be good things and bad things that will happen. There are definitely areas within the federal government that could be improved. Efficiencies to be gained. I do, however, think this needs to be done in a very thoughtful manner and with a lot of consideration to the employees. This is not what I am seeing so far. It looks to be more of a “shoot from the hip” approach, and whether or not it is intended, it is overwhelming employees. It seems the rush is on to get rid of employees. What is the rush? Do they have to do it quickly before the gig is up? Before the mid-term elections?

    Thanks, Sharon for being thoughtful on this and providing a space for discussion.

    Reply
    • I agree, Dave. The wave of resignations and retirements, along with a hiring freeze and problems with seasonal hiring, has the potential to gut the land management agencies before they can deal with any new policy or initiatives. After the past couple of weeks I don’t know why anyone would want to work for the USFS, BLM or NPS. But maybe that’s the point. And maybe disabling the agencies is a precursor to privatizing (at best) or selling the land to the highest bidder.

      Reply
    • I think it might be worth listening to the Hotshot Wakeup podcast on this.. he wonders why there was no public outcry over the “hiring no temps” next year, certainly that affects the work of the Forest Service.
      Also there was no outcry over giving out Forest Service work via grants during the last Admin. The only people who seemed to care were retirees.

      Now I grant that permanents are different from temps, but to me all these actions are against fed employees.

      And I would say three things about the rush:
      1. Delaying and stalling is a time-proven tactic of bureaucracies.
      2. Part of this approach is setting a tone that things will be different. So there is a certain amount of drama involved (think tariffs).
      3. They have the unions and the courts to deal with plus many employees who are actively resistant.

      Who said that they wanted “the best and the brightest?” It reminds me of the David Halberstam book. That did not end well..

      Reply
      • I listened to the podcast. He brings up some interesting points. I don’t know who all the hypocritical people are that he knows but everyone that I know was and is upset about the seasonal hiring debacle. I have talked about it here in the past. I have also seen a lot of mention about it on Facebook. I think the current outcry from the general public is due to the fact that this is affecting the entire government and not just one agency. I also don’t know why there has not been more concern about all of the Keystone agreements and grants. I think the Forest Service was pretty successful in keeping it all on the down low. It was a mess in my mind and a waste of taxpayer dollars. I think employees were afraid to mention anything about it. Best to keep your mouth shut.

        I think that I have been pretty critical of the Forest Service under the Biden Administration and Randy Moore. Maybe too critical sometimes. But using the old “What about what they did” doesn’t negate what is going on now.

        I understand why they are in a rush to get rid of employees. However, I don’t think your three items justify treating employees this way. The seasonal employee decision was a “disaster” (one of Trump’s favorite words, everything, and everyone is a disaster) and what is going on now is also a disaster. Downsizing or rightsizing the federal government does not need to happen overnight. Whenever I get in a hurry, I usually make mistakes and do something that I regret later.

        Have you really not heard the “Best and Brightest” spiel? Pete Hegseth and others have gone on and on about that. Yes, maybe Hegseth needs to study his history a little bit. It would be good for a Secretary of Defense to have some knowledge about the Vietnam War.

        Reply
        • I’m curious about why putting the short-term IRA:BIL funding in grants was a bad thing, given the agency didn’t have the staffing to execute all the funding without the assistance of partners.

          Reply
          • That’s a decent question. I have seen a number of the Supplemental Project Agreements from several of the Regions. These are not all standard. They are dealt with differently by Regions and it seems by the Partner also. With some of these, there is a good bit of monitoring by the FS, and for others, it appears to be not much. There are always the FS costs built in and then there are a number of other costs, overhead, etc. by the Partner. Some of these are pretty significant, paying for travel and other things. So, there are the costs of funding the FS and the Partner overhead and misc. costs. Essentially doubling the overhead costs in some cases.

            Why couldn’t these have been done through IDIQ contracts and using the well-established processes of contracting? Why does the FS not have an easily accessible way for the public to find out what is going on with all of these agreements, so we can find out how our tax dollars are being spent and what has been accomplished? The FS is not open about this at all. We filed a FOIA many months ago and have still not received all of the SPA’s we requested from all of the Regions.

            Then the FS budget problems come to light, not hiring seasonals, etc. and the FS has transferred many millions of dollars to NGO’s. I think with some creativity, the FS could have figured out how to keep the dollars and work in-house. The Keystone Agreements were seen as an easy way to deal with all that money and have someone else do the work. That’s just my opinion.

            Reply
            • I’d add I’ve seen 22% overhead on some. Also the NGOs are hiring people short term for what used to be employee jobs. Often they don’t have the qualifications required by the federal workforce, and the expertise they gain will be lost. Then there are the problems Dave alluded to with transparency and accountability.

              Reply
      • “he wonders why there was no public outcry over the “hiring no temps” next year, certainly that affects the work of the Forest Service.”

        I’ve said before and I will say it again, HSWU podcast deals in rumor and innuendo, and even when there is facts, it is all hidden behind hand waving, for the point of making money, and arguing that fire is more important in the USFS/BLM and state agencies than anyone else in existence who has a college degree and forest smarts.

        That said, the reason I would guess there is not an outcry over the lack of hiring seasonal in 2025, is that 1) most of the country doesn’t know/doesn’t care, 2) the places most affected (like where I live) are tired and quite frankly hate the USFS (and in some cases BLM). Not because of the individuals, or the agencies, but just the abject lack of communication, action, or ties to reality when it comes to actions around land management.
        It will be interesting to see when the fire side of the USFS and others suddenly find that the lack of non-fire hires, seemingly impacts them, either for lack of work, or when they are ordered to do a whole lot more work.
        I mean, from last May through September, if the number of times I could count seeing the local USFS hand crew sitting around, working out, sitting around, working out again, or absent (personal vehicles absent), but paid a full wage all in view of a small rural town, well, I could buy a lot of ice cream.

        Reply

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