Forest Service Braces For Up to 7,000 Layoffs: E&E News Story

One thing I wonder about is whether other agencies have the same proportional cuts as the Forest Service. I’m not hearing about them, but I’m not following them closely, either. Anyway, here’s the story.  It’s interesting that the story is based on two agency employees and “others familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking.”

The Forest Service plans to shed as many as 7,000 additional employees in the coming months through force reductions and early retirements, with a heavy toll on research that supports healthier forests, according to two agency employees and others familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking.
The mass departures — more than double the number terminated in the recent firings of probationary employees, if realized — would affect a wide range of missions as the administration looks to shift the agency’s decision-making away from Washington and toward local offices. The Forest Service had around 30,000 total employees prior to this year’s reductions.

With a large organizational chart of managers compared with other departments, one Forest Service employee told POLITICO’s E&E News on Wednesday, “We are sheep headed to slaughter when it comes to our innocence compared to other agencies.”

I’m not exactly sure what that means. “With a large organizational chart”  sounds like the FS might be chosen because they appear to be full of fat and tasty for cost-cutting exercises. Not sure what innocence has to do with it.

And wouldn’t the correct comparison be “compared to other agencies that manage large chunks of federal land”. And I could think of only one.

A reader pointed out: USFS has 35,000 employees for 193 million surface acres. BLM has 10,000 employees for 245 million surface acres and 700 million mineral acres. It was 10,000 employees 20 years ago.     Perhaps the FS has more rangers and employees per square mile than the BLM? But having fewer and consolidating would run against being more present in local communities; those same communities the FS needs to build trust with for successful wildfire prevention, management and community resilience.

Employees who shared details about the plans aren’t authorized to speak publicly and requested that their names be withheld.
The projections are part of the Forest Service’s personnel-cutting plans due for submission to the White House by March 13, a deadline other agencies face as well.
They reflect twin objectives of making the forest agency smaller and realigning policies to be more in tune with the new administration.
Even in the current atmosphere of workforce reductions, the envisioned cuts were jarring to outside groups and individuals who work in forest policy.
“I don’t know how they do anything with cuts like this,” said Susan Jane Brown, principal at Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm in Oregon.

Hopefully we can get a copy of the document at some point.

They also come as the Department of Agriculture faces a court order to temporarily reinstate probationary employees terminated February.
Details emerged as the new Forest Service chief, Tom Schultz, prepared for his first employee wide call Thursday, after stepping into the job at the beginning of the week.
Schultz is a former timber executive in Idaho with a background in public land management there and in Montana.

The call was rescheduled.

Other priorities shared with E&E News include cutting forest restoration tied to climate change

But all restoration and fuels treatments were “tied to” climate change, if only through a few sentences here and there.

and reducing or eliminating urban and community forestry that supports tree-planting in public spaces throughout the country.

I think the UCF program has several complexities associated with it. 1. It gives urban people an opportunity to support the FS budget (quite significant, given proportions of urban vs. rural people), 2. It can be used to reward communities that an Admin wants to reward (as one Clinton-era Undersec was heard to say “the UCF  authorities are so broad you could drive a truck through them.”), and 3) it raises the question “what is the federal government’s role in communities? Certainly cities could pay for their own trees, or native plant programs or sidewalks, or rural communities could pay for wildfire mitigation and fire department support.  Then we might talk about “why not block grants to the States?” and tell them it’s generally to support a laundry list of programs, which would save much administration at the federal level.

In addition to research — which touches on everything from pests and diseases to climate change — initiatives such as international programs to keep out invasive species could see sharp reductions. But fire science and forest inventory and analysis would be spared the heaviest hits, according to the people familiar with the plans.
Fire-related positions would not be exempt, although the definition of fire-related jobs is broad, an employee who’s seen the plans told E&E News.
The Forest Service and the USDA, which oversees the agency, didn’t immediately return a message seeking to verify the information.

The agency would also seek to increase timber harvesting, an existing goal being ramped up by the Trump administration.

Reductions of the level officials envision would put the total cuts at the Forest Service this year in the range of 10,000, although estimates have fluctuated as the agency
reverses some terminations.
The staff reductions set the stage for spending cuts across several Forest Service mission areas in the next fiscal year that begins in October.
Internal communications viewed by E&E News outline as much as a $316 million cut from forest and rangeland research — which is most of its annual budget — and $40
million from urban and community forestry, which is virtually its entire budget.

My understanding is that Congress decides these line items in the budget. The Administration gets to decide what to spend it on, within the broad outlines of Congress.  Also, this would be a really bad idea.  In my experience with both the FS and USDA R&D, in-house research tends to be more relevant and pragmatic to users, which is exactly what we should want.  That’s not to diss university research, (after all that was my gig at the agency that is now NIFA) but entire disciplines like forest economics or genetics can be lost at universities, so they don’t apply for grants, so the work doesn’t get done.

Research has been a “sacred cow” at the agency, Brown said, suggesting the idea of cutting it won’t have much support. “We’ll see how all that happens.”

Plus anytime the idea is raised to close up local Research (or other) facilities, elected officials become involved.

And while the administration is promising bigger timber harvests to meet an executive order President Donald Trump signed last weekend, “you’re sure not going to do that
without people and infrastructure,” Brown said.
Significant losses in personnel could jeopardize Forest Service work on clean water, wildfire mitigation and other missions, said Ellen Montgomery, public lands campaign
director for Environment America.
“Our forests filter drinking water for millions of Americans, shelter hundreds of species of wildlife and provide spaces for Americans to ski, climb, hunt, fish, hike and camp,”
Montgomery said. “The Forest Service research and development arm provides invaluable research and resources, while other staff do significant fire mitigation to protect communities from future wildfires.”

Side note: while Environment America seems to think that fire mitigation is protective, according to our friends at the Center for Western Priorities, “scientists say” thinning doesn’t work.

Scientists say that increased timber production is not a solution to wildfires. Climate change and drought are what make wildfires bigger and more destructive, and forest thinning can actually increase wildfire intensity by reducing shade from the forest canopy and changing the forest’s microclimate.

“They’re not hiding the ball,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. “It’s just about trying to cut as much [of] our forests as possible to line the pockets of timber industry executives.”

Anyway…

Force reductions would fall more heavily in the Washington headquarters and the Forest Service’s nine regional offices around the country, employees said. That pursuit could have broader support, as organizations that work with the Forest Service complain that it’s too top-heavy.

I wonder who these organizations were?

Past proposals to eliminate regional offices haven’t gone far, but Brown said there may be some merit to reorganizing them. She said she wouldn’t be surprised if the administration seeks to consolidate regional offices. Among officials’ goals, they said, is to put more decision-making authority in the hands of local offices that have a better handle on community priorities.  Putting more decision-making authority in the hands of forest supervisors and other local officials would build on efforts already underway. Those include “good neighbor” agreements that the Forest Service uses to work with non-federal partners to thin forests and do other restoration work in places where national forests abut state and

Timber industry groups have long applauded the collaborative approach, although they’ve also watched nervously as sweeping staff reductions threaten to undermine the administration’s goal of stepping up forest management.
Cuts to community and urban forestry would not be new ideas to the Trump administration, as it sought a similar move during Trump’s first term. Doing so would allow the Forest Service to concentrate more fully on wildfire in the West, the first administration said.
The National Association of State Foresters and other groups have urged continued funding for urban and community forests, saying they cover at least 138 million acres nationwide. The Inflation Reduction Act steered $250 million to state forestry agencies for the program, although some of that funding appears uncertain in the new administration.

The Admin can try to zero this stuff out,  but traditionally the States lobby for it and get it.  To me, if the Admin wants to minimize the amount spent on the “programs that Congress wants funded and will anyway” while maintaining transparency and accountability around those federal funds, that’s a very different question and requires a different approach.