Forest Service Employment Over Time: I. Context

Just a gentle reminder.. TSW is not the place for generic statements about politics, nor to attack other people on this site nor elsewhere.  I have been tightening up, so if you don’t see your comment posted, that’s the reason.  There are plenty of other places full of generic comments you can visit,

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I’m still looking for any documents related to the Transformation effort.  The Museum and the Forest History Society don’t have any. I sent an email to the Forest Service historian and haven’t heard back.  It just seems like something that cost so much time and effort should have some documentation available.  Otherwise, we’re going to have to depend on my memory… and that would be bad.  Guest posts about your own experiences with Transformation would be welcome.  Why? Because folks are talking about reducing non-Forest and District personnel and that’s exactly much of what went on with Transformation.

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Anonymous asked this question:

I’m looking for reputable numbers of Forest Service employee numbers over the last 50 years. Are we bloated, are we on the decline?

There are a few moving parts to this question. I’ll review the 2019 NAFSR study in the next post, and look at the overall numbers in the third of these three posts.

1. Has the work itself grown, decreased or otherwise changed over time?

If you were in Region 6 during the big timber days of the 80’s, there was a great deal more timber work going on, with associated work and expertise (for example, the Ochoco had a full time transportation planner in the Engineering shop).

Like reforestation, this decreased over time.  At the same time, recreation work increased, as did fire work, and probably lands and special uses. Different kinds of work goes with different series of employees and different ways of getting it done (contracts, grants, agreements, concessionaires and so on.)

2. What is the role of federal employees?  Even in the 80’s, the FS used contractors for timber sales.  We also used contractors for tree climbing and reforestation.  You need fewer employees to contract work than to do it force account, but you still need employees for the paperwork and quality control (CORs and inspectors). During some contracting effort in the past, we used to talk about work that was “inherently governmental.”  I wonder if that has changed over time,as I don’t hear much about that anymore.

In the last few years, work has been done via grants and Good Neighbor Agreements and so on. You need G&A people to get the grants out, and it’s unclear in some situations if the grantee monitors themselves or not (based on my read of the agreements). There are also many concessionaires doing recreation work including campgrounds and trailheads.

Depending on that, conceivably programs like American Forests’ work in reforestation or NWTF’s and other efforts on fuel reduction projects would require fewer FS permanent employees.  Or any of the Keystone Agreements. But maybe just different kinds.. more G&A employees and fewer natural resource folks.

3. Has the composition of the workforce (in terms of series) changed based on different needs?

NAFSR (Forest Service retirees) did a terrific Workforce Capacity study that looked at this.  We’ll dive into that in the next post.

4. How have the numbers of field vs. non-field changed over time (for the purposes of this discussion, field =District and SO)?

It’s not clear that this information is available, in the Budget Explanatory Notes, I think in the Notes the FS counts everything not WO as the field.

4.  What is the role of permanents vs. temporary employees?  We saw last year that some temps were converted to perms. The temps were told not to come back for 2025, but then the converted ones were probationary and let go.

This reminds me of the “toilets not being cleaned” news stories associated with recent cuts in permanent employees. This certainly varies by Forest, but where I am, most of the campgrounds are run by concessionaires.  Last fall, I overheard temps working on cleaning toilets at a visitor center talk about not knowing if they had a job next year.  On another Forest I ran across what might have been permanents in uniform cleaning a campground’s toilets.  According to this story from last fall and the freeze on hiring temporaries:

The Forest Service recently converted 1,300 seasonal positions into permanent jobs, including 105 in the Rocky Mountain Region and 15 in the White River National Forest.

That Colorado Sun story is also interesting as it focuses on interviewing volunteer organizations on how they will be picking up the slack.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation recently joined with partners to distribute $3.7 million for 33 projects in Colorado, including elk research, fencing projects and habitat improvements in the Arapaho, Gunnison, San Isabel, San Juan and White River national forests.

Blake Henning, the chief conservation officer for the foundation, does not expect the Forest Service hiring freeze to impact these projects.

“Most of the work we provide funding to the Forest Service for, a lot of it is done by their fire crews,” Henning said. “Those people are going to help continue the projects we have granted money to. Talking with our partners in the Forest Service, my sense is that a lot of these temporary folks are related to recreational programs like trail maintenance and campgrounds.”

It sounds from the quote as if RMEF received funding from the FS to hire FS fire crews. That’s somewhat confusing.  Also were temporary fire folks caught in the previous temporary freeze?

5. What about the big chunks of money? As I’ve said before, it’s hard for an organization to spend so much funding suddenly.  If they give out lots of grants, they need more G&A folk, contracts, contracting folks.  If they hire more people to do the work, or even the contracting or G&A, what happens when the funding goes back to normal (or less).  The only solution, it seems to me, is for Congress to not give agencies huge boluses of funding.  Look at what happened with the EPA. Certainly the Forest Service did better with the groups it selected, but it’s not really clear whether the Forest Service had any choices that would have been possible to implement without hiring some people, either in G&A or to do the work, or to coordinate with the grantees plus G&A folks.

Next post: The NAFSR Workforce Capacity Report