We have covered many things over the past 15 years of The Smokey Wire. We’ve had number questions about timber, and folks like Mac and Gil and Andy could always make sense of them. Never before have I run into so much difficulty as with Forest Service employment figures.
Most recently, I ran across this letter sent on Feb. 14 by various members of the Colorado delegation to the US Congress, Bennet, Hickenlooper, Neguse, Pettersen, and Crow.
Our offices have heard for years about chronic understaffing at the USFS. Today, the agency’s workforce is nearly 30% less than it was three decades ago. This significant reduction in staff has occurred even as the country’s population grew by over 100 million people, visitation to national forests exploded, and wildfire risk increased drastically. Agency employees have entered public service despite low pay, the frequently seasonal nature of the job, and limited housing in the remote areas they serve. With the rising cost of living across the state, Colorado communities are already challenged with limited USFS staff to confront land management challenges. Combined with the existing hiring freeze, yesterday’s staff reductions will stretch the agency to its breaking point and place an enormous burden on Colorado communities.
If I count back from 2025 for 30 years, I get 1995. If I go to this handy John Kusano powerpoint about workforce trends from 1992 to 2001. It looks here remarkably consistent in terms of permanents .. a little over 30K in 1995 and 35,560 in 2024. If I eyeball the Kusano powerpoint graph at 31K, then there’s actually a 15% increase in permanents over the last 30 years.
Since these numbers are so different, I have a phone call in to Bennet’s office to find out where those numbers came from.
People were working on diversity way back then (2001)
I thought that this slide was particularly interesting..given the recent problems (24 years since this ppt was presented) with over-hiring.
Looking for historic trends, I found this story in the Mesabi Tribune from August 23, 2002:
Fewer are being asked to do more. And the trend applies nationally.
“We are down nationally about 10,000 employees overall from where we were eight to 10 years ago,” Sanders said.
This statement doesn’t exactly match the powerpoint, but we don’t have 1991 in the powerpoint.
In fact, between 1991 and 1998, the total Forest Service workforce fell by about 21 percent or from 50,238 to 39,782, according to a January Forest Service report.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that people apparently use different sets of numbers, but it does make life difficult. I suspect that the “total workforce” from Sanders might include temporaries.
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I’d like us to all use one set of numbers. Temps and perms should be separated, and maybe a “total hours worked” if we could go back in time and do that. I hope that somewhere out there such numbers exist?
And I agree that “the FS has been historically understaffed ” and I’d add “underfunded” and that’s a great discussion to have.
But let’s agree on the same set of numbers first. I’m sure there is an official set of numbers out there somewhere.
A good source of numbers on the decline in Forest Service employees is the NAFSR presentation to Secretary Purdue in 2019, “Increasing Workforce Capacity”. The presentation can be found on the NAFSR website, NAFSR.org
Thanks, George, I was planning on getting to that next. It’s a great report on changing composition but there are no totals of perms and temps that can be compared with other sources.
The annual FS budget justifications contain FTE numbers, they don’t seem to track temporary positions.
For example, see the fy 24 BJ here (especially pdf pp 20-21):
https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/FS-FY24-Congressional-Budget-Justification.pdf
One of the relevant tables contains this unhelpful note:
“Note: In addition to the numbers above, there are temporary positions as well.” Id. at pdf p21.
So it would be possible to use the BJs to track at least full time FTEs over time, but the farther back in time you go, the harder it is to unearth these documents.
Good point.. I just looked at FY 24 and 25 Explanatory Notes and got lost down a couple of rabbit trails probably not worthy of TSW time.
More people does not mean more work can get done.
I hope they actually keep people with technical skills, forestry knowledge, wildlife knowledge, botany knowledge, hydrology knowledge, actually needed to get things done well. Anyone leading a FOREST Service unit that manages forests should know more than a little bit about, um, FORESTS. The whole ethos that “foresters / ‘ologists don’t make good supervisors/leaders” and a push to hire and promote people without significant relevant subject matter expertise has had terrible consequences for the agency. In my experience, many (not all) people at the top of the Agency know no more than I would expect a high schooler to know about forest ecosystems. Maybe one good thing that can come out of current reorganization will be a return to forestry expertise in leadership. At least, I am choosing to be optimistic on that front.
Maybe NOW would be a great time to make sure that all ‘Ologist’ surveyors stick to the accepted protocols, for whatever they are surveying for? (I do know that hasn’t happened that much, in the past.)
Hi Jonas, would you please tell us more. An example would be good.
Regarding goshawk surveys, there is supposed to be a grid of call points over the entire study area, with points being 150 yards within each other. Not just within the proposed harvest units. Can a survey crew really testify in court that they did the ‘proper amount’ of call points in these large thinning projects?
A. what have you noticed about this.. are people being hired from outside directly into Ranger or Supe positions without a natural resource background?
Locally (northwest Montana) the U.S.F.S has had FAR MORE than 30% cuts since 1980.
The reason is that they are no longer selling timber to loggers and sawmills, which has caused a much larger cut in the workforce and the local economy. Dozens of sawmills have gone broke and disappeared. The gap has been filled by thousands of truckloads of lumber from Canada.
With the new tariffs on Canadian lumber the price of lumber will skyrocket, since there are no American sawmills left to fill the gap. Re-hiring F.S. workers won’t help. The people that need to be fired are the federal judges that have worked with the environmentalists to stop all logging.