Tim asked this question:
Sharon et al— I’m curious how RIFs targeting the RO/WO could trickle down to districts. My understanding is bump & retreat means that RIFed RO people could potentially take jobs of folks in lower positions on the districts (in the same commuting area as the RO). Is that right? How widespread might this be?
I thought that this would be a good time for us oldsters to get our memory hard drives reconnected with our memories of RIF. I think the last one was during the Clinton Administration.
“After all the rhetoric about cutting the size and cost of Government, our administration has done the hard work and made the tough choices,” Clinton said in a statement. “I believe the economy will be stronger, and the lives of middle class people will be better, as we drive down the deficit with legislation like this.”
The legislation was an outgrowth of Clinton’s National Performance Review, which launched in March 1993 with the slogan “Make Government Work Better and Cost Less.” Clinton appointed Vice President Al Gore to lead the review and issue a report within six months.
About 250 career civil servants worked on the review and created recommendations with agency employees.
Not everyone agreed with the Clinton-Gore initiative.
“There was opposition,” but union leaders supported reducing the power of middle managers, the target of most of the reductions, and the increased role of unions in bargaining, “so they felt this was an acceptable trade-off,” John M. Kamensky, National Performance Review deputy director, told PolitiFact.
But there were also Reagan RIFs
‘For every worker directly affected by a RIF, three to four more workers indirectly experienced career disruption,’ the study found.
The number of RIFs have dropped by 70 percent since they peaked in fiscal 1982.
Rep. Michael D. Barnes, D-Md., who co-chaired the task force, said the RIF policies are costing the government in morale, and ultimately failing to do what they were established to do — save the federal government money.
‘Our study tells us that no matter how you order or structure a RIF, it’s a bankrupt policy,’ he said.
Which is, of course, interesting to us today because what D Barnes said was a “bankrupt policy” was engaged in by the D Clinton Administration.
So here’s an opportunity to tell our own stories. During the Reagan RIF, I was a GS-460-11 or 12 Area Geneticist (that’s another story). I was told that a District Ranger with more time in grade in the commuting area could bump me. I questioned that, saying by the same token, I could conceivably bump a District Ranger. At the time, at least in R-6, folks were very particular about requirements for line officers. I don’t remember any women DRs at the time, for example. Apparently I did not meet the cultural requirements. After I pointed this out, the talk went away, and I never knew what happened, but I didn’t get RIFed.
When I look at the OPM direction for RIF today it goes by..
1.tenure of employment (e.g., type of appointment);
2.veterans’ preference;
3.length of service; and
4.performance ratings.
Now I went to forestry school in the 70’s with many Vietnam-era Veterans, but I don’t remember that being talked about much at the time as a factor in RIF. Of course, my memories are hazy.
My point is, though, in my hazy memory, earlier RIFs were not particularly “thoughtful” as they played out through the OPM regulations and bumping. I see RIFs as more or less of a mechanical process, and while the media may focus on the intention (good=D, bad=R), the intention may not matter much after the button is pressed.
So I’m interested in hearing from people about their own experiences with RIFs. Probably most of the those RIFfed are not still around in our community, so we may not be able to hear their perspective.
So back to Tim’s question, I think it went by commuting area and series, and length of service, and don’t remember much beyond that.
There is an informative document about RIF on the NAFSR website – National Association of Forest Service Retirees. By the way, if you join, your first year dues are free.
Here’s the link to that
https://nafsr.org/FAQ/RIF-faq.php
and one on VSIP and VERA https://nafsr.org/FAQ/VISP-faq.php
The NF that I worked on in Oregon went through a RIF in the 1990s. The commuting area/competition area was the entire forest, so that made for some interesting “bump and retreat”. Seven positions were eliminated, but 23 people were affected by bump and retreat. I had been on the forest for about 7-8 years when the RIF happened and I remained on the forest for about 12 years after the RIF. The Forest worked very hard to avoid a RIF, so it was miraculous that only 7 positions were involved in the RIF. I was one of the 3 Foresters on the forest with the least amount of tenure, so it was nerve wracking. The other 2 moved to other positions on other forests and several longer-term foresters also left or retired, so there were no forester positions involved in the RIF.
For the folks that were involved in the RIF, I remember a GS-7 Engineering Technician bump/retreating back into a GS-3 position in the SO mailroom. I also remember another GS-9 Engineering Technician bump/retreating back into a GS-5 position. It was pretty crazy stuff. They protected your pay for 2 years, so many of those downgraded folks were able to get back to their previous grades within 2 years.
And if there were any vacancies within a certain time period after the RIF that a RIFfed employee was qualified for, they had to be offered the job.
It was a pretty bad deal for morale. I remember going through 2-3 rounds of downsizing and it seemed like it would never end.
Thanks! Based on our attempt to count RIFs, it sounds like that may have been the Clinton-era RIFs. I saw one story that said that effort reduced the headcount by 20% “The Clinton administration ended up making sizable cuts to the federal workforce with REGO, reducing headcount by 20 percent — some 351,000 positions” across government. https://www.newsweek.com/how-bill-clinton-shrunk-federal-government-30-years-before-doge-2032893
But I don’t know if that varied by agency/subagency..also I am now dubious about any personnel figures.
I don’t remember why there were so many rounds.. maybe someone else remembers? Seems like that would only extend the period of worries and bad morale.
I was a GS-9 at the time, so not too much in-the-know on higher level political goings-on, but from where I was, this was directly due to the signing of the Northwest Forest Plan and the budgeting system that was in place at the time. We were not allowed to use “timber” allocations for work in Late Successional Reserves – only “wildlife” allocations, so there was a large decrease in budgets that meant a large decrease in staffing. I also forgot to say that you are only allowed to bump/retreat into a job series that you had previously held – so the engineering tech had started his FS career in a clerk position. Since I had only ever worked as a forester, I would have only been allowed to bump/retreat into forester positions.
RIFs are bad news, morale busters, so expensive and a last resort tactic. If someone really cared, they would simply ask for a savings target and stand back. The agency is very good at following direction. Sometimes too good. What is happening now, and the tactics being used are really careless; thoughtless really.
But the new Chief knows that RIFs are a last option and certainly not needed and reckless at this point in time. Let’s see if he has a voice. If he does what I think he can do, he will stand up. You don’t always have to stand tall, but one does need to stand up.
Very respectfully,
Michael, I think that would be true except for the 5860 new perms in the last two years https://forestpolicypub.com/2025/03/10/forest-service-employment-numbers-did-the-fs-add-20-more-perms-in-the-last-two-years/, given that some were temp to perm conversions and some were fire. So it appears as though the FS can’t afford them all. So perhaps the overage could be handled by VERA and VSIP, but those might be the wrong people in the wrong positions. Plus, it would be argued, that the people eligible are the most knowledgeable (whereas it was argued that the new hires would “lead to the loss of a generation.” Side note: my boss’s boss tried to get rid of two of us directors because he felt the Region “needed new blood”, so that argument could be made as well. You are making some emotional judgments “if they really cared” “careless” “thoughtless” “not needed” “reckless” and so on.
We don’t know whether the budget can be cut without cutting employees. Maybe you know but I don’t. Maybe that was intentional… “let’s bulk up and then cry to Congress if we go over budget”? Who knows?
We also know that some employees questioned some of the new positions as not directed toward needs of Districts.
The FEDs have only two dull mechanisms to accomplish any reductions, VERA and RIF, which we know, based on our experience, don’t always work to keep the desired employees.
So it seems to me that we don’t know if employee reductions are needed or not, but if they are, there doesn’t seem to be any legal way to keep the most necessary workers. Even if we agreed on who they were, which we probably don’t.
Where I was at, since there was a 20% vacancy rate and HR processes were very slow, and turnover (retirements, people transferring/promotions, people leaving the FS) was on-going, the idea was to just hire what you needed because with all of the churn, you would not hit your “headcount cap” imposed by the region very soon. And the other thing was that these were mostly (except for the Reforestation Trust Fund) time-limited funds – many of us were concerned about the fiscal cliff after those funds expired – but the word from the WO was that “we consider these funds a downpayment and there will be more”. But apparently there was no one minding the store in a way that allowed the agency to see that they were spending way more on salary than they could sustain. The other thing is that salary is now primarily paid out of a special salary & expenses (S&E) allocation (trust funds also contribute to salary), so you can no longer switch around funds to cover salaries as easily as you could in the past.
Thanks! It sounds like the S&E allocation had an unintentional consequence of making the FS less resilient in this case. But I wonder why the WO was so sure that there would be more bucks? Also I hope that there is someone now minding that particular store.
S&E was a good idea gone very, very bad. While it was wonderful that some of my employees went from 15 job codes on a timesheet to 3 or 2 or even in some cases, the magical 1, managing the pot out of the regional office removed any semblance of true accountability at the forest level (and I say this as a ranger on a forest that fared very well hiring over the past few years). No one anywhere, including the RO and WO, had any idea of how much money we had, how much we were spending, where it continued to come from, so no one ever gave us a head count cap so we took it from there.
It was a fun few years but it has certainly caught up to us now. Even more shocking is how no one took the fall for a complete lack of accounting controls, in fact maybe you could even be named acting associate chief.
That’s the $750 mill question, isn’t it? Where were the controls then, and is there a lessons learned and changes to the system now?