Stay tuned… I am reflecting on the comments on thinning as well as the Lindenmeyer et al. paper, so we will be back to that in a while.
For now, though, I’m posting a Blast From the Past, in which Chief Jack Ward Thomas talks to WO employees about reorganization (1995). You can read the piece in its entirety on the Forest History Society site (shout out to them!). I picked out the parts that seem similar or different to today. Sometimes I think that older people don’t have “wisdom” as such, but the experience of having lived through time gives us the ability to discern the signal (long term trends) from the noise (the fads or approaches of the current day.)
For those of a political persuasion, here is the political context for 1995. Reinventing Government was a Clinton initiative and both houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans. According to Google AI “Key Conflict: A major budget impasse between the Republican Congress and President Clinton led to two federal government shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996.”
Many of the concerns expressed by Chief Thomas are still concerns, and hopefully folks who remember will add how they pereceived these changes, and why they think some of them didn’t work as intended over time.
Sidenote: at this time I was a WO drone as the Research Coordinator for the RPA Program, and I don’t remember the Chief’s talk or being reorganized. Hopefully some other retiree, maybe Michael, who remembers better can give some relevant context. I do remember JWT’s mantra “change or die.”
Jack Ward Thomas
Remarks to WO Employees
January 5 & 9 1995
Restructuring the Washington OfficeThirteen months ago, in my first all-employees meeting with you, I said “change or die” and later presented the corollary ~ “change and live. Today, we meet to begin a process of change that will bring us into the 21st century as the leaders in conservation that we want to be.
We face many challenges. We will overcome those challenges together. They include reduced budgets, Congressional mandates to reduce Washington Office and Regional Office staffing, reorganization of USDA, seemingly ever-increasing skepticism of federal government by the American people, mandated increases in supervisor to employee ratios, orders to disproportionately reduce GS-14 and above positions, and other edicts which seem to occur with ever-greater frequency. Global markets and perspectives which have accelerated the “ripples” of change moving through our country. Adjusting to this instability is complicated by the dramatically shifting paradigms in natural resource management.
It is not just the Forest service going through such changes. The entire government is being dramatically changed altered by several interacting factors. It is appropriate to examine some of the reasons.
The civilian work force is declining dramatically — dropping 272,000 government-wide, the Forest Service share is to go from the present level of 40,612 to to 37,523 FTEs by 1999. This is on top of a decline of some 4,000 since 1992. Reductions are targeted in several categories such as personnel involved in policy making in the WO and administrative and supervisory staff throughout the agency. We are supposed to reduce to 1,003 personnel at grade 14 and above by the end of FY95. The Washington Office share off these reductions is to drop at least 25% from FY92 levels. To make the minimum 25% cut, the FTE count must be not more than 680 by 1999. The current FTE count is 850.
Budgets continue to decline. In facing up to the Nation’s $4 trillion deficit, the Forest Service is helping by spending less. Budgets have been generally “flat• for the past several years. This simply means, when inflation is considered, that the Forest Service budget is and will continue, for the foreseeable future, to decline at a rate of 3-5 percent per year. Congressional committees are considering recissions of over $100 million for the Forest Service for 1995 with similar cuts in the 1996 budget.
Public expectations seem to be changing. Political pundits describe the recent elections as indicative of the people’s desire for a changed approach to federal government. People are described as wanting a smaller, more efficient federal government that is more responsive to their needs. It is difficult to not agree. Such agrees with our basic premises set forth in the Reinvention report.
There have been significant effects of law and legal challenges on the way the Forest service does business. Much has been learned from a series of court cases involving the Endangered Species Act and the National Forest Management Act. Our recent victory in the Ninth Circuit Court on the President’s Forest Plan for the federal forests, in the Pacific Northwest is an indicator of what works and where we can go to have a firm basis for our management. Recent set-backs in the Pacific River cases in eastern Oregon and Washington and the Columbia Basin have brought forth similar lessons.
The national policy to undertake ecosystem management changes the way we do things. Our scientific knowledge and technological strengths now make it possible to assess, monitor, analyze, and manage with an ecosystem view. The Forest Service faces vast changes in our work as priorities and budgets have shifted away from production and targets to land condition and ecosystem management. In the face of these challenges — most far beyond our ability to control — we have the will to change and live!
How will this be done? As a way of gaining insight from the experience of others in government and private industry that have gone through the reinvention experience. I have read a number of books on the subject recently. A list of such books and articles is attached to the handout you have received here today.
The January 1st’s Washington Post “Business” section summed up the basics to be gleaned from these sources nicely. Perhaps you saw Steven Pearlstein’s article, “Two at the Top: ’95’s Odd Couple, A Pruning Primer as Gingrich and Company Prepare to Cut,… “. It had eight messages: “Be Bold, Arbitrary is Okay, Decide Your Direction, Reorganize the Work, Change Personnel Rules, Nurture the Survivors, Outsourcing Works, and Honor the Risk Taker.”
First Message: Be Bold
I have called for each team that has served in the progressive attention Reinvention to “be bold.” I told them not to stop at timid half-measures and to settle for incremental changes. Instead, they were instructed to reach for truly sweeping changes — for such change is essential. Those teams have done that. Together, we will continue on course to the future.Second Message: Arbitrary is Okay
I have said we will avoid “no-brainers” during reinvention such as across the-board percentage staff or budget reductions. We will not do those things for to continue on such course merely produces debilitation and general mediocrity. We will spend the next 75 days consulting with you to help to, simultaneously, prevent “no-brainers” and how to emphasize areas of our mission that are most critical. This implies doing “less with less” while concentrating our efforts on being the very best at those things we do emphasize.On the other hand, at some point over the next 75 days the National Leadership Team~ decide the future structure of the WO. Inevitably such decisions will seem arbitrary to some of those who do not like the decisions. But, believe me, by then, you will have been listened to and heard — if you take advantage of the opportunity to participate. The National Leadership Team will reflect on and help address the personal or professional problems that arise from restructuring the WO. But, make no mistake, a change in WO purpose, culture, structure, role, and work is already happening and will continue. The opportunity for participation is open to all of you. The time is now. In 75 days, the die will be cast.
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And then….. Albuquerque Service Center was born soon after! JWT had some great ideas, and some even were carried forward, but the vast majority of GS 14’s in the WO managed to persevere…..
I didn’t read anything into that saying “First, burn the forests to make them natural again.” The other issue is what did the GS-14 folks do with no timber revenue to speak of? No roads to maintain. Consolidation of forests, dropping more than half the RDs. Short seasonal Work Centers. How many does it take to sell $15 maps? Wilderness permits to enter are gone in an hour one day per year.
What particularly galls me is crappy trail maintenance except for the Pacific Crest ditch. Those neophytes who get lost due to bad trails are not USFS subjects. Nope. The County Sheriff must look for them. Run the SAR operations. And the county has lost 95% of it PILT payments. So the sheriff has very limited budgets to accomplish that, and damned little for profit private property to tax as the result of residents statewide capping the tax rate which cannot possibly demand the residents crammed onto the paucity of private land and the needs other than policing public lands. Better, the sheriff has no Constitutional power to arrest a federal employee for any civil crimes. Supremacy Clause and US Attorney will represent the USFS in Federal Court. Up to and including a DEA agent “tailing a suspect” who ran a red light and killed a cyclist riding with the green light in her favor. Federal judge dismissed the State charges for the death. Better, the Federal Tort Claims Act eliminated any civil recovery for her family. “Discretionary function exemption.”
The USFS has morphed into a lamprey, a tick, a tapeworm for local government in counties with a third or more land federal owned. No tort liability and fire from federal land is totally immune from the responsibility for the damage to private assets. So immune that private land owners near federal land are losing fire insurance at any price. Why? “Non-Economic damage awards for “pain and suffering from smoke and ash fall, and the mental trauma of fire threat to their “things and lives.” The tyrannical urban majority, even in “fly over states,” supports “preservation” which is “eternal life” which is folly. Ask your great great grandmother or grandfather. Oops. You cannot. Their lives were finite. So was East Slovakia from where they immigrated. And the passenger pigeons sold at the butchers’. Steam engines pulling passenger cars. Buffalo robes for winter comfort in the buggy driving them to school.
We are where wildland fire on federal lands in Oregon costs $50,000,000 to suppress. Destroys an equal amount of court awarded damages. Wind from the conflagration blows debris across energized power lines and USFS sues the utility for a Billion dollars. They settle for half a billion. That is a sale. USFS sold their loss to the power utility by court order. Where is the county’s 25%? PILT. No different than a timber sale.
I used to respect much of JWT, but this is one of his worst and embarrassing speeches. It was the same things that the administration was saying. Remember, he was the first political appointee Chief, and he was simply saying the clap-trap that he was told: “reinvention”, “budgets that continue to decline”, “change that will bring us into the 21st century as leaders”, “mandated increases in supervisor to employee ratios”, “decide your direction”, “consulting with you”, etc, etc., etc.
I don’t have all the data at my finger tips like I used to, but I do recall the personnel cuts. But I do not believe there was any significant reduction in the budget (see the following chart I found on my computer), nor was there any change in the supervisor to employee ratio. These mantras were passed from the WO to the Regions to the Forest to the Districts. We all had meetings presided over by the Forest Supervisors (I was at the Forest level) who told us that RIF was coming, that Forests and Ranger District WOULD combine (even though no cost/benefit analysis was ever done that justified such centralization), that budgets were and would, literally, collapse to near zero. And this was in 1996, not 2026!
Back in those “Reinvention” days, I remember the Sup and a Regional Office employee TELLING/mandating to our Forest “leadership team” that the budget was going to “falling off the cliff” next year and we had to act accordingly and fast. Yes, we scared. After hearing all this (I was a Union rep and an engineer), I called up my local US Congressman (who happened to be Rep. Dave Obey, ranking member of the Appropriation Committee who I knew from previous Washington visits), and lo-and-behold, he and his staff told me there was NOT going be FS budget cuts. I reported that back to the Forest “Leadership Team” and they were ALL aghast that I could even say such a thing and I (being a “dumb” “ignorant” engineer who had never went through the FS “Leadership Training” BS ) was literally laughed at and ignored. Being the Union guy (on the “partnership council”), I was soon embroiled in “downsizing” at the Regional Office. I went into one meeting which turned out to be interviewing all the department heads to find what they were doing and how to cut, cut, cut (personnel, not trees) . And I wasn’t told what the meeting was about (I had come in my flannels while everyone else was in their suits and ties). I held my ground against the Regional budget “expert”.
All these doomsday predictions were wrong. It turns out it was all a shell game by the FS leadership–let by JWT and all the WO staff.
I remember another situation. I was attending a Regional Engineers meeting at the WO (this was after 2002) and the Engineering “leaders” at the time were still pontificating about the need to cut engineering staff. I again pushed back and told them Engineering was the only division in NSF that had followed through [with the downsizing] and that Engineering was stupid enough, to keep cutting staff. But of course the Engineering staff all looked at me as if I was from Mars. And the engineering cuts continued.
Remember the competitive sourcing fiasco? The FS, back in the “Reinvention” days, was when they started to contract out most functions (Engineering was and is still decimated). In the past, prior to 1990, the FS did much of its own research, and even wrote its own software. The FS now (I retired 14 years ago) does little original anything and has become a bunch of contract administrator, yes-people, and bureaucrats with little expertise.
We had a Union newsletter and I later made graphs and wrote everything I could to save our jobs and to fight back.
I could go on and on. Thanks Sharon for mining my memories and my hard drive! I could add some of my Union article to give a different perspective over what the “official” communications back then were saying. Downsizing doomsday scenarios are nothing new in the FS! But truth and transparency has always been lacking in the FS.
Seeing of this image inclusion works..