The Three Threads of Forest Service Reorganization: Partisan Politics, Organizational Improvement, and Facilities

I did say that I would talk about R&D, but in this post I’ll set some relevant context, and next post will be R&D only.

Since I was supposed to be off last week, the first I heard about reorganization was the interview with Chris French and Sarah Fisher. Then when I read the information on the web, some old neurons from my R&D past fired up, and I began to see some patterns that made sense. But to understand that, I’ll talk a little about the role of the folks in the WO (whether you call them “headquarters” or not) in interpolating agency career desires with Administration priorities.

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But first, here are two numbers that I heard from sources who usually prove to be correct:
500 or fewer people will have to relocate (they received letters). How can this be? I asked, how can the number include both Regions and the WO? I was told (and I had heard this as it was happening) the during the Big Hire on Soft Money, many folks were hired in various RO’s (to the dismay of field folks at the time) who were working from home (as in a complaint from an RO person “we’ve never actually seen them”). Some RO staffs doubled. When this Admin ordered them to return to the office, many went to local offices which were not the RO building. Last fall, I met some folks who had previously worked in an RO and had already moved to another FS facility “within commuting distance.” That’s an important term. As it was explained to me, if you’re working in an RO and did not receive a relocation letter, it is likely your job will change, perhaps you will work as part of a service delivery team say for NEPA or wildlife or ski areas or lands..but you won’t have to relocate your family.

I had also heard a rumor that the FS needed to lose another 1,000 people to make ends meet, but my sources tell me that normal attrition will account for this.
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Given those numbers, I think that there are three separate threads here that we need to explore. In this case, I like to think of it as a tapestry. The fake silver and gold political threads strike the light and the media.. say, last Admin “old growth,” this Admin “headquarters move, more bucks to the field”. Those threads tend to flake off when the next color of Admin shows up. But the WO magic happens when the career FS folks weave these threads with others.. dealing with long-term improvements in their own views.. and present the completed cloth to the Admin and get buy-off. That way, when the political flakes off, the changes they wanted to make remain and the energy to take out the other threads are unlikely to be priorities in the next Admin.

Thread One: Move Headquarters- The Shiny Thread

Now if the people who are left in DC are the people interacting with Congress and other Agencies (i’ve heard 200), what is a Headquarters exactly? Would a headquarters by any other name attract as much media attention? Is it where the Chief is located? This is a great partisan thing because in my view it’s symbolic, and so each side can proclaim or complain and possibly be distracted by more practical (and meaningful) changes.

Let’s look at the other two threads (there may be more, please add if you know about them). My organizational spidey senses tingled when Chris spoke about the pre-Admin efforts to deal with the FS Fiscal Cliff (the $750 mill or $350 mill according to Chief Moore). That would have been the summer of 2024 when hiring of temps was curtailed. Apparently folks were brought together for a meeting in Salt Lake City for ideas, and then further teams came out with recommendations. I plan to FOIA the results. So just like Transformation (2007) and apparently with some of the same approaches and concepts, employees worked really hard to develop improvements to the way the organization worked. Improvements that seem to be in line with what other teams of employees came up with in 2007. I think that those folks deserve a shout-out! In most news stories I’ve seen, they are invisible. Whose voices are we not hearing? That’s because, in a weird governmental permutation of Lao Tzu’s in the Tao Te Ching:

Those who know (are not allowed to) speak about it.

Those who speak about it do not know it.

Thread Two: Organizational Redesign Focused on Supporting Field and Reducing Layers or Transformation Plus 20 Years

As long as I was in the RO or the WO, field folks complained that too much funding went to overhead. People, external and internal, who worked in different Regions have complained that there are too many apparently (to them) random policy differences between Regions. We know that technical support capacity for forests is not spread evenly across Regions. One idea I heard from one of the team folks was that there are people working on a way to even out budgets and people on Districts based on various metrics of how much work the District is expected to accomplish. In my view, this has been a problem since the Timber Years, when some Timber Regions formerly had big bucks and if you just decrease by the same percentage across all Regions, then they will always have a larger budget and more folks, regardless of current needs. It is definitely time to rethink organizational structure, just as it was in 2007. You can disagree about the outcomes (and we will) but I think the Fiscal Cliff brought home the need and opportunity to try something different.

Further, I have always liked the idea of State Offices (perhaps my experience in R2, Colorado is not Wyoming, and ease in working with BLM) and Michael Rains liked the idea of one executive in an ecological area over NFS, S&PF and R&D. Point being that these ideas for improvement can be easily distinguished from a particular Admin or political ideology.

Thread Three: Facilities, Leases and Maintenance Budgets from Congress

When I read about closures, something clicked in my memory. This has to do with facilities budgets and how changes in programs and where people are working has often led to little-occupied offices. Lease costs have gone up. Costs of maintenance have gone up. If people didn’t get relocation letters, they are probably going to be reassigned to other owned or leased facilities within the commuting area.

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What seems to have happened is that the FS folks have woven the three different threads into a Reorganization cloth that was bought off by the political folks. I think we owe them a debt of gratitude. I’m sure that all the folks working on the teams were thoughtful and did hard work, work that wasn’t easy to do or sell to others, and seems to be mostly invisible in the media I’ve seen.

One more point that seems lost in some media coverage, but is certainly not lost on forests and districts and their partners… if Congress allocates the same budget, and less is taken off the top, then more must go to forests and districts. If you are a member of the public and want better road maintenance, maybe you can have that as well as a team somewhere who has expertise in road design. Maybe the folks who worked on the teams think we can have both.

Finally, this current effort is a bit of a “Big Gulp” of reorganization and getting more bucks to the ground. But the opening for such a Big Gulp was created by the Fiscal cliff. This may remind you of the story of the Chinese farmer. When folks are really sure that what is going to happen in the future is good or bad.. well I’d say, “maybe yes, maybe no.”