A few new people have joined us since the News Hour story on Monday, so I thought it might be worth it to back up and give some (what seems to me) relevant context that was not included in the story. This post is very long, but I tried to summarize many of our previous posts for the new folks.
A dear friend said I sounded like an “apologist” for the Trump Administration . I don’t think that that’s the case and I’ll explain why. I do tend to see both sides of an issue and it helped a great deal in my work of briefing decision makers and trying to find areas of common ground.
I made two statements used in the piece. First was that, in my mind, if Congress didn’t accept zeroing out R&D the first time, it is unlikely it will do it now. I didn’t say that it was a good idea to zero it out .. in fact, I think it’s a really bad idea as people here at TSW know. Congress is always complaining (has been for 30 years at least) that much federal research funding isn’t helpful to their constituents (hence ideas like the Fund for Rural America). FS R&D does quite a bit of helpful research, including in areas of particular interest to this Admin, like fire and fuels, timber, wildlife and fish, hydrology, and grazing. I’d argue that it does more helpful research than any of its competitors in forest research. So I think it’s a bad idea to cut funding for it in general, but specifically inconsistent with this Admin’s druthers. There have been many years of zeroing out S&PF, but everyone knows the states always come through with support.
To be clearer, what I meant was “before I get concerned, someone has to make the case that Congress has changed its mind since last year.” I also think anyone who has influence with Congress should speak up for FS R&D budgets. My most recent experience was raising a concern with my Congressperson’s office, and getting back a form letter on a different topic, so I won’t be spending much time on that.
Thinking it’s a bad idea, and being concerned about something has an intervening step for me.. the likelihood of the bad idea happening. For those of you who weren’t here, the last time I said “this dog won’t hunt in Congress” was about federal land sales and I was right.
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The FS Budget Crisis and Administrational Whiplash
The other thing I said was that the reorganization is an opportunity to deal with some of the issues that have been identified as problems in the Forest Service for a long time. I was specifically talking about the 2007 Transformation effort. Good people, including people who became my employees later, put their energies, experience and minds to it. Folks in engineering and minerals made changes, and at least some of them seemed to work. That was in 2007, but the idea that maybe there was too much overhead has been around. The Forest History Society has this piece from Chief Jack Ward Thomas under the Clinton Administration in 1995 (my bold):
Is Public Forest Management Too Costly?
We must reduce the deficit and that calls for lean times in the public purse. The Forest Service is reducing headquarters and regional staffs by 25% and field
organizations by 6% between now and 1997. We have already reduced staff by 4000 people; we will drop 3000 more. We are responding to budgets which will go down at a 10% rate per year for some years to come, about $300 million below the presidential request for FY96. Budget reductions should be viewed in light of our streamlining and Reinvention efforts which will allow us to reach much further to improve efficiency and customer service. In all of this, our focus is on sustaining field activities and superior customer service as much as possible.
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The other piece that I didn’t think was covered was the Forest Service budget crisis history. Here goes: the IRA and IIJA gave the FS a huge cash infusion for various things/. The Biden Admin chose to hire 5300 or so permanent new employees. From my observation, at least some were not on forests and districts directly involved in doing work on the ground. There didn’t seem to be an overall agency plan for what positions needed filling.
Also some of these “new hires” were actually long-standing workers who had been on temporary appointments for years. So there were still serious gaps on some units, despite the new hires. The FS ended up being $740 million in the hole. So the Forest Service, before the Presidential election, determined that they could not bring on temporaries in 2025.
Meanwhile, the money that the agency received from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law, has already been spent.
All of this, combined with recent cost-of-living increases for staff, means that the agency is feeling strapped for cash. The next year “will not likely be a very robust budget environment” said Forest Service Budget Director Mark Lichtenstein during an all-staff call in mid-September.
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In the all-staff call, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore acknowledged that the agency will be forced to struggle without its seasonal workforce.
“I know that this decision will affect your ability to get some of the critical work done,” he said. “It’ll also be felt deeply by managers and units all across the agency.”
Here’s Chief Moore telling the story of the budget deficit.
So then, a new Administration got elected. DOGE tried to remove the new hires (people on probation) but were not allowed to, so to bring the numbers down, the FS had to use voluntary authorities, which took out many more experienced older people. So the FS, perhaps uniquely because they had so many new hires, and because they had been hired on special authorities that had longer probationary periods, suffered from Administrational Whiplash. For new folks here, you can dig deeper with this post and others.
The budget problem or crisis- which started under the previous Administration to my mind was an opportunity for change and not just “everyone reduces by 5%”. I’ve FOIAd some of the work products of the reorganization teams so at that point we can see what the different options were and the rationales.
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I’d like to go back to the NewsHour story.
Chief Schultz says “we have to manage within our budgets.” “push decision-making down to the ground, less middle management and more money to the field.”
1, “Shuttering 3/4 of the research facilities”
Reporters ask my opinion about this. I ask them, well the first question is do you believe what the FS is saying? I don’t necessarily, but I don’t know where else you start.
They ask “Do you believe that all these should be closed?” I say “I don’t know, I’d have to see the following information for each site:”
How many FS employees are currently located at that facility?
Is it owned or leased. If owned how much does maintenance cost per year? Are there any large investments that need to be made? If leased, what are the lease costs?
Are there vacant spaces at FS facilities within commuting distance?
Is there something unique about the employees’ research that requires a certain kind of facility or lab?
Are those facilities available elsewhere at less cost?
If at a university, has the FS asked the university the cost of leasing space? If an owned lab close to a university, has the FS explored leasing to others or moving other FS workers to that facility?
I’m assuming that if the researcher or staff moves “within commuting distance,” they will be able to get to research sites with about the same travel time and costs.
Again, facilities budgets are given by Congress to all of the FS, not to NFS or R&D, so the entire portfolio needs to be considered as one.
2. “Moving the “entire agency’s” headquarters to Salt Lake City”
I’m not a fan of doing this because it seems mostly partisanly symbolic on both sides. Some stories seem to miss that they are leaving 120 people in DC to do the schmoozing necessary. I don’t think that’s in any way equivalent to the BLM approach that (I think) tried to move everyone or all career people.
Why does the story say “the entire agency’s headquarters” when they are leaving 120 people? Is 120 the right number or composition? This is “the next level down” or “how would it actually work” question.
There are potentially good things about moving (although I still think it’s a bad idea). First is that it’s easier to get people to move there in general, so you might have more quality candidates to choose from. Second is optimizing your schmoozing. If schmooze (or OK, relationships, formal and informal) is an important reason to keep people in DC, how many schmoozers do you need? Should you optimize schmoozing (and relationships) by spreading it among a broader range of locations? This also fits in with the State Director model. Suppose you were in Arizona or Wyoming. Instead of DC and Albuquerque or Denver, you would be able to see FS officials in DC, Utah and your own state. In that sense, the current situation would be focused on ROs and DC, while this approach would spread the schmooze.
3. “Critics argue that this restructuring is really a dismantling”. So they have Chief Dombeck, Chief during the Clinton Administration who says that the Trump Admin doesn’t like federal employees nor “science”.
“Dismantling” is one of those words that sounds like part of a media campaign. It seems to have to do with the idea of getting rid of the FS? That seems unlikely. The folks who want to move it to Interior tend to be D’s (like Megafire Action) and western R’s seem more hesitant.
I disagree a bit with Dombeck here. Again, it’s a matter of where you look. Dombeck said “give me some reason that you would trust an organization that treats its employees like this.”
Of course, Chief Dombeck apparently worked for an administration that had planned to cut, according to the quote from Chief Thomas above, even more employees.
“These changes are coming from an Administration that is hostile to both federal workers and scientific research and wants to slash the FS budget”. I’ll go with the “wants to slash budget”; however I respectfully disagree on the employees and research. I follow two other areas, energy and health. Chris Wright is not “hostile to science”, Jay Bhattacharya is not “hostile to science.” I would bet that the green eyeshades folks at OMB are not hostile to science so much as “looking for something to cut.” Anyway, I think it’s more complex than Dombeck attests, and different parts of the Admin want different things as is always the case.
Mike argues that dealing with the Admin has been “chaotic”, I’ll go with that, but he says “putting a reorganization on top of that makes him wonder What is the real end-game? What is the Administration’s long-term goal?”
I would say that a budget crisis (due to actions of the Biden Admin) is exactly the time to think about restructuring. To repeat what Chief Thomas said:
Budget reductions should be viewed in light of our streamlining and Reinvention efforts which will allow us to reach much further to improve efficiency and customer service. In all of this, our focus is on sustaining field activities and superior customer service as much as possible.
The story says that about 500 jobs will be relocated but the Union says that the number of “impacted” jobs could be much higher, around 6500. I don’t know exactly what “impacted” means. For me, getting a new list of things to do or a new boss to report to is very different from being asked to move my family. It would have been helpful to ask for a definition.
You might wonder where the unions were during the Clinton Admin. Here’s what Grok said.
Why Unions Supported (or Tolerated) It
Federal unions like AFGE, NTEU, and others did not universally cheer mass cuts—there was initial opposition and criticism of the scale and implementation. However, key union leaders accepted or backed elements for these reasons:
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Targeted at Middle Management: Unions represented many rank-and-file employees and often viewed layers of supervisors and overhead as obstacles that micromanaged workers and slowed operations. Reducing these positions could empower frontline staff. NPR deputy director John Kamensky noted: “There was opposition, but union leaders supported reducing the power of middle managers, the target of most of the reductions… so they felt this was an acceptable trade-off.”
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Increased Union Role and “Partnerships”: In exchange, the administration expanded union influence:
- Executive Order 12871 created labor-management partnerships, giving unions more input into decisions.
- Greater bargaining rights and involvement in “reinvention” efforts.
- This shifted from adversarial relations toward cooperative ones in some areas. Unions gained a seat at the table that they lacked under prior administrations.
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Humane Implementation: Cuts emphasized voluntary buyouts (incentives up to $25k–$50k in some cases), attrition, and retraining/relocation rather than mass firings. Clinton framed it as protecting “good people trapped in bad systems.” Unions preferred this to abrupt private-sector-style downsizing.
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Broader Political Alignment: As Democrats, Clinton and unions shared many goals (e.g., labor-friendly policies elsewhere). Supporting “reinvention” helped maintain influence and avoid being painted as defenders of wasteful bureaucracy during a time of deficit reduction pressure.
Note that these programs emphasized “voluntary buyouts, attrition and retraining/relocation.” It actually sounds fairly similar.
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I think part of the problem with understanding R&D is that closing Research Stations is like closing Regional Offices. When the reporter says “77 research stations will be closed across 31 states” (we have heard that this is not final but..) it elides facilities closing and the Research Stations themselves. In my mind, outside the FS, a research station is a place where scientists work. In the FS, it’s an administrative layer. It seems to me that many media folks also elide facilities and the work done there. As I said in a previous post “facilities are not people are not programs.” We moved offices a couple of times when I worked in DC and it’s not unusual to do so. When scientists want to move from FS facilities to universities, for example, the FS doesn’t tell them “sorry, that will potentially disrupt your research.” More likely, they think “thank Gaia we won’t have to be responsible for hazardous waste disposal in that aging building on a septic system.”
And of course, the Fire Science Lab (where some of the photos were taken in the story) with researcher Mark Finney is not on the list.
Then there’s the “reorganization is bad for wildfire” which I think is odd since Interior is actually reorganizing… its wildfire folks! This season! If I were going to worry, I think I’d worry about that. I see stories every day about the FS not being prepared for this fire season, and I wonder why the emphasis seems to be on that rather than on Interior.
One thing I learned from talking to reporters the last few weeks.. many people have concerns. I can’t say it’s wrong to have those concerns or share them widely (I got in trouble with some for calling something “fear-mongering”). I have my own concerns which I have shared with some reporters. Here they are:
If not managed well, new organizations will themselves bulk up and suck up just as much funding as the old organizations. Ongoing and tedious levels of discipline are required. Centralized service units can give forests better service (in my experience, for example, the Content Analysis Team and the Minerals staff) and bring experts to bear (if you need a coal expert, you need one even if your former Region didn’t have one) but if they are not managed well they can be a disaster (it has three letters the last one is C). So my concern is that the agency will have the management discipline over time and Administration fads to keep the pressure on. Once every twenty years is not often enough to think about performance and efficiency. IMHO.