Is USDA Hugging the Bear?

1. Last week I was told that contracting folks were moving to a team based at USDA to work for all agencies. This does not apply to emergency (wildfire) procurement folks. I sent an inquiry to FS communications, which was promptly answered and forwarded to USDA comms.. I haven’t heard from them yet. Kudos to FS comms for quickness of response! Here are my questions.

It has come to my attention that Forest Service non-emergency contracting folks are being moved to USDA, where they will be part of a service center for all USDA agencies.
Is this true, do you have anything to add?
Are there other business services that will be moved to that kind of USDA-wide structure? Grants and agreement, HR, IT ??? (later I added FOIA)

What is the rationale, and is there an overall organizational plan that can be shared with the public?

If readers know more about this, please add in the comments.
It could be that the Secretary is imbedding the FS in USDA, to make it more difficult for forces to try to strip the FS (whole or in parts) from USDA and put it in Interior.

2. Don Amador has a piece on his blog about combining USDA agencies into one office in Redding, California. Here are some excerpts, and that is his photo above:

When I recently visited the new USDA Service Center in Redding, California, I found myself reflecting on just how much the U.S. Forest Service has evolved over the past century.

Located in what many longtime Northern California residents still think of as the Shasta-Trinity National Forest Supervisor’s Office, the building today serves a much broader purpose. Along with the headquarters for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, it houses the Pacific Southwest Research Station, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Farm Service Agency (FSA), Rural Development, and other USDA programs under one roof.

Rather than serving as the headquarters of a single National Forest, these facilities function as integrated USDA campuses where multiple agencies work side by side. The emphasis is less on organizational boundaries and more on delivering a range of services to rural communities, landowners, agricultural producers, conservation partners, researchers, and public land users.

It is a noticeable evolution from an agency structure rooted in the 1930s toward a model that better reflects twenty-first century technology, community engagement, and collaboration.

Don’s piece got me to thinking about how it may well make more sense to combine offices with other USDA agencies, compared to with BLM. Although the FS and BLM share similar missions, Interior does not have the kind of facilities nor outreach to citizens that USDA does across the country.

If you go back to some of the rhetoric around moving the FS to Interior (from the D side), it would be because Interior is full of “conservation” agencies.  Actually, it looks like the BLM goes back and forth from minerals folks to environmental NGOs.. neither being particularly close to rural (or even urban, as in urban and community forestry) people and communities across the country and their concerns.

It wasn’t until I worked on the Fund for Rural America that I began to appreciate the many programs within USDA.  Because I graduated from a land grant institution, I was aware of Extension, Master Gardeners, and of course NRCS (our associate chief when I was in RPA, Dave Unger, came from there, and many USDA reorgs had the FS and NRCS sharing an undersecretary) and so on, but not so much FSA and Rural Development. Even the wood waste problem (e.g. paywalled San Fran Chron op ed) seems more related to capacities of USDA and the Forest Service, rather than, say, USGS. Although when we had the bark beetle outbreak in Colorado, DOE came with some ideas for wood waste to energy.

Long story short.. I guess these are all arguments for the FS (whole) staying with USDA.  Still, I don’t know how common the Service Center idea is.. probably depends on lease terms and other factors. Probably someone out there knows..