The Wildfire Consolidation Study. Unconfirmed retiree network info is that in fact the North Carolinians are hiring FS retirees to help them with the study. We recall the Keystone Grantees also hiring retirees to do timber work. A person could wonder whether it would be easier for the FS to hire retirees directly without middle-people soaking up their cut. Would they, if it was easier to hire people? Federal hiring has been a problem for some time.
As Jennifer Pahlka details in her history of implementing the CHIPs act, it’s something that really important projects can get a workaround. For those of you interested in how government could work better, Pahlka is definitely worth following.
I’ll only add that if only one party seems interested in improvement, that’s not a good thing. The last time I remember D’s being interested, reducing the WO, reducing the workforce, combining pieces of agencies within Interior and getting rid of layers, was the Clinton Administration. Since then, we’ve had Bush II (Transformation, studied much, did some). So two improvement efforts in a row, with one from each party. Then Obama, Trump and Biden, again two parties, but none of which seemed particularly interested in improvement. Again, two different parties, both seemed not interested, at least in our regularly followed agencies.
In this piece, Pahlka argues that “Rebuilding the machinery of government can’t be a partisan project.”
A partisan project can contain only the machinery changes one party can make alone: the orders to sign, the offices to reorganize, the exemptions to be granted. Whatever one party can do alone, the next party can undo alone.”
Which is very reasonable, and I am a big fan of bipartisan work. At the same time, both parties would have to care, and raise their eyes from the urgency of elections. What would it take for both sides to get on board.. together? Perhaps the D’s thought that things were fine. Why was improvement a topic for the Clinton Admin and for the FS, the Bush Admin (think Transformation) but not much since?
Things were not fine, at least not in the FS (evidence, budget deficit). When I read Pahlka’s Substack on the three horizons framework about the pressure valve, I thought of the IRA and IIJA grants, and now contracts for studies such as the Wildfire Consolidation effort:
The dynamic of unintentionally propping up the status quo is easiest to see in what you might call vertical interventions. An agency lacks the talent to do important work, so philanthropy pays for some detailees, often through an Intergovernmental Personnel Agreement. An agency can’t hire the people it needs under standard civil service rules, so Congress grants a particular team a special hiring authority, as it did for the CHIPS implementation team. The procurement rules will take too long, so an agency gets an Other Transaction Authority exemption. The answer to “the system doesn’t work” has been to hack it in the vertical domains that get attention, not fix it horizontally.
Each of these carve-outs delivers genuine value. Most of them are the right call in the moment. But each one also functions as a pressure valve on a system that, absent the relief, might generate the political and institutional pressure needed to fix the underlying problem. The legislative carveout that makes Paperwork Reduction Act compliance unnecessary for a particular program means the people and organizations with the most standing to demand PRA reform never do. They just move on to the next challenge. The rescue team that fixes a broken system well enough to make it functional returns it to “good enough,” which is exactly the condition in which structural change is hardest to achieve.
The cost of the workaround isn’t just lost pressure. Every special authority, every exemption, every vertical fix makes the overall system more complex, more fragmented, and more navigable by sophisticated actors — large contractors, well-resourced agencies, organizations with the staff to learn which door to knock on. The organizations least able to navigate that complexity are typically the ones serving the populations with the worst outcomes. Vertical interventions don’t just leave the underlying dysfunction in place. They tend to entrench it.
When I see job ads for NWTF for timber harvest inspectors on contract,
The NWTF is seeking Requests for Proposals for the Wasp Stewardship Project Harvest Inspector. The contract will run from September of 2026 through December 2029. The contract may be extended based on progression of logging operations.
(with thanks to NWTF for helping out), I think “can an uncompeted grant to NWTF that goes to a competed contract actually be the best way forward for quality USG work?” Think about the Keystones and what Pahlka says about favoring large contractors. It’s not so much that a different approach was necessary for the short-term funding But rather that the funding was likely to have dried up by the time the capacity was built up in each NGO.
Why couldn’t the FS (with more flexibility) have hired its own temporary teams, the cream of which could be hired permanently?
To be fair, my contacts in this Admin say they are outsourcing reforestation now because they weren’t allowed to hire people in this Admin. I think the FS is a great example of how inconsistent approaches across Administrations makes everything worse.
Pahlka also had a piece today on the SNAP program.. but I think her observation that it’s not the best we can do fits many other programs. And AI will make jobs easier and at the same time may raise our expectations for transparency. It sounds like there are people (some in the FS) considering this, and I’m interested in their thoughts.
Because with all due respect to those who’ve been fighting to improve it, I guarantee you that SNAP, at least the way we’ve been administering it for years, is not the best we could do.
Or more to the point, a “safety net” (make those air quotes extra heavy here) made up of dozens of bespoke programs, each with mind-bogglingly complex eligibility criteria and fragile, expensive systems poorly built to administer them, in which each program affects the other, causing endless “benefit cliff” doom loops that force constant re-engagement with said crappy systems, each gameable by those with resources and an absolute black box to those without, is not the best we can do. And it is not fit for the job we will need it to do in the coming years as AI changes what people need and expect. I read DeParle’s warning against losing SNAP through this lens. What if this crisis were a call for profound renewal? What if this moment were about building something better?
Oddly enough, the ‘regular’ Forest Service usually felt that Harvest Inspectors were excess baggage, outside of salvage projects. Even when thinning acreage went up, Sale Administrators were expected to merely sample harvested areas, because there wasn’t enough time to walk every skid trail, or inspect slash work over every unit. When I was a Harvest Inspector, I walked the entire unit, multiple times, accepting or rejecting work.
We seem to rely a great deal on human judgment of how much needs to be inspected and when, but with different humans, with different levels of experience, from different organizations doing it, seems like that might be too much flexibility.. the old conundrum. How much to standardize, and how much to leave to someone’s judgment.
I suspect that the “pace and scale” of logging is not fast enough for the Administration’s ‘influencers’. Yes, it IS important to inspect (and document) every skid trail…. BEFORE the timber gets felled. That slows down the loggers, for sure. A 62 year old Sale Administrator might not be able to keep up, juggling multiple projects. (Which brings up the thought about how much ‘independence’ do you give a newbie Harvest Inspector?)
Remember, the basic Timber Sale Contract only delegates a minimum amount of authority to a Harvest Inspector. IIRC, the three things were 1) Mark trees 2) Mark damaged trees 3) Flag waterbars. For me, it took a 2 page report to delegate all my authorities, officially, in writing.