I wanted to double back and let retirees to catch up… Dale pointed out in a comment that the FS doesn’t use “charge as worked” either.
I keep seeing reference to “charge as worked” in this and other recent posts. I don’t know about BLM and other DOI agencies, but the USFS essentially dropped project or resource job codes five or more years ago. When that change happened and before retiring from FS less than 2 years ago, basically all non-fire employees (including timber) charged their time to one job code – NFSE (the SE was for “salary and expenditures”). Funding for equipment and to pay for contracts still may have used resource specific job codes, but that was very minimal for shops like wildlife. For example, as a wildlife biologist (or for other resource specialists) I no longer was given or had to track multiple job codes from timber, fuels, lands, recreation, special use/permits, etc. for project support/NEPA analysis work and how many hours I charged to each. All my time was charged to NFSE on my timesheet (with minor exceptions), no matter what projects I worked on. Another huge funding bucket for a time anyway were special job codes from the “Wildfire Crisis” money bucket. Fire folks may have had a different code, and I think there still may have been timber budget line items to track payment to contractors for timber contracts, for example, or special codes for external project proponents. This greatly simplified everyone’s timesheets and resulted in every permanent full-time employee having 261 days of funding at the start of the fiscal year, versus the annual paper funding chase of permanent full-time (PFT) employees not being “fully funded” because line officers and supervisors would not ensure that the mix of job codes would add up to or fully fund PFT employees at fiscal year start.
I mention this also because it seems, even though the USWFS Chief seems to be saying above (and others have said the same thing in other TSW posts) that fuels planners under a USWFS model would not change chairs or locations for working on NEPA approvals with agency interdisciplinary teams. But if they are essentially part of another organization (USWFS) versus BLM (or USFS if they are merged in to a USWFS at some point), they would be in a different org and chain of command, funding requests and time requests would need to be made and approved between the 2 orgs, etc. creating unnecessary inefficiencies it would seem to me.
It sounds like the FS can’t report to Congress by program code? I don’t think we want feds to bill their time in 15 minute segments, but maybe there is an explainer out there for how the budget is tracked? Some of us are interested in reforestation, and others recreation, and so on. Not to speak of tracking via grantees’ work. We must be missing something in reporting and accountability.
I think Dale raises an interesting point about two organizations coordinating time. Like I have said, there’s probably someone in the bowels of the Interior building who has all the details figured out. But this goes back to Service First.. they managed to have BLM and USDA fund the same people. And they seemed to think it worked better, because they jointly were able to afford specialists that they couldn’t afford separately (if I recall correctly). Even when I began my career, we had area specialists and our workplans were coordinated among our four forests. The Supes negotiated it- it didn’t seem like it was a big deal, except competition for the Area Ecologists’ time required some horsetrading.
Our budgeting work was the biggest waste of time since the advent of putting computers at everyone’s desk! Multi-day, all Forest meetings to argue over how many days per job code someone was planned for. Zoned employees were even worse for managing the “261”! Cost Pools added to the lack of fully funded budgets, etc.
I do wonder though, Trust Funds (KV, BD, SSF) must have some method of keeping track of collection and use. Same for coop funded projects, like roads, facilities and quarters. I still have scars on my knuckles from SSS’s trying to teach me the in’s and out’s of facilities and quarters functions, including what and when we used those funds…..
Any improvement at budget simplification is a “win”!
There is a tension between simplification for the units and people, and accountability for the buckets that Congress allocates, for sure. We tried the Big Bucket approach in the 80’s during the Ochoco Pilot and I think it foundered on the shoals of accountability (or programmatic self-interest at the RO) but for sure there’s some relationship between programmatic interests and accountability for Congressional buckets.
Jim Z is correct. This change made a previously unworkable and inefficient model way better. It also puts the FS in line with most other agencies and private sector – namely that salary is now considered a fixed cost. Another real plus for employees is that uniforms, boot reimbursements, training and travel are also considered fixed costs. Instead of the asinine idea that we couldn’t afford those things some years. The change to an S&E funding, accurately titled budget modernization, was one of the few respectable things Randy Moore accomplished, but was unfortunately paired with assigning the discretionary budget to zones, an abysmal failure the new administration wasted no time in undoing. I guess I don’t see how this limits accountability. The agency still can get called to testify to committees at any time, and has reporting of accomplishments across its many programs. Natural resource managers can now manage resources, instead of pointless bean counting. All of this is just for annual appropriated funds. The agency still has many non-appropriated funds available, uses them regularly to supplement S/E, and for specific projects that align with the statutory basis for each fund. These funds have not gone away at all and are a useful and neat way the agency generates its own revenue to meets the mission.
I guess my question is… suppose I were an interest group focused on recreation on a forest. How would I know how much money the forest gets in recreation and where it goes? I get that a rec employee and all the relevant training etc. is one box of funds (that makes sense) but can a person find out how many perms and temps, grants and contracts, etc. the forest has in one interest area and is spending? Also volunteer hours and external grants? Seems like that kind of thing used to be in some forests’ Annual Report.