I know folks could easily get tired of the reorganization ideas, so I am posting them in bits.
Sometimes, redactions are a bit of a hoot- and we can use them for a FOIA version of Mad Libs. What lies behind the redacted word or words before “Bridges and Structures Program.” Demonic? Laissez-faire? What would you suggest? It would be interesting to see a copy without the redactions.
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The next section provided in my interim FOIA results is the “ US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service (USFS) Bridges & Structures Work – Reorganization Proposal.” OK, so we don’t get to see the recommendations. What else can we find of interest? I know that this series may be of limited interest to many, that’s why I have the titles of the posts clear.
Here’s my first take on the Roads and Bridges and I don’t know how widely it applies; due to federal requirements that individually seem reasonable, especially when focused on major federal infrastructure, the Forest Service isn’t funded to fulfill those requirements.
Logically, the FS would… consider if they could make requirements that fit better with the FS mission. Perhaps in conjunction with the BLM? We can imagine a school of public administration study that would look at, say BLM and the FS, and see how they implement the same federal regulations. I guess no one is interested in funding that kind of work to make our government work better? As Anne Healy of Recoding America says in her post “government reform needs a field”
“But the gap is acute, and philanthropy keeps walking past it: dollars flow to working around government’s broken systems far more readily than to fixing them.”
Anyway, we all know that bridges are important for recreation, wildfire, emergencies and so on. They have a nice description in the report that I won’t reproduce here. Ultimately I will post the whole thing.
As Fred Norbury used to say about NEPA, “how can you say it takes too long and costs too much if you don’t know how long it takes and how much it costs?”
I’ll continue working through the FOIA documents.