Accountability

I suspect that people of all political stripes support government accountability and transparency.  People who want the government to spend less like to know that what is spent is being used well. People who like government want to show how Congress and others how well it handles the money given, and the great things that are happening, in hopes of getting more.  So this should be a popular topic.

There’s a webinar that has been changed to Jan 10 at 10 Mountain. You can register here. I plan to attend and it would be interesting to get others’ views. Here’s a link to the registration.

I was looking to see if I had a copy of the FS response to the “litigation and appeals are not a problem” GAO report, and ran across this in my files.

This letter is a bit of a hoot, especially given the current discussion about focusing on the basics. I hope I softened the language before it was sent out (to a team in the RO).

Below is a sample. It was a response to questions from the Transformation Team in 2007. I don’t remember who the Foundation Principals Group was or what they did.

In answering the questions below, provide specifics to your Region, Station, Area, or Washington Office Staff, along with suggestions and ideas that are more corporate in nature for the organization as a whole. Please present ideas that will assist the Forest Service in maximizing capacity, increasing effectiveness, and reducing costs. Avoid focusing on the status quo.

Questions are in italics, my answers in bold.

Transformation Efforts and Transition

1. Please list other recent, current, or projected Forest Service initiatives (e.g., other organizational efficiencies, consolidation, or shared service initiatives) that could compete or align with this effort’s success. Provide the name and contact information of who leads these efforts.

What does this mean? Region 2 has set up a partnership organization within the Region. Is this an example of an initiative that should be included.

Planning directors are working on coordinating economics expertise across regions to reduce the need for an economist in each RO.

2. What are some of the important lessons learned from past change efforts within your area/unit AND Forest Service-wide?

• The August 1999 NAPA study Restoring Managerial Accountability to the Forest Service was required reading for the Foundation Principals Group and it should be required reading for the Transformation effort.

My lessons learned:

YOU NEED TO OPTIMIZE ALL LEVELS AT ONCE

From the Pilot (all parts of the agency need to be aligned: problems during the Pilot with the Region not going for the “bucket of money” approach; certainly partially due to a need for accountability with Congress but

From Region 9 decreasing their RO a number of years ago- I experienced people who would have called the RO now calling other regions and using theirs or WO expertise. Leeching off others is not efficiency.
From efforts to centralize and improve the efficiency of administration – again, making your workload less by giving it away to others does not increase the efficiency of the organization- it is a shell game.

IT SHOULD BE KNOWN IN ADVANCE WHO WILL DO WHAT WORK AND IT MUST BE COSTED OUT, AGREED TO BY THE NLT, AND PASS THE LAUGH TEST (perhaps an outside group less likely to be invested in the desire to “go with the flow” or not be seen as an obstacle).

THE KEY ASSUMPTIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES SHOULD BE PILOTED PRIOR TO FINALIZING THE CHANGE
Efficiency is impaired by nonfunctioning computer systems and applications or poorly designed ones. It should be very clear who is responsible for each application and to whom questions should be addressed. Each should have a board of customers to advise on issues and possible improvements.

IF THERE ARE TOUGH CHOICES TO BE MADE WE SHOULD INVOLVE STAKEHOLDERS IN THOSE DECISIONS. Perhaps an advisory board? Perhaps some academics from public administration schools? Our tendency is to circle the wagons when we’re in trouble and appeal to our internal constituencies (example, EMS) and potentially build a monstrosity that doesn’t meet the original need to due the need to garner internal political support. Internal politics is important for sure, but shouldn’t be the main determinants.

3. What effect would a “soft freeze” have on your program areas as we move through this process?

This is an odd question. Don’t know what a soft freeze is. The impacts would depend on who retires or gets a different job, and how easy it is for someone else to learn those skills – in my case, running an appeals process (easy) , NEPA expertise (not easy).

4. What recommendations do you have for implementing a “soft freeze”?

• Attrition is not the best way to design a Transformed Forest Service. Our experience from past efforts is that it is a good way to loose critical skills needed by the agency.

If you must implement a freeze, then give RF’s discretion over which positions to fill. Otherwise we are managing by random factors (who retires or leaves). Don’t know anyone who would run a business not knowing who was coming to work the next day.

Back to Basics

5. Before we can look at organizational concepts, we first need to look at what work we are organizing to do. What do you think is the core business of the Forest Service?

• A finalized Foundational Principals document is key to the Transformation effort in that with the Foundational Principals one could discern the core business of the Forest Service and the design and organizational concepts for the Agency.
o The National Leadership Team needs to approve a “Core Business of the Forest Service” and Transformation design criteria or organizational concepts statements.
• Much of the Agency’s time and energy now goes into things the public does not care about (where our financial organization is located, how we structure the WO and Regions, etc.). We as an agency are focusing more and more on ourselves and less on the customers we serve.
• Organizational Concepts

Running the national forest public lands (research and helping state and private forests). Keeping the campgrounds running, the permits processed,
The streams running clear, etc. If all we had left was a ranger, a visitor information specialist and a contracting officer on each district, and some folks to inspect the contracts we could do the core business. (this model places high value on presence in communities).

6. What do you think are the priority areas of work needed to “take care of the land and serve people”?

• Upward reporting is taking more and more time away from the field to measure aspects of performance at the Washington level. The question to ask instead is whether we are delivering services to the field better.
• Things on the land the people on districts do and the advice they need to do them right.

7. What skill sets are needed to accomplish the Agency’s mission in the future?

Natural resources, conflict resolution, contracting.

Organizational Concepts

8. Are there any organizational concepts or ideas that you feel should be evaluated as part of this transformation effort?

• If all we are trying to do is reduce costs, why not use a simple across the board WO/RO cut of 25% or a 40% cut in the WO and a 15% cut in the RO.
• The follow-the-money analysis the Team is considering is very important to the process.
• Want to know how much of the Agency’s funding goes to the WO and the ROs.

9. Are there any key areas deserving extra focus and evaluation as a part of this transformation effort?
• Human Capital Management should be on the table in the Transformation process.
• Specialists of all kinds in terms of project and broader scale planning – we need them but how many do we need and can we share better and actually have higher quality available at a lower cost?
• When can people work from wherever and when it is important that they be together? Our organization seems to be unclear on this and makes different decisions at different points in time before we spend beaucoup bucks on TOS shouldn’t we have a corporate principle about this?
• There is so much change going on right now. How does it all fit together and when will it stop? The agency as a whole may be at a breaking point in so far as continual change is concerned. There is a perception at the upper levels of the Agency that the field is resistant to change, while in fact change has been continuous. The agency has gone from a predominately timber focused organization to one focusing on fire ecology and management, a very significant change.
• The Agency as an organization is not functioning well.
• The Charter says we will leverage new technology but we have not been able to do so. For example, we cannot pay our bills on time.
• Many Forest Service organizations have undergone efficiency changes. Don’t penalize those organizations that have already made efficiency changes.
• The Case for Change in the Charter is written defensively and needs to be written with a positive focus such as:
o We want to be able to do our mission better, here are some reform ideas.
o Need to explain the origin of the Case for Change
 Roslyn leases were up and an opportunity to operate more efficiently became apparent.
 The Regional Foresters agreed to being able to deliver an extra Million dollars in funding to each National Forest. This later became a 25% reduction in WO/RO funding.
• In the Charter Key points it says, “Leverage the capacity of the Agency’s centralized business operations services in Albuquerque.”
o Albuquerque has not been a success. There is not any capacity in Albuquerque to be leveraged, and they have not been able to deliver what has been asked of them.

Marc Heller has an article about the Keystone Agreements here. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.  He didn’t cover many of the questions that Dave Mertz, I and other retirees had.  Also interesting (and annoying) that Marc could get answers from the FS and Dave and I (and others who have been asking) could not, after weeks of reaching out to different offices and levels. We had to FOIA to get copies of the agreements themselves, which I’ll attach, also tomorrow.

**********************************

Maybe some of you, like me, are old enough to remember the old TV show “Sledgehammer.” His catchphrase was “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” The problem was, oftentimes, he did
not know what he was doing. I wonder if, with these Keystone Agreements, the Forest Service is asking us to trust them because they know what they are doing. We do know that they are
committing a whole lot of federal dollars through these agreements, and there doesn’t seem to be much transparency.

To be fair, the Forest Service was provided a lot of money through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and they had to figure out how to utilize that
funding in a short period of time. Were all of these Keystone Agreements a logical way to bank that money and put it to good use later? Maybe so. Or was it a convenient way for the Forest
Service to claim accomplishments and take some of the load off of them? Maybe it was both?

In the interest of finding out more about these agreements, I sent an email with several questions to the Forest Service’s National Partnerships Office. To date, I have not had a response. I would
imagine that a response will need to be cleared by higher-ups, so it may take a while. Here are the questions I asked:

(1) We have obtained copies of the Master Agreements with the various NGOs through FOIAs.  We are interested in the details contained in the associated Special Project Agreements (SPA), particularly the financial information.  Shouldn’t this information beavailable to the public?  We believe it is important to know how the Forest Service is spending federal dollars through these agreements.  Do we need to file FOIAs to obtain this information or could it just be available online?  If not, why not?  We realize there would be some proprietary information that would need to be redacted.

(2) How are accomplishments being tracked through these agreements?  Who is providing oversight, Grants and Agreements?  The Partnerships Office?

(3) What is the process of awarding the NGOs funding?  Do they receive the dollars and then projects are developed?  What are the overhead rates of the various NGOs?

(4) Are the Keystone Agreements being used to avoid Federal Acquisition Regulations and federal hiring difficulties?

(5) We are hearing that Forests are having budget difficulties this fiscal year and that it will impact their ability to hire employees.  In hindsight, was it wise to put so much funding into the Keystone Agreements rather than into NFS?  Could a lot of this funding have been put into IDIQ contracts instead?

(6) Are Keystone Agreement accomplishments being claimed when the funding is awarded rather than when the work is actually accomplished?

I have other questions that I did not bring up. How much funding has already been provided through the various Special Project Agreements? It appears that through these agreements, the
Forest Service still has a number of obligations. These projects are not turnkey. If that is the case, are they really saving the Forest Service that much work? Are they a good bang for the
buck? Do these organizations have the expertise to accomplish this work up to Forest Service standards? Who is ensuring compliance with the associated NEPA documents? Are these
organizations doing some inherently governmental tasks? I could go on.

I would be interested in getting other’s thoughts on all of this. Can you help answer some of these questions? It would be good to hear from you!

This is a re-ask from 2022. Accountability has come up in our recent discussion, and we have new TSW readers. I’m still looking for the Tom Mills Accountability Task Force report. Rich J has a number of interesting links in the comments.

The Smokey Wire Information Request- FS Accountability Study and a new “What Year Was This?” Quiz

A few weeks ago,  I heard Chief Moore say something like “the Forest Service is considering alternative measures for fuel reduction/wildfire resilience based on outcome not outputs.” This is somewhat related to our earlier discussion about timber targets.

I remembered that RVCC (Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition) had done some work on this, and the RVCC folks were kind enough to dig two reports up for me.  So it’s worth discussing and feel free to share any other reports or thoughts in the comments.   Discussions of performance measures do not normally get the blood flowing in many people I know.  Retirees may just roll their eyes and say “Thank Gaia I don’t have to think about this anymore or sit in meetings or read stuff about it…”  Nevertheless, here goes

It looks like there were two different thoughtful efforts.  One (2020) was called “Implementing Outcome-based Performance Measures Aligned with the  Forest Service’s Shared Stewardship Strategy.”

We’ll cover the other one (2022 with many of the same notable players) in the next post. This was a joint project of U of Oregon’s Ecosystem Workforce Program and RVCC with support from the Forest Service. The below is an excerpt of part of the paper.   The whole report is worth reading, and has many other points worthy of discussion.

5. Guiding principles and recommended next steps

In this section our goal is to provide guidance to the agency for moving forward with revising performance measurements in accordance with the Shared Stewardship Strategy. Our suggestions are derived from recommendations from the literature, stakeholder feedback, and our own experiences working with the agency

5.1 Internal agency considerations to prepare for performance measure redesign
The agency must define and communicate a clear purpose and audience for new performance measures prior to moving forward. We suggest that the agency consider the following questions and recommendations before requesting input from stakeholder partners.

It would be nice if all efforts required “communicating a clear purpose and audience prior to moving forward.”

Implementing Outcome-Based Performance Measures Aligned with the Forest Service’s Shared Stewardship Strategy 13
• What decisions and changes are new performance measures intended to inform? Whose behavior will change, and at what levels of the agency, as a result of the new performance measures? Be cautious of defining too many goals for performance measures. Composite priorities, such as those that are often referenced together in Shared Stewardship (e.g., cross-boundary, geographic prioritization, partnership), may require distinctly different performance measures.

• Will new performance measures replace or complement existing measures? New performance measures will not exist in a vacuum independent of existing measures, particularly timber volume and fuels reduction acre targets. As noted in the literature review, easily measured and defined goals and associated performance measures are likely to crowd out those with more complexity.  Furthermore, if new performance measures have no connection to budgets or staff performance reviews, they are unlikely to motivate or institutionalize new bureaucratic behavior. The distinction between performance measures should be clarified internally within the agency and externally for partners prior to moving forward.

• Who are the intended audiences (e.g., WO,Congress, OMB, states, community partners) and what would be meaningful to them? A single performance measure is unlikely to meet
the needs of all possible audiences. Counts of partnership agreements, for instance, may help signal progress to Congressional audiences, but are unlikely to be particularly meaningful to local stakeholders or state implementation partners. We encourage dialogue with intended audience(s) to ensure performance measures are meaningful to those parties.

• What investments will the agency be able to make in data collection and management? Utilizing existing data may be necessary and preferable in the short term; however, new performance measures will likely require some level of new data collection. We encourage the agency to recognize that updating existing databases and creating new fields, if not whole new data systems, is likely needed to meaningfully report on partnership outcomes.

• At what scale does the agency want to implement new performance measures? The recommendations and considerations offered below apply broadly across most or all scales, but
performance measure design and implementation will look different at varying scales. For instance, the principle of inclusivity may look different if a performance measure is intended to evaluate a District or District Ranger compared to a Region or Regional Forester.

We also recommend that the agency make revised performance measures one part of a broader strategy to ensure that incentives and policies within the agency align with the intent of the Shared Stewardship Strategy. In particular, we suggest the agency convene a series of workshops for academic partners and practitioners who specialize in United States public lands forest governance and policy to consider options for broader reform efforts within the agency (e.g., reforming the National Forest Management Act, incentive structures within the agency, long-term visioning). We further recommend that the agency convene a structured meeting of national partners to further develop recommendations for implementing revised performance measures.

I’d only add that partnership-ish measures at the landscape scale should perhaps be coordinated in such a way that landscapes with intermix of BLM and FS should consider collecting the same kind of information and consider developing similar performance measures in those areas, if performance measures occur at the landscape scale. I think partners, neighbors and taxpayers would thank you.

On one hand, it seems like the Boulder County folks, with help, did an excellent job investigating the Marshall Fire, and changing their practices based on that knowledge. Along with the concept of “lessons learned”. All that information is posted on their website. including an After Action Report and a Facilitated Learning Analysis.

On the other hand, we’ve had a global pandemic. Two federal agencies (DOE and FBI) think it might have been due to a lab leak. Other federal agencies were funding the research that might have led to the lab leak, and don’t think it was.. which seems like an obvious conflict of interest.. and they are continuing to fund similar work. You don’t need to have WHO numbers at hand to know that the Covid pandemic had substantially worse impacts than the Marshall Fire. Through the work of independent investigators, we have found many unsavory things about how gain of function research was managed, and how the discussion was handled in the press and on social media. Scientists are asking “is this research a good use of federal funds? Are the risks too great? Was gain of function research actually helpful in this pandemic, as promoted in the proposals? If it’s essential should it be done in more isolated places..say like Plum Island is for foreign animal diseases. Would it make more sense to have a commission of independent folks look at all this holistically -whether this research is needed and how it’s managed- rather than a variety of intelligence, law enforcement and other agencies coming to different conclusions on the more narrow question of a specific lab leak? Or should the usual “management of research” questions be considered (from London Times story):

It could have been the end of the Wuhan-North Carolina collaboration, but a loophole allowed gain-of-function work to proceed if deemed urgent and safe. Baric made the argument to the NIH, which gave approval.
……..
This triggered alarm bells for the US government because it would have involved the type of gain-of-function experiments that were still barred. According to documents obtained by freedom of information campaigners, Daszak argued the Mers experiment was not gain of function because it was unlikely to make the virus more pathogenic. A compromise was reached whereby the scientists would stop work and report to US officials if they created a new mutant virus that grew ten times faster than the natural virus it was created from.

…….

And the old and familiar, one agency found out something but it didn’t make an impression on another agency.
The US embassy found out about the experiments in Wuhan and sent diplomats with scientific expertise to inspect the institute in January 2018, according to diplomatic cables leaked to The Washington Post. They observed “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory”.

In the case of the New Mexico fires last year, the Forest Service had a 90 day stand-down, and involved the public in figuring out how to improve, and changed practices based on those findings. There’s a public report.

Then there’s the Durham Report. I recommend that if you’re interested, you read it yourself, not believe what others say about it. I think anyone working in a frequently FOIAed/litigated bureaucracy may enjoy it from a “glad that wasn’t me” perspective. There’s some humor in there as well. From page 258:

Within a day of receiving the Alfa Bank materials, Cyber Agent- I and Cyber Agent2 drafted a report of their analysis. he report’s summary stated that they had “assess[ ed) there is no CyD [Cyber Division] equity in this report and that the research conducted in the report reveals some questionable investigative steps taken and conclusions drawn.” The report acknowledged that there was no allegation of hacking and so there was no reason for the Cyber Division to investigate further. The report also said that

it appears abnormal that a presidential candidate, who wanted to conduct secret correspondence with the Russian government ( or a Russian bank), would (1) name his secret server ‘mail I.trump-email.com’, (2) use a domain (trump~ernail.com) registered to his own organization, and then (3) communicate directly to the Russian bank’s IP address (as opposed to using TOR or proxy servers).

Cyber Agent- I testified that both he and Cyber Agent-2 did not agree with the conclusion in the white paper and assessed that (i) the authors of the white paper ‘jumped to some conclusions that were not supported by the technical data,” (ii) the methodology was questionable, and (iii) the conclusions drawn did not “ring true at all.”

Now, I don’t expect the FBI to stand down for 90 days and look at how they went off the rails and how they might fix it. But why not have a report of what they found they had done wrong and how they plan to fix it in the future? After all, I’ve heard another election is coming up…

Here are my hypotheses:

-Fire culture has a history of lessons learned, others don’t.
-Important people don’t really want to know or improve; it’s OK for fire folks to undergo review, but not really important people.
– Partisans will try to get partisanship to creep in certain reviews and not others, and once partisan demons have entered the discussion, any review and improvement is DOA (dead on arrival). It has already reared its head with Covid in ways that I find, as a non-partisan, unfathomable. I understand how it happened with the Durham report, which was after all, about the FBI putting its thumb on the political scales before an election to the benefit of one party. Notice the Politico headline “Republicans dive into politically fraught push for Covid’s origin.”

But despite a growing chorus of bipartisan calls for such a probe, it’s unclear whether Democrats are actually willing to launch a wide-ranging review. The House’s select panel on Covid-19 has not committed to exploring how the deadly outbreak started, with its chair, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), recently suggesting he’d rather look forward than backward.

What is missing from this take on Clyburn’s take on (some) reviews is the idea that information helps agencies improve What if Chief Moore had said “I’d rather look forward than backward” after the New Mexico fires last year, or NASA had said that after the Challenger disaster?

Some (I would argue many or all) things are more important than partisan sparring. Like improving the way our agencies operate, especially those tasked with public health and law enforcement. Especially if you are in a party, I think, which holds the position that the government should be doing more things, an important piece of gaining trust would be being transparent about failures and fixing them… all across the interlocking mass of federal agencies. Among us the knowledge hasn’t been lost on how to do bipartisan commissions and reviews, all that’s lacking is political courage and a certain amount of bipartisan trust.

But even without the Congress setting up a bipartisan review, or the President setting one up.. perhaps they are all too embroiled in power-seeking to hear the call to good governance, there is nothing to keep NIH and CDC, and the FBI, from getting some fire folks in to help them develop the skills to have a more open, lessons-learned kind of culture. Who could be against better governance and developing trust?

I’m getting a few posts together on a history of the Forest Service and various forms of “accountability”; also thoughts about “why the FS is not as adaptive as it could be” brought up by Chelsea.

In the meantime, I thought it would be thought-provoking to expand our view to “how other government agencies are held accountable”. Now there’s all kinds of accountability as we will see, but here I’m interested in accountability for “getting things wrong, with ultimately bad results for people in our country.”

When the Forest Service made a mistake, they did a stand-down on the practice for 90 days and involved a variety of inside and outside people in looking at what went wrong, and making recommendations for improvement. Which I think we will see in the next week or so.

OK, well maybe the CIA does this when their assessments turn out to be wrong, and we (obviously) wouldn’t know about it.  Let’s start with the Federal Reserve. According to its website,

The Federal Reserve, like many other central banks, is an independent government agency but also one that is ultimately accountable to the public and the Congress.

I ran across this podcast of journalist Bari Weiss with Larry Summers (who has had a very distinguished career doing many things, including being the President of Harvard and Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, but is an expert on economics). The question was “he was more concerned about inflation than others, why does he think he got it right and others got it wrong?” This is right at the beginning of the podcast.  One thing I like about economists is that they tend to be humble about what they know, as daily, annually, or whatever, there is empirical evidence that they are right or wrong.  They also appreciate uncertainties, and have developed ways to think about them.

Here is Summers says.. paraphrased by me.

It’s tempting to blame this (thinking that there won’t be inflation) on politics, but he doesn’t see political motivations among business forecasters. Emphasis on short memories; 40 years since we’d gone through this- many folks had no lived experience of inflation.  Bad statistical modelling.  Motivated belief, people wanted to avoid mistakes of the slow recovery, wanted to believe that they could engage in expansionary policies, the Fed knows best.. reluctant to challenge the views of the Fed. Tendency among pundits and economists to want to make new mistakes.  Everyone who did “widowmaker” trades worried about inflation in the past, didn’t want to make that mistake. All of those contributed to a communal belief system; Keynes said “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?”

Bari asked: why does the Admin ask you for advice, if you are critical of their policies?

Summers points out that except for the Trump Admin, he has advised both D and R Admins.  One reason he says is that he never questioned motives; never impugned integrity, focus on what the ideas are. Don’t feel we should take positions of moral superiority except in extreme circumstances.

It’s easier for people to hear you if you respect their sincerity.

Anyway, I’m not a big podcast person, but I think this might be interesting to TSW-ites, especially around the topics of expertise and accountability.

So, the Federal Reserve; perhaps CDC, what did they get wrong and right about Covid?  Should they have a 90 day review? I wouldn’t think they need to involve me (the public) but perhaps include experts who suggested different approaches than the ones they took?

What makes an agency get something wrong enough to generate a stand-down and a review?  How do we tell? Perhaps it should become more common.

Should citizens be able to nominate apparent mistakes for formal review? How can we do this without devolving into a Partisan Rock-Throwing and Defensive Drama where we can predict the dialogue in advance? Somehow the FS appears to have  managed to avoid this, so it can be done. What is their “secret sauce” (a Summers-ism)?