Some of this is similar to Frank’s previous post. One idea that is new and likely controversial is his idea of bringing in disruptors- management/business types at the top.
Leadership change is elemental for an entirely new Agency refit and performance expectations. The new Chief must not be from the ranks, nor should the Chief be one of the industry or environmental gladiators who spar over minor adjustments to a $10 billion budget. We need a disruptor, a person in a hurry, and a change agent on an epic scale, like the Secretary of the Navy. The safe but ineffective home office comfort zone, the shattered and scattered agency employees and organizations, and the days of working from home in a place far removed from a physical duty station are ending. The communities we serve do not telework. They don’t have duty stations five States away from the town square. Neither will we. It’s time to rejoin the circle of life in rural America, where our people and natural resources struggle for help and support.
If you disagree, please comment below or send in your own post of “what I think should be done by the next Admin.” I haven’t turned anyone down who wants to submit a guest post yet. And anonymous posts are fine.
************************
Among the most challenging roles for government change agents (and the least understood) is finding new leaders immune from the administrative state’s enticements. Most agency employees and those who would influence agency employees have worked closely together, for good or ill, over many years. They are known to each other. Their positions are well understood. Hiring officials look for operatives in various issues areas who have labored for decades to obtain sufficient power and network credibility for leadership positions in the new administration.
My message to the 47th and Second President Trump administration and the transition team: Do not hire these talented and skilled personnel! They will not fix anything!
The USDA Forest Service took decades to outsource core agency functions, such as public involvement and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis, to contractors and NGOs. It took more decades to “offshore” essential work to people more than a thousand miles removed from the ranger districts where their help is needed most. It took six Presidents in five administrations to allow the essential Forest Service to devolve into an irrelevant, disconnected, fractured, scattered, and furtive shadow of its former glory and purpose. It will take a new and courageous level of disruptive change to redirect the former “best federal agency” from bureaucratic inertia and destruction to intimate public service and hands-on natural resources management and stewardship. It’s a Herculean task as challenging as slaying the nine-headed Hydra of Lerna or killing the Nemean Lion. It will take unknown heroes with impeccable credentials and histories working tirelessly in thankless jobs without pause, recognition, or mercy.
It’s time to clean house in the ranks of the USDA Forest Service. The just concluded election offers an opportunity to do so. As in life, so in government, the status quo requires a reset periodically to recognize and adapt to changed conditions. There is precedent for executive action to rewire government agencies to be responsive to the realities of an incoming administration and radically new approaches brought on by profound changes in the world, spiritual and temporal, that demand the sort of revolution in the head experienced once in a couple of generations.
To aid post-Civil War Western settlement, the government made a solid effort to coax an agricultural Eden from the vast, arid, Western wilderness by building and operating water impoundments to irrigate fields and provide power to newly rising communities. By mid-century, dam builders like C. J. Strike in the USDI’s Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) found themselves without a portfolio and faced bureaucratic extinction. Strike and other nimble thinkers in politics and government recast the BOR as a flatwater recreation outfit and changed its mission and political support base to reflect the new reality. This new social license gave BOR a popular water sports constituency and left the Agency intact, complete with engineering professionals and technical staff to maintain the complex systems.
For over 90 years, Forest Service Chiefs sought to operate above the fray of Senate confirmation hearings and apart from wrangling for political appointments. Agency leaders asserted their leadership as a professional class of neutral expert foresters overseeing the greatest good for the greatest number over time. It worked for almost a century. Career Chiefs were tolerated and even encouraged. When the Agency’s mission, workforce, and ecosystem services were fully functional, clearly understood, and socially licensed by a supportive public, there was no need to shake up the sober and highly respected foresters and range scientists who made sure trees and grass grow sustainably.
Today, the Forest Service is a mess, both spiritually and in fact. Deeply in debt (a billion dollars this fiscal year alone) and reduced for its social license to dependence on its role as a wildland fire department, the Agency is badly off course. Lacking accountability and poorly led and managed, the decentralized model that once made the outfit among the most effective in government has fallen into a caricature of past competence. The Chief has abandoned his role in sustainably managing our natural resources. He has given millions of dollars and inappropriate management responsibilities to outside non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to manage what he will not or cannot.
As with much of government, many employees no longer report to the office to share the synergies of working together, to provide immediate access to the public, to build esprit de corps and corporate knowledge, or to raise new generations of employees by mentoring and daily example. There is no water cooler or pickup cab where rookies and veterans share knowledge, skills, and common sense, and become the beating heart of their local communities. No champions have risen in the ranks since the pandemic to redefine its role in the larger government, society, and institutions. Without a solid footing and a firm base of public and cooperator support, no likely future path would compel the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to keep the Forest Service going in its current state.
The Forest Service never recovered from the profound effects of the upheaval around agency management prerogatives following the Forest Wars of the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. Spotted owls and the greater good suffered from myopic political compromises that ended traditional community relationships with the National Forests and Ranger Districts and subjected the Agency to narrow political and environmentalist interests for which the Chief had no social license. Top-down decrees sought to “save spotted owls” at the price of sustainable rural economies. Agency strength and capabilities dwindled as increasingly restrained leadership searched in vain for a new place to land.
As Service leaders teetered on the brink of irrelevance in their search for a path forward, the disruptive power of the late pandemic struck like lightning on a summer afternoon, further isolating, confusing, and shredding any hope of leveraging the synergies of people and communities that long served as the bedrock of ecosystem services and public confidence in the Agency. The forest and grassland bureaucracy found itself stumbling into its old white-hat standby, wildfire management, as its raison d’etre.
Fear of the pandemic engendered low morale in transitioning from natural resources management to virtually full-time wildfire management. Agency lawyers refused to back up line officer decisions supporting the Agency’s multiple-use mission against often-frivolous lawsuits. Forest Service communities of interest lost confidence in the government. The nail in the coffin of an otherwise rudderless agency has been catering to employees’ personal work preferences over production, performance, or service. Current leadership’s conspiracy of circumstances and intentional choices to scatter the Green Machine and her people to the wind left personnel and assets randomly falling wherever whimsy might lead, usually wildfire use instead of sustainable management.
The Chief and the Executive Leadership Team surrendered management priorities and future direction to a Fauchian cabal of misinformed CDC initiatives and weak OGC attorneys, focusing on work consolidation for its own sake and enabling employee-centric remote work and telework. After all, any duty station will work in an Agency without purpose and direction. Agency leaders prioritized employee safety and comfort over any other consideration, including public safety and service. Chief Moore promised to keep employees safe and protect their salaries as his preeminent mission. “The goal of the agency,” he wrote, “[is] to ensure we continue to pay and take care of all employees currently working for the Forest Service.” Caring for the land and serving people is a dim memory from a formerly reliable provider of a wide array of ecosystem services that enjoyed a 75 percent public approval rating.
As the pandemic unfolded, absent scientific evidence and without the courage of their convictions, fearful leaders first cajoled and then intimidated the workforce into accepting the medical judgment of people no one trusted and management advice from people no one knew. Employee confidence hit rock bottom, replaced by the fiction that any activity was better than no activity and that any path would be acceptable in the crisis. Employees retreated to their homes, sealed the doors, and joined the Laptop Class of teleworkers now under universal condemnation. Excesses of illiberal bureaucratic power resulted in wrong-headed and corrosive boons granted to those who do not directly contribute to the financial health and capacity of the Nation. Tax spenders are less cautious with our collective bank accounts than taxpayers who make a living from private efforts and sacrifice.
Suppose telework and remote duty stations were a good idea but on a limited basis. In any case, they are now anathema to a Nation resurgent in its need to strongly support and sustain rural and urban communities where our National Forests or offices reside and to ramp up economically vital industries, including our War industries, to mitigate the international interventionism of the past four years. A new sheriff has arrived with a new message: get back to work. As Van Elsbernd wisely observed, when the Agency decides to do something, you’d best figure out how to get it done or get out of the way before you find yourself under the bus.
As in World Wars One and Two, the urgent priority for our precious natural resources is to provide raw materials for our weakened but rising industrial base. Focused on intentionally using wildfire to “restore fire to fire-dependent ecosystems,” Forest Service leaders have neither recognized nor pivoted to the most urgent change in National priorities in the current century. The lack of a coherent policy and compelling leadership on issues related to the new priorities, like healthy and efficient ecosystem services, means the Executive Leadership Team has been asleep at the wheel.
A new Chief and senior staff will have urgent priorities to address in the first two years of the Trump administration.
- No reform will occur unless a champion of disruptive change fearlessly wades into this most traditional and sluggardly Agency and changes almost everything about workforce dynamics, conditions of employment, leadership expectations, and the locus and focus of the work. Already, political leadership is eyeing the same old gang for leadership roles. At the front of the list of names for the new Chief are the executive directors of various forest products industry lobbies and associations. It’s a mistake to think people who are already captives of the multiple compromises within existing systems would be able to make fundamental changes. The just past administration brought their interest group loyalists, environmentalists, and various radical activist groups in to run agencies like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). They made few changes and accomplished little lasting effect. We can expect the same result if the Forest Service chooses timber industry lobbyists or cowboys as leaders. We need an ELT of DOGE-style leaders and managers, perhaps on loan from SpaceX or the Boring Company, who will turn the place upside down, shake it hard, then put the pieces back in a way that benefits the American people and restores the Agency’s social license and organic purpose. Applicants need not have strong opinions about natural resources management; they must be biased toward action and purpose (hint: enabling employees to be comfortable living at home and working from a screen is irrelevant).
- Immediately restore the seasonal workforce. Plans to cut seasonal positions to save a billion lost dollars are DOA. The Forest Service is swarming with special “teams” comprised of Senior Executive Service employees, a government efficiency program instituted under President Carter that has now lost any utility other than distributing wealth to often undeserving bureaucrats. A warren of GS Fantastics who live wherever they want, commute to duty stations at considerable expense, and spend endless hours on Zoom and Google Meet calls pretending to be in close touch with the people on the ground play redundant supporting roles for the imperial SES ranks. This aspect of current Forest Service human resource practices infuriates employees on the ground and is expensive to maintain and support. The arrangement frustrates the public, who can’t find Smokey anywhere when needed and have to meet with virtual employees and contractors online in areas where internet access is often untenable. Human Resource officers are packed together in a single centralized space at the Albuquerque Service Center in New Mexico…well, they’re supposed to be there. More often than not, these HR pros are at home in (pick a state) and work by answering voice messages left on personal/government phones. Contrast this unresponsive reality with past practices when HR personnel were right down the hall, always available, and always responsive. HR is broken. It’s time to lead a Reduction in Force (RIF), targeted buyouts, directed reassignments, and new conditions of employment requiring employees to report to their physical offices (ranger districts, regional offices, Washington headquarters buildings, work centers, fire bases, Job Corps Centers), a new emphasis on wearing the Forest Service uniform, and many other Draconian demands aimed at forging a strong, unified, service and management-oriented Agency from scratch. Paint the vehicles Forest Service green. Eliminate the creep of nepotism through the ranks. Return to the policies of the 1970s and 80s that ensured related employees would not have conflicts in form or fact. Employees are marrying each other in ways that create economic advantages for couples with little oversight of ethical and practical considerations.
- Leading by example, these and other specific actions will reduce the workforce by 25 percent. There are now four regional foresters at the SES and GS-15 level at each of the nine regional offices, up from three pre-pandemic. None of these employees are reliably found working in their offices. They are leading by bad example. Cut their numbers in half, and they could still effectively serve by coming to work every day. Cutting specific numbers of SES and GS-13-15 employees at all levels through retirements, RIFs, directed reassignments, changed duty stations, requirements to physically report to and work from duty stations, and other measures designed to bring continuity and purpose to the Agency are crucial to success in the first two years of the new administration. Get rid of the army of senior philosophers and hobby enthusiasts in special programs and hire the army of doers who clear trails, clean campgrounds, fight fire, patrol rivers and lakes, and interpret the natural world to the public.
- Whether the new Chief and senior line officers and staff are foresters or range scientists or not, whether they have solid academic and research chops, and whether they can fight fire like nobody else are immaterial to the qualifications for effective, efficient leadership. The new Secretary of the Navy has never served in the military or commanded a ship at sea. He has bent and formed large business operations into entirely new ways of operating for shareholder and public benefit. We don’t need a Naval Commander. We need a business titan with the vision to reform and rally a badly underperforming Department and its business operations. What’s good for the Navy is good for the National Forests.
- Forest Service wildfire management policies aimed at sustainable outputs and outcomes in perpetuity (living functional forests) have been replaced by “alternative suppression strategies,” including “monitoring” and let-burn and light-it-up tactics. New leaders must quickly pivot to a purposeful, transparent, and accountable fire suppression policy prioritizing public safety, agency accountability, and environmental protection. There is no legal basis for intentional wildfire use nor adequate or comprehensive efforts to document and disclose cumulative effects. Alternative arrangements from CEQ have now fallen away along with the Chevron deference, both of which provided cover for current opaque policies. The new Chief must reassess the entire basis for intentional wildfire use, prepare strategic and programmatic plans, disclose cumulative effects, and perform an authentic and rigorous public planning process to build informed consent for this significant federal action affecting many property owners besides public National Forests.
- End lawsuits over firefighting practices. Standard fire-retardant chemistries pose environmental and health concerns due to their composition, which contributes to nutrient pollution, threatens water quality, inhibits plant growth, and poses potential health risks to the public and firefighters. Phosphorous and magnesium chloride are famously ill-suited for safe and effective use in either ground or aerial operations. Over the past 15 years, lawsuits have increasingly threatened the viability of what should be one of our most effective suppression and prevention tools. The EPA Safer Choice program has identified new chemistries that are more effective, much safer, and require much less handling and maintenance than current products. They can be sprayed or dropped in advance and work bone dry until washed away in fall rains.
- An otherwise promising agency contracting system, VIPR Virtual Incident Procurement, has been preempted and neutralized. The Agency organization in charge of VIPR insists on forcing a potentially effective, computer-based system that would quickly order equipment and services for emergencies into a 1960s-style review and authorization maze of old-school, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Urgent reform of the incident management system for wildfire response is needed by separating emergency and non-emergency operations, promoting district-level contracting, and increasing efficiency through proactive planning and resource management within 8 to 20 months. As it stands, VIPR is far removed from improved service, embracing instead a slow and unresponsive jobs program for underemployed SES and GS Fantastics who work from home in scattered teams and stove-pipe organizations who answer to no one. A suffocating and employee-centric management scheme has derailed the entire premise for system success that all contracting would proceed directly from the Ranger District to the contractors.
Leadership change is elemental for an entirely new Agency refit and performance expectations. The new Chief must not be from the ranks, nor should the Chief be one of the industry or environmental gladiators who spar over minor adjustments to a $10 billion budget. We need a disruptor, a person in a hurry, and a change agent on an epic scale, like the Secretary of the Navy. The safe but ineffective home office comfort zone, the shattered and scattered agency employees and organizations, and the days of working from home in a place far removed from a physical duty station are ending. The communities we serve do not telework. They don’t have duty stations five States away from the town square. Neither will we. It’s time to rejoin the circle of life in rural America, where our people and natural resources struggle for help and support.
As difficult as this sounds, a prescription to heal the Forest Service will work. All will be well. Future employees can and will sign up confidently for the Agency and their integral purpose to care for the land and serve people. Current employees will get it figured out through attrition, resignations, voluntary transfers, and dedicating themselves to becoming personal friends of the United States Forest Service in the Clan of the Smokey Bear.
(I tell you these facts only to demonstrate the apparent usefulness of our communications with FS employees).
