Organization and Management

This story (thanks to Nick Smith) on USDA reorganization plans being litigated, plus looking into the Clinton-era Reinventing Government efforts which identified many of the same issues and concerns and acted upon them, without apparent litigation, makes me think that the current partisanization of everything has led to a “Dog in the Manger” approach to government improvement. “We don’t want to fix these things, but we don’t want you to either, and we will bark at you if you try.”

Friedman’s Law: No Public Policy, or Government Program is Improved or Clarified By Becoming a Partisan Issue. As I used to say about a project on the Rio Grande “reasonable access for unreasonable people,” reason tends to go out the window once tribal loyalties enter the picture.

I’ve told this story before, but there are new people here, so..  As a training assignment, I worked on Representative Carrie Meek’s staff  (D-17th District Florida, first African American  elected to Congress in Florida since Reconstruction) in the House. Being a small staff, I did science, women’s issues, the biological side of medicine, and the environment.   As the rep to the Democratic Environmental Caucus, I suggested that we work with the R’s on improvements to ESA. The head staff person on the Caucus told me “we don’t want to do that because it’s more important to attack R’s that want to change it.” OK, then.

Isn’t it reasonable that organizations would  figure out key measures, monitor those, and try to improve. Wildfire folks tend to be more structured and upfront about all this.  Like I often say, we get more lessons-learned from the Fire people on an ATV rollover than we got for Covid response, or closer to home, the NWFP or the 2012 Planning Rule.  Perhaps it’s because some can argue that there is nothing wrong, so why improve? But we know that some people think that there is something wrong, so why ignore them (or not even have a process to listen to them?)

Let’s use Forest Service policies as an example.  Some people have seen problems with the mapping of 2001 Roadless, with forest planning implementation, with travel management mapping and implementation, or a $740 million deficit?

Here’s how it seems to go:

1. Everything is fine.

2. Some people think things are not fine, but we can ignore them, or don’t have processes in place to listen to them.

3. The people who think things are not fine have spoken with politicians who agree with them.

4. The politicians are doing something or are asking the organization to change.

5.a. They are the wrong politicians (from the other party) so we can focus on how bad they are and they want to destroy everything. And/or

b. Ok, so there might be a problem, but they are going about fixing it the wrong way, because their intention is really bad and they have bad ideas to boot.

And never have a discussion directly addressing the concerns and potential alternative approaches.

6. When we get back in charge, we continue to ignore the problems.  Hurray!

This can work with 1-6 being worked by either party for different issues, but right now it seems to D’s and their allies focused on not changing organizational structures.

It seem to me that the fact is that folks will always disagree, about what should be decided, what scale it should be decided at, and what the decisions should be. In Spencer Cox’s book, he says that he thinks the best way to get good, long-lasting decisions is through the legislative process, because people with different views have to interact directly with each other.  Of course in a lopsided legislature, they don’t have to. And they might be more interested in performative displays that look good on social media, decrying the badness of the other party, or working on their elections rather than sitting down to work things out.

In my experience, what might  be helpful is to have standing groups with representatives of various interests to review, at regular intervals,  implementation of regulations or processes.  I would say FACA committees, but these tend to be overly regulated and hard to keep going due to all the paperwork.  Plus the current Admin often wants to put its thumb on the scale (or more than a thumb, in some cases).  Most of the groups that get started to work on something are disbanded by the time the flaws start showing, and the agency might not have the energy or political oomph to argue for fixing the problems (and factions within the agencies might not agree on what the problems are).   On the other hand, to be within an organization and know that something isn’t working often runs into what some partners call “antibodies to change.”

I would propose that in the same way that the Colorado legislature selected interests for the State Roadless Taskforce, that the federal legislature could select interests and require an agency to set up a review taskforce to examine implementation at 10 year intervals.  It would include open public listening sessions and documentation, and identify needs for change, both for agencies, partners and Congress. Because courts work off statutes and sometimes case law can develop over time that is not great for anyone.

For those who are interested in improving government implementation..check out Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, this is a Google AI summary..

Pahlka and Greenway at The Niskanen Center developed this thought paper for those who are interested in the broader topic of improving state capacity.

Rebuilding our state capacity — the how of our government — is an arduous task that requires a stomach for learning and fixing the rules and culture of the bureaucracy. But make no mistake: whether or not we do it is not a technocratic choice. It’s a political choice — a leadership choice. Previous administrations may not have actively set out to make dealing with public services a burden, or to cripple our nation’s military readiness with policy clutter amounting to hundreds of copies of War and Peace, or create a veto-cracy that limits our ability to build infrastructure. But neither have they made fixing it a priority. This one can, and should.

Our two parties (and even the factions within them) often speak about state capacity in very different languages and have differing priorities for where that muscle should be deployed. But the vast majority of elected leaders on both sides of the aisle would like the bureaucracy to be capable of achieving the missions it is assigned

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?

Jon raised an interesting question from the management perspective..

Did someone (like the public) say that more consistency (not less) would be a good thing? Does anyone think that this is really about “rightsizing,” and not a partisan deregulation effort (getting rid of the things that get in the way of their marching orders)?

It reminds me a bit of some media outlets. Trump Admin proposes something.  It must be bad. Even if a previous D Admin proposed the same thing.  If that is pointed out by someone, there are a couple of responses,  they don’t really mean to do it  If the Admin does it, they won’t do it right. Then the media outlet finds people who will prognosticate about all the things that could possibly go wrong.

If we put the partisan lens aside and just think about management, I’m sure every organization faces (some of ) the same challenges.  If we were rational (ha!) we might ask the same question about the directives as we might ask about the current state of NFMA planning…  what good does it do? to whom? And ask a variety of folks with direct experience, inside and outside the agency, to make suggestions for improvement.  After all, we have 14 years or so of revisions under our belt, and they aren’t happening exactly as projected in the regulation.   Sometimes I wonder whether partisan views are getting in the way of a reasoned approach to improving the way the US government works.

Some directives serve a purpose both to folks inside and outside, as a compendium of current info on how the agency does things.  Like current CEs in the NEPA directives for example.  I had to go outside the FS to find a spreadsheet with them.. so this is an example of “keeping important info in a format that is updated as needed.”

There are “required ways to do things based on statute and regulations and national interpretations” which is likely where the Timber Manual fits in.

Again, we get to “both things are true”: (1) the folks on the ground know best, as the Chief says and

(2) without any sideboards from headquarters, or shared learning, there can be much reinventing the wheel, at the taxpayers’ expense. (I think the Frenchian effort to centralize some aspects of plan revisions was in response to the forest’s “once in a career” amount of learning and creativity.)

Psychologically, I have seen forests and districts unwilling to change their practices when other forests and districts are more successful with a different approach.  Stodginess, or a careful internal or external political (small p) sensibility? “Not invented here” or “line office fiefdom” or “real world differences at that unit”? Who knows?

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Jon asked “Did someone (like the public) say that more consistency (not less) would be a good thing?”.  I only have two data points… yes-  wildland firefighters think more consistency would be a good thing.  Also the Service First effort (based on my own experience, at least in SW Colorado) showed the public preferred some consistency between the FS and the BLM.

There are legitimate disagreements about how to do things.. for example, I think selecting planting stock on the basis of computer models of future climates is silly. Others think differently.  Is diversity of practices (the results of success won’t be known for 50 years at least) a good thing or a bad thing?

So I think that there are different threads here to untangle…

1. Consistent availability of key information on data important to the public (like recreation sites, fuels accomplishments and so on- the People’s Database).  Probably consistency with the BLM would be handy. But this is not directive.

I remember when the BLM and the FS were doing expensive and to me, not all that different kinds of “assessments” on neighboring pieces of land in Colorado.  Most of the topics seemed to be the same.. but no one could say “hey, why don’t they draw a line and do it together?”  We did try to do an RMP and Forest Plan together and that did not founder on the shoals of regulations, but it seemed, on lack of support from Regional and State leadership, which might have traced back to perceived losing some degree of control.  It’s not easy stuff.

2.  Conscious discussion of what needs to be consistent direction and what doesn’t and why (statutes, regulation interpretation).

3. Within the regulatory framework, discussions of best practices (perhaps this should be organized as a learning discussion online rather than an agreed upon document).

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But back to Jon’s “deregulation” and “marching orders” aspect.. freeing up locals, it seems to me would work both ways.  Patrick has pointed out that the predilections of  some line officers against OHVs seems to  influence their decisions.  If we assume that most FS employees are more allied with the D-ish inclinations (which may or may not be contested, but I’m fairly certain there is evidence) perhaps this would ultimately free them to do more bias-wielding in the future?