Similarities Between FOFA and Energy Permitting Reform

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https://projects.capradio.org/california-fire-history/#10.32/41.7591/-123.2883

On my recent vacation in California, we took hwy 50 across the Sierra from South Lake Tahoe.  Major fire scenery.  We then visited my old home in Pollock Pines, which had had a prescribed burn very close to the subdivision (yay!). Then we went north and took 290 to the coast, more wildfire, as far as the eye could see.  On the coast,  we visited redwood groves with fire scars at the base (after 50 years since my Cal Forestry education, I had forgotten the role of fire on the wet coasts).  We turned back toward Grant’s Pass, then to Mt. Shasta and on to Lassen National Park and finally to Susanville.  Let’s just say.. the landscape included miles and miles of  large, “recent-enough that trees hadn’t grown back” fires.  The California Wildfire History Map says simply “See how the state’s fires have changed over time due to a changing climate and increasing forest fuel loads.” And yet Californians have gotten very serious about other solutions to wildfire than decarbonization. Having driven through Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Oregon recently, it seems as if  more people in California are exposed to wildfire landscapes on a massive scale.

Which maybe helps explain why Senator Padilla is a co-sponsor of FOFA (with Senator Sheehy who is obviously a wildfire guy), and why MegaFire Action originated in California.

As I always say, a big thank you to the folks at Megafire Action who have done much hard work to move this through the House and the Senate.

Here’s a link to a High Country News piece.

Here’s one from E&E News.

In this editorial by the Sacramento Bee, they mention:

Noticeably absent from the list of supporters is Sen. Adam Schiff, one of five members of the Senate Agriculture Committee on the losing end of an 18-5 vote on Oct. 21. His concerns centered on fears the bill’s expedited procedures could weaken environmental oversight and limit public participation. Schiff also criticized the shortening of the review period for legal challenges from six years to 150 days.

What I thought was interesting about the legal changes in the bill is that the National Governors’ Association sent a letter to Congressional folks on permitting reform for energy projects.

This list of items for your consideration is presented as a package and were discussed extensively by a bipartisan working group. It draws from our experience as Governors, and from the work that many non-partisan and governmental groups have undertaken in recent years to explore potential reforms to federal permitting systems. Some of the members of our working group may disagree with individual elements. However, we believe that, as a whole, this set of ideas represents areas of potential common ground and would reduce barriers to developing critical energy infrastructure at the pace needed to win the AI race, lower costs for consumers, and responsibly develop the advanced energy sources of the future.

Here’s what it said about those energy projects…

Reducing Legal Uncertainty:

  • Reduce the statute of limitations for filing suit against an agency NEPA action from six years to one year or less.
  • Direct courts to set a time limit for an agency to act on a remand of six months, and require courts to prioritize cases reviewing energy project permitting decisions for the next five years.

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Also with CE’s there is some congruence between FOFA and the NGA energy permitting changes.  More philosophically, should permitting reform ideas put different thumbs on the scale for different kinds of projects? If so, which kinds of thumbs.. CE’s? Litigation time limits? Something else?

 

 

The Recoding America Fund

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I thought I’d start this conversation even though FS employees are not back to work yet.   I am a big fan of both improving government operations and departisanizing pretty much anything. So I was impressed by Jennifer Pahlka’s Substack post:

That’s why we’re launching the Recoding America Fund. It’s a pooled philanthropic effort that will raise and deploy at least $120 million over the course of the next six years. We’ll build off the work of so many over the past decades who’ve seen this problem from a variety of angles: the Congressional modernization field, good government groups, the civic tech community, think tanks who see the futility of their policy recommendations when they land in a system that can’t faithfully execute them, private sector leaders and contractors who have had to grapple with unnecessary government bloat, and others. But while this work will leverage the powerful insights so many have gained from grappling with a system in disrepair, it is also discontinuous with the past in three ways. First, the frame is no longer transparency or accountability or modernization, but rather state capacity – simply, the ability of our government to achieve its policy goals. Second, we seek to build a diverse but coherent field around that frame, one in which advocates can achieve more collectively than each could alone, while maintaining their own perspective and tending to their own politics. And lastly, we are collectively committed to leveraging this moment of disruption to achieve what’s needed for the future of our country, not what’s comfortable or convenient.

We have a view on how to do this. If you want a government that can achieve its policy goals, it must be capable of four key things:

  • It must be able to attract, select, develop, retain, and manage the right people, which means we need civil service systems at all levels fit for that purpose. Our civil service systems run the gamut from merely outdated to fundamentally unfit for this critical work.
  • It must ask those people to do the right work, which means reducing the procedural bloat that keeps most civil servants from focusing on the substantive outcomes the public needs and expects.
  • It must have purpose-fit systems, which means changing how we build and buy technology so it can adapt to changing needs and drive effective operations.
  • And it must employ test-and-learn frameworks, which means being able to act on what we learn as we pursue policy goals rather than stay locked into decades-long plans even as we can see they are not working. This also means constructing feedback loops between the makers of law and policy and those who implement them or experience their consequences, intended and unintended.

If the feedback loops sound a bit like adaptive management or continuous improvement, well, so be it.

Of course, when I think of “locked into decades-long plans even as we can see they are not working.” I see.. the entire NFMA planning process. But that’s just me. What I like about this effort is dreaming the dream of making things better even as downsizing and budget reductions are going on.

So I wonder what you would put on the table, either employees, retirees, or the general public.

One thought I had is better integration of visitor info across federal lands.  This does not require moving the FS to Int, it just would help if some efforts were joint that clearly don’t need to be separate.  For example,  the NPS app worked well to show us a map of where we were, sites of interest around there, and descriptions (which got a bit didactic and climate-y, but that could be edited).  Also, the recorded sections didn’t work but the transcript did, but maybe that’s because of poor internet access (which is likely to be an issue in many places).  Maybe a “be sure to download before you go” would be helpful.

Ideas?

Unions of Government Workers AFGE and NARFE Call For Clean CR

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From FedSmith

AFGE and NARFE Call for Clean Resolution to End Shutdown

With the federal government still shut down and hundreds of thousands of federal employees not getting paid, the nation’s largest federal employee union—the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE)—has broken its usual silence to call for a “clean continuing resolution” to reopen the government. And, in the latest event, NARFE has also joined with a similar press release.

It’s a rare and politically notable move. AFGE, usually closely aligned with Democrats, is now openly urging passage of a measure that Republicans have been pushing in recent days: a continuing resolution (CR) that restores government funding without policy riders or partisan add-ons.

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So why would AFGE break with that pattern?

1. Strategic Frustration Over Partisan Gamesmanship

The union’s leadership has made clear that this shutdown has moved beyond a policy dispute—it’s a crisis for workers’ livelihoods. In its official statement, AFGE warned that “political brinkmanship has gone too far” and urged lawmakers to fund the government first, then continue debating longer-term budget issues later.

By publicly backing a clean CR, AFGE is effectively saying that workers’ immediate needs outweigh partisan alignment.

2. Signaling to Democrats to Prioritize Relief Over Leverage

AFGE’s statement may be aimed as much at Democratic leaders as at Republicans. By endorsing the quickest available route to reopening the government, the union underscores that maintaining a united front isn’t worth weeks of unpaid labor. This places pressure on Democrats to compromise in order to restore pay and stability.

3. Political Optics and Moral Positioning

The timing of the announcement—just as the Senate considered new CR proposals—appears calculated to influence the debate. By calling for action while bills are under discussion, AFGE reinforces its image as the moral center of the shutdown debate, representing the human cost of inaction rather than any party’s legislative strategy.

Political Crosscurrents

The coming two weeks will likely determine whether this shutdown becomes one of the shortest in recent memory—or stretches into Thanksgiving and beyond.

AFGE’s public intervention may give moderates in both parties political cover to support a clean CR without appearing to cave. But if either side continues to treat the shutdown as leverage for unrelated policy goals, the voices of federal workers may again be drowned out by partisanship.

As the union’s Kelley stated in an open letter:

AFGE’s hope since October 1 has been that the spending impasse would be resolved to the satisfaction of both sides of the aisle, including on the critical question of healthcare affordability that members of both parties have acknowledged must be addressed. In the meantime, the government must be funded. With less than a month before Thanksgiving, no federal worker should have to turn to a food pantry to help prepare the family table. Please vote for cloture.

Whether that appeal finally shifts the debate—or simply highlights Washington’s paralysis—will become clear in the days ahead.

FAST-41, the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, the Shutdown and the Forest Service

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From FAST 41 Dashboard

Here’s what the actual Dashboard looks like for a sample project:

 

There’s an interesting article in E&E News (not paywalled) with an interview with:

Emily Domenech, a Hill veteran and executive director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, is also calling some of the hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers back to ensure Trump’s priority projects — including mines in Idaho and Utah — move forward.

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How are you making projects move faster?
In many cases, a number of our transparency projects have been waiting for years for some of these permits. Transparency works both for the public, but also for federal agencies to see which priorities are being identified by the White House, by the permitting council. It makes it harder for a project to sort of get lost in the pile of applications in a field office.
We just finished permitting … the Perpetua stibnite gold project in Idaho, they had been waiting for their last permit for almost a decade with not a lot of real information
on why it wasn’t getting done. … We listed it … in May and completed federal permitting in July, and then moved forward to the construction phase in these last few weeks.
Almost entirely, we were able to finish that project in that time frame, almost entirely because it had been sitting in a pile of projects in a field office, and the field staffer thought they were going to get sued and didn’t want to put the work into completing that project.

This sounds like a fairly common prioritization..”thankless tasks that will likely be litigated ad infinitum with ever more peculiar analysis requirement by judges”.. but in my experience, minerals folks in the FS and BLM tend to just march forward on those.

Sometimes we fund [full-time employees] to do work on the ground to help a project move faster if there aren’t available staff to do the work they need. A good example is the U.S. Forest Service, which has really been building out its mining review capacity.  In some cases, they needed to hire contractors to do that. Sometimes we fund technology improvements to reduce man hours and make projects move forward faster.

What about roadblocks?
I’m a longtime congressional staffer. I worked on permitting for a really long time. You could always come up with a litany of potential roadblocks, but I think it’s the same
things you always hear.
Much of what the permitting council solves is agencies that are just simply not on the same page … doing redundant reviews, not coordinating, not sharing their best practices, or not sharing what their findings are in a timely manner, and that just slows down the process.
We’re doing environmental reviews that are required by the law in the most efficient way possible. And frankly, you kind of need a task master to keep people focused on that. Otherwise it’s really easy to get stuck in the federal system.

I don’t think her observation of interagency lack of coordination and something of a bias toward inaction will surprise anyone here. That reminds me of my old boss at EMC, Fred Norbury, who wanted to “make NEPA more like a NIKE factory and less like a cobbler shop.” Or a group of cobbler shops (agencies) with different priorities and views.

What do you think will happen on Capitol Hill?

It’s wonderful to see folks like [House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.)] really moving the needle early to get their legislation out into the public, to get comments, get input, to start that legislative process.
I think there’s a lot of interest in solving the permitting challenges that we can’t solve from the executive [side]. There’s a lot we can do to move things forward and to ensure things get built during President Trump’s term. But … we can’t fix judicial review, and Congress needs to address that issue.

There is definitely much interest and many ideas and people working on it.

So I took a look at the FAST 41 Dashboard to see what FS projects are on it. The screenshot is above as is a sample of the dashboard. I’d add another linked “litigation dashboard” so that the timeframes from ROD being issued to on-the-ground implementation would be more transparent.  I’ve been involved in projects that for various reasons seemed to take more time to litigate than to permit.

Broadcast Burning Continues in Region 3

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Based on feedback from current employees, some Regions were going forward with pile burning and not broadcast. Apparently R-3 is also broadcast burning.

This came across my desk..

*** UPDATE 10-27-2025 – Fire managers are planning to start at the Pine Flat project south of Williams on Tuesday, October 27. Pending favorable conditions, crews plan to begin the Blue Stem project near Tusayan later in the week, potentially burning through the weekend. ***

Williams, Ariz., October 22, 2025— The Kaibab National Forest is planning prescribed fire operations on the Tusayan Ranger District beginning Friday, October 24, pending all required approvals. We estimate this work to continue through the weekend and may begin operations on the Williams Ranger District next week as weather conditions allow. We use prescribed fires to help reduce overgrown vegetation to help protect local communities, infrastructure and natural resources from wildfires.

Prescribed fires planned for the area include:

  • Blue Stem Project-Tusayan RD- 7030 acres of broadcast burning
    Friday Oct 24 through the weekend
    Smoke will be highly noticeable from the Tusayan area, particularly portions of State Route 64. Smoke is expected to lift during the day and travel northeast away from developed areas adjacent to these burns, however cooler overnight temperatures may cause smoke to settle into low-lying areas surrounding the burn location.
  • Pine Flat Project– Williams RD- 4302 acres of broadcast burning
    Potentially the week of Oct 27
    Smoke will be highly noticeable from the Williams area, Flagstaff, Verde Valley communities, Prescott communities, Chino Valley, Paulden, Ashfork, Parks, Bellemont, I40 and portions of State Route 73. Smoke is expected to lift during the day and travel northeast away from developed areas adjacent to these burns, however cooler overnight temperatures may cause smoke to settle into low-lying areas surrounding the burn location.

    Area residents and visitors can expect to see and hear a helicopter in these area, as aerial ignitions will occur on portions of the burn. Aerial-drone systems should not be used near the active project area, as they could interfere with aircraft operations.

    Those areas may close to the public for several days for public safety. Watch for warning signs along roads near all prescribed fire areas before and during burns.

    Residents may experience smoke during the prescribed burns. Go to https://fire.airnow.gov/ to find more detailed information about air quality. When driving, slow down and turn on your headlights when you encounter smoke on the road.

    We will evaluate weather conditions in the hours before a burn begins. If conditions warrant, scheduled prescribed fire activities may be canceled.

    Stay informed about the scheduled prescribed fires through the forest website, social media channels, and InciWeb, the interagency incident information system. We will notify county emergency management officials when burning begins.

Why Don’t We Know More About Visitors’ Bad Behavior During Shutdowns in National Parks?

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From a (clean) bathroom at the Bristlecone Pine Visitor’s Center (closed) on the Inyo National Forest.

 

I’ve been traveling the last two weeks and now am catching up, so if you sent me an email last week, I am only now getting to them. I visited too many National Forests to mention, and three National Parks- Redwood, Lassen and Death Valley.  First of all, a major shout-out and thank you to all the employees, partners, contractors and concessionaires who are keeping things running at the Parks, BLM and National Forests!  Other than writing on the bathroom wall (or paper on the bathroom wall) we have no other way of thanking you!

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If you recall, anytime there’s a shutdown, there’s a whole “shut down the parks” media campaign like this in High Country News.  Perhaps it’s not a story so much as an op-ed.. but sometimes, increasingly, it’s not really clear. But after reading many of these, I find some key clues. Headline: “Interior is failing to conserve national parks.” Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “Former Park Service Director Thinks Parks Should Be Closed.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s decision to keep the national parks open without adequate staffing during the government shutdown shows the failure of his responsibility to conserve them unimpaired, for future generations.

……

And now the parks are being left wide-open to vandalism as well. The current Interior Secretary has demonstrated a failure to “conserve for future generations” and proven that the Interior Department is no longer worthy of the public’s trust that their national parks will be protected.

As I always say, why is it that Parks seem uniquely targeted by vandals who apparently don’t target open lands like BLM and FS?

Starting with what I know to be true.. that many people are out in National Forests (with guns, during hunting season) regularly and do not vandalize and trash.  Are these different people? What is it about (some) Parks that inclines people to trash and vandalize them?  We hear about Joshua Tree and Yosemite a great deal.. is that because of reporters’ convenience, or is it proximity to large population centers? Who is actually doing the vandalizing, and what do law enforcement folks know about it?

Also public health and safety are prioritized for workers to stay on, plus some facilities are run by concessionaires, contracts or grants.

At every Park I visited, there was no apparent “resource damage” or trash or whatever.  The Visitor Centers were closed, but the National Park App with info and audio tours worked (although the audio didn’t work for me, perhaps an Aged Person with Technology problem).  When, as at Lassen, the gift shop partner folks had maps, I can’t see that my visit would have been any different except for visitor centers and the fact that a road hadn’t been fixed in Death Valley apparently due to the shutdown, an important road that led to many of the sites.

As to visitor centers, in Colorado,

DENVER – Governor Polis, Colorado Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and the Colorado Tourism Office (CTO), a division of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT), announced today that the State of Colorado is providing funds to keep two visitors centers open at Rocky Mountain National Park while the federal government remains shut down.

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Sadly, I expect shutdowns to continue unless Congress votes to forego their own pay during government shutdowns.  Seems only fair, but unlikely to pass.

Wouldn’t it be great if some foundation would fund a strikeforce of observers and mappers to visit National Parks and see what is happening, and interview law enforcement and other folks who are working?  Then we might know more and be able to design better for the next shutdown.  Social scientists could also be funded by externals to do this.  Or maybe our economist think tank friends like Headwaters or PERC? Why do foundations seem to spend so much on promulgating their point of view rather than studying how to make things work better?

Double the Regions, Double the Fun? Temporary Assignment of Duo-Regional Foresters

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Several retiree sources told me that some Regional Foresters were going to be assigned to two Regions.  The corporate story I heard (granted, a bit like playing “telephone”, but hopefully TSW readers can add what they have heard) is that:

1. There will be a reorganization and plans are ongoing, but this isn’t it.

2. There are excellent 15s acting in RF roles, but new hires of any ilk are not allowed, and apparently there is some rule that details to SES can only be 180 days (or something like that).

3. Given that many SESers have retired, and the FS can’t hire new ones, they need to spread the “qualified leaders”(eligible for SES jobs) around and place them where they are crucially needed.

Given that information, a TSW reader sent me a link from a news source that we don’t usually hear from.

Here’s the NOTUS story..

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The U.S. Forest Service is consolidating the oversight of its regional offices, part of “interim” changes that mean fewer staff will oversee larger expanses of land.

If all the DRFs are still there, it would be technically true that one fewer staff person per dual region would “oversee”.  That person would have twice the relationships to deal with or possibly would farm out some to DRFs. The RF also rules on internal disagreements among various internal entities, so perhaps the combo regions would work out a different conflict resolution system.

In a letter to Hill offices obtained by NOTUS, the agency presented a map that showed its regional oversight had been consolidated into five hubs. The agency cited “significant changes in our workforce during the last eight months,” which is most of the second Trump administration. The agency said those changes included staff leaving, as well as “reassignments.”

I wish the story had included the map (why not?) instead of the link going to the current regions.  I have heard 8 and 9 under Ken Arney, and 5 and 6 are combined. Hopefully together we can glean info on the other individuals and combos. Maybe a Hill person can forward the letter and map?

“As we await information from USDA on departmental reorganizational efforts, it is necessary for us to adapt how we function in the interim,” Jake Donnay, the legislative affairs director for the Forest Service, said in the letter sent Thursday to the Hill.

“We have developed interim operations to ensure we can safely and effectively deliver our mission, focus on agency priorities, and maintain stability and oversight. Regional foresters in permanent positions will temporarily expand oversight to include additional regions until a permanent structure under the pending reorganization is implemented.”

Donnay noted that the changes were “operational” and “do not affect our organizational structure or regional office locations. ”

The changes are part of a larger plan from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to reorganize the Department of Agriculture. And they are happening as many Forest Service employees are furloughed due to the government shutdown, and as more than 5,000 employees have taken deferred resignation options in the last year.

In a statement to NOTUS, a Forest Service spokesperson confirmed the changes.

“Until further direction on departmental reorganizational efforts is established by USDA, the Forest Service is taking interim steps to ensure essential executive leadership and oversight is in place,” the statement said.

“The Forest Service is taking steps to continue stable, seamless operations while the future organization is developed,” the statement continued, noting that its senior executive service members’ “roles are being expanded, and portfolios are being redistributed as an interim measure to ensure there is continued support for our priority work.”

“These actions are not a reorganization. All nine Forest Service regions remain in place,” the statement added.

Which is pretty much what the retiree network provided.  Do others have information or rumors to check out?

Potential BLM RIF Numbers

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I’ve attached the numbers (find them in this court document about DOI RIFs).

The numbers for the State Offices seem very large, do those numbers include the field offices? I think “covered employees” mean covered by union agreements (unions are the plaintiffs) but the ratios of covered to non-covered seem to vary widely across states. I wonder if that is real, and what the explanation for these differences is.

Shutdown and Prescribed Fire- Your Observations?

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photo from NFF webpage

 

Awhile back (October 2), High Country News had an article on the shutdown, Here’s an excerpt:

A Forest Service contingency plan, current as of Sept. 30, calls for continued wildfire response. But the work necessary to reduce the fuels for massive wildfires, including prescribed burns, is on hold. Prescribed burns are an important tool to burn excess vegetation, keep landscapes healthy and reduce the risk of destructive wildfires. But starting last week, some Forest Service staff were told not to conduct burns in preparation for a potential shutdown.

“We were told, ‘No ignitions,’” said a Forest Service fire management officer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of losing his job. “‘Don’t even start.’”

Senator Wyden said something similar in a Bend Bulletin piece:

Prescribed burns and other hazardous fuels treatments are supposed to happen in the cooler, wetter months like October,” Wyden said. “Instead, the needless shutdown inflicted by Donald Trump and his Republican fellow travelers who control Congress means that proven wildfire risk reduction strategy is derailed—despite communities counting on that work to stay safe.”

Personally, as non-party aligned person interested in Good Government, I have a “blame for shutdown” rule that says “you folks always disagree, you will disagree on next year’s Approps bills; the party who won’t accept a clean CR is the one I blame for the shutdown.” And if the R’s really controlled Congress, as Wyden says, couldn’t they pass whatever they wanted? Oh well.

So I believed these folks, until I started getting notices from various Forests about PB projects going forward, and on this vacation noticed smoke and signs for FS prescribed burns.

So, is the FS not following the plan? Have some Forests not gotten the message? Do different units have different funding sources that either allow it or not? Are the Regions different? Has the message changed since the HCN article?

What are you all seeing out there where you are?
Local newspapers are also carrying stories like this..

Mike Lee Bill to Move Forest Service to Interior?

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I’ve been out observing the National Forests directly..so my approval of comments and responses are delayed.  Apparently Mike Lee is dropping a bill to move the FS to Interior and the draft legislation made its way to E&E  News.

My take- that dog won’t hunt either.  There are Republican reasons it’s a questionable idea, and I suspect those factors will influence the enthusiasm of other Rs for the idea.  Interior is notoriously political, as Governor Freudenthal (D) of Wyoming noted  in 2010 for the BLM:

Unfortunately, Washington, D.C. seems to go from pillar to post to placate what is perceived as a key constituency. I only half-heartedly joke with those in industry that, during the prior administration, their names were chiseled above the chairs outside the office of the Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals. With the changes announced yesterday, I fear that we are merely swapping the names above those same chairs to environmental interests, giving them a stranglehold on an already cumbersome process.

I think less name-chiseling rather than more would lead to better governance.  Right now, folks at Center for Western Priorities are concerned that the recent decisions to stop RMP revisions and amendments will throw the legal context into disarray.  At the same time, folks like me wonder whether not making extreme decisions (especially after elections) based on phone calls from DC might have been better- and the CRA efforts wouldn’t have happened.  Various D Admins have not been the friends of ranchers or oil and gas folks or the timber industry for that matter.. remember the MOG?

I don’t know how many of you remember the Reagan-era Interchange effort.  The idea was to have all grazing land administered by BLM and forest land by the Forest Service. Ranchers (Rs, in general) did not like the idea, as rational as it was. My take on their lack of enthusiasm was that the ranchers were thinking  “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.”

More rational, in my mind, would be to start with wildland fire coordination among agencies and build on the old Service First model.

Anyway, Marc Heller of E&E News had a good round-up of the history (note there are links in the article but I don’t have access to that version):

The draft legislation, called the “Forest Service Reorganization Act of 2025,” would also create the separate wildland fire agency Lee’s promoted for the Interior Department, and it would waive overtime pay caps for wildland firefighters.
In an executive order released in June, President Donald Trump stopped short of calling for a separate wildland fire agency, seemingly leaving the matter to Congress.

The proposed shifting of the Forest Service to the Interior Department carries the most historical baggage of the ideas. Proponents — including the environmental group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics — have said the concept has merit and that the Interior Department in the long run might be more focused on caring for the land than exploiting it.
Critics say the move, in addition to being disruptive for employees, might sacrifice longstanding ties between the USDA’s Forest Service and state and local governments. Those connections are important to managing lands that cross jurisdictional
boundaries.
The idea has also ridden on officials’ egos and personal aspirations through the years, according to historians and long-time employees. Responsibility over forest reserves, as they were then called, fell to the Interior Department beginning in 1891. The Forest Service was created in 1905 at the USDA, where forest research was already housed.
Jurisdictional tussles occasionally followed: In 1934, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes tried to wrestle the Forest Service away at the same time the USDA was angling for the Interior Department’s National Park Service.
During the administration of Bill Clinton, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman called the Forest Service “my little Marine Corps” and wondered if the Interior secretary at the time, Bruce Babbitt, secretly coveted it.

Of course he did!  Bureaucracies exist to aggrandize and grow.. think NPS taking over various parts of National Forests.

Then Ryan Zinke, as a nominee for Interior secretary in the first Trump administration, made no secret of his desire to pluck the Forest Service for himself. Senators were skeptical: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) abstained from a committee vote to advance his nomination, citing worries Zinke would divert his attention from land management to “shuffling bureaucracies.”
The Government Accountability Office had looked into the issue in 2009 and found flaws.
While moving the Forest Service to Interior might provide efficiencies in the long run, the GAO said, it could diminish the agency’s role in working with farmers, ranchers and state foresters, traditionally a strength of the USDA.
“Numerous officials and experts believed that it would be more effective, and perhaps more efficient, to leave the Forest Service in USDA and work to increase collaboration.

This seems to be another case in which good governance (Service-First like efforts continuously applied through time) lost out to “reorganization or not,” and then .. give up.  Maybe just improving coordination is .. too hard? I guess we’ll find out how coordination will go with wildfire first.