Forest Service Drops Plan to Pull Employees Out of Forests

Under the plan, thousands of employees posted to forests across the country would have been reassigned and consolidated into six centers, affecting more than a quarter of the agency's entire workforce.

The object of the plan was to "streamline" work performed under the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, the basic planning law that shapes major resource decisions.

This agency-wide reorganization, which had been on the verge of adoption last fall, is being shelved to "avoid additional disruption and confusion," according to the February 20, 2008 memo from Forest Service Chief Abigail Kimbell to top agency managers.

"After careful consideration, however, we will not pursue these options at this time," wrote Kimbell. "At a later time, we will revisit recommendations from the NEPA Feasibility Study."

This retreat follows a series of recent setbacks in efforts to privatize large portions of Forest Service operations. With less than one year left in the Bush administration, it is unlikely that the plan will be revisited anytime soon, said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, whose organization had first revealed the agency's intentions.

"This is welcome news for an organization that has enough problems," he said. "The Forest Service is currently coping with crippling proposed budget cuts and a radically shifting mission without a survival guide."

The restructuring of NEPA functions was designed to facilitate potential outsourcing of work connected with assuring compliance with NEPA regulations.

In December, Congress blocked further privatization of Forest Service activities for the rest of the 2008 Fiscal Year – another factor acknowledged by Kimbell in her memo.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office, GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a report that found the Forest Service incapable of rationally carrying out Bush administration dictates to offer large sectors of it operations to private bidders.

GAO concluded that Forest Service competitive sourcing risked jeopardizing "the nation's ability to fight fires and respond to other emergencies" by failing to consider how outsourcing positions affected the agency's ability to respond to forest fires and other emergency situations requiring immediate on-the-ground capabilities.

The Forest Service was found to have violated Congressional spending limits imposed to prevent abuse and "could not substantiate the savings it reported to Congress." In one case, costs of roughly $40 million were excluded from the $35 million in savings reported to Congress.

"We welcome the findings of this independent GAO review as an important first step in bringing some accountability to this misguided and counterproductive program," said Mark Davis, chair of the National Federation of Federal Employees Forest Service Council Legislative Committee.

Davis points out that the Forest Service follows the same Office of Management and Budget, OMB, accounting guidance used by all federal agencies, throwing in doubt any White House claims of major savings from competitive sourcing.

"A broader, government-wide review is needed into OMB's role in encouraging misleading accounting practices and outsourcing inherently governmental work," he said.

Ruch says, "Lost in the search for NEPA efficiency is the steep decline in the quality of NEPA planning within the Forest Service, which has lost a long string of environmental lawsuits charging the agency with failing to adequately consider the consequences of, or alternatives to, its proposed actions."

"Nothing is more inefficient than losing a lawsuit that forces the agency to throw away months of effort and millions of dollars," he said.

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved.