Fake news, Fox News, public lands, public service, literacy rates, and what all that has to do with the Forest Service reorganization, which is definitely not a “dismantling.”
Yes it is alot of hype. And I roll my eyes. But I will let you provide the critique.
I want to bring up a whole movement in another country and this is where locals slog it out to protect the most ancient of temperate rain forests, the takayna of Tasmania. This is the Bob Brown Foundation and I would argue it meets a high level of 'purity' test. Yes it is named after a former doctor turned probably the most effective Green politician in global history. The Australian Labor and Liberal parties have always both been extremely pro-extraction. Conservation and environmental movements have nearly always been from the people.
Yep, you got it. So important to stay focused on the real threats. The one thing I would add is that one of my biggest worries is that, through the reorganization, they are deliberately undermining the efficacy of our USFS research organization. Good resource management is impossible without ongoing and robust research and monitoring. I saw firsthand during my USFS career, how this led to a better understanding of how to do things better, and was used for real-time adaptive management. Weakening and undermining this part of the USFS sends us backward, something we cannot afford in the era of climate change. It's not just the reduction of sites, it is the dismantling of the research leadership structure that is concerning.
The moving of regional offices to state offices and moving the location of the WO, actually look like improvements for many reasons for a career USFS employee. But the concern is what leadership structure will sit in those offices, and what laws, policies, direction, and targets/performance metrics they will be directed to follow.
The Trump administration is lying to all of us. The longer term goal of their disgusting plan is to make the U.S. Forest Service look as incompetent as possible and to be more easily able to sell off and lease our public lands to private top bidders,logging interests and oil, gas and mining interests. They have tried very hard to to keep this big insane plan as quiet as possible, it’s not working😡
I worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 30 years I totally understand how vital the current and long standing(since 1908) structure of the Forest Service is to the management and protection of our public national forests lands.
Their plan is nothing but gaslighting and destruction.
It is vital that the Washington Office, the 9 Regional offices, the Experiment/Research Stations, the Forest Supervisors Offices, and the Rangers Stations structure stays in place for the safety of all of us and for the safety and management of our national forest lands.💙🌲💚
My most recent info from holdover agency staff is that the Forest Supervisor offices will remain. Of course, that was April 3 and who knows what will happen next week from this totally incompetent administration.
Thank you again Wes for straightening me out. I read the entire 2700 words. I did send some emails to my Congress people this week and I hope I said the right thing. Or I hope I didn’t look like an asshole.
That urgency to call your rep about every little thing gives people false agency. Republicans do not care about you. Hopefully I am not the person breaking that news to you. Work to elect Democrats in November, work to get a Dem President in 2028, let's all work on rebuilding our institutions for a few years, then sometime around 2036 have a conversation about our two party system.
Qn excellent, informative piece, Mr Silver. With this administration and its business cronies, however, the issue you raise about the mitigating effects of a more onerous permitting process is scant consolation. Remember the East Wing (incidentally, part of a National Park)? In the immortal words of John Belushi in an ancient, "old growth" Saturday Night Live skit, modified for this context: "Permits? We don't need no stinking permits."
I read the entire article and tried hard to find any mention of outdoor recreation & tourism on the public lands as being a huge economic driver for rural communities. "Crickets."
But I found only that the purpose of the USFS is resource extraction by big business. Or as the late professor of law at the University of Colorado, Charles Wilkinson, put it in the 1980s: the "Lords of Yesterday."
Here on Colorado, COVID wreaked havoc on our trail systems by much heavier use, especially near the Front Range, as people needed to get out. Now with DOGE's gutting of the USFS and BLM last year, recreation staff have mostly left or been reassigned. At the least the Great American Outdoors Act is bringing in some amount of money to help with the huge backlog of trail maintenance, much of which is now being done by skilled volunteers (like me).
“Claim: “BUT THEY’RE RELOCATING THE AGENCY TO SALT LAKE CITY SO THAT MIKE LEE CAN DO SOME UNSPECIFIED EVIL!!!!1!”
Reality: The plan calls for 130 of 270 headquarters staff to be relocated from Washington D.C. to Lee-land sometime between summers 2026 and 2027.”
Honestly if I was a HQ staff I would love this move because I’d be closer to outdoor stuff I’d like to do. I’d just be mad that snowfall keeps sucking year over year.
I think a lot of HQ staff are just going to be very rooted in suburban DC. Especially the mid-to-late career ones who will have kids in high school or college, and as federal employees take advantage of services like public transport, public school, and good healthcare. Attempts to paint SLC as an outdoor mecca very much ignore its problems with religious extremism, hate, poor services and awful schools.
Oh absolutely! Completely agree. Picking up and moving your family is a traumatic experience even when everyone is on board (ask me how I know). The political/religious co-mingling is problematic at best to put it lightly. I just personally like big sky country with access to open BLM lands.
Great job pointing out the current issues in the conservation movement. A lot of is in, indeed, funded by memberships or subscribers, which is a huge problem in and of itself.
For some organizations and publications, every single new announcement, statement, or press release has become an opportunity to inflate what's being said or proposed just to draw attention to themselves and get quoted or shared somewhere else.
Unless it's actually urgent like the recent seven-day public comment period for Chaco Canyon, chasing breaking news should NOT be anyone's goal. Depth, nuance, facts, background, and real long-term solutions should be the goal.
This whole Forest Service outrage is just not based in that nuance or those facts. Like, there aren't even any real facts to work with here (yet). The only thing we have is one vague press release with a bunch of quotes from government officials. That's all.
While this may, in fact, end up being pretty bad, we just don't know at this point. And my biggest issue with all of this is that it's so incredibly distracting from the more serious, more important, and more pressing issues like the CRA, which you pointed out and rightly so.
Congress, in its current composition, is a FAR bigger threat to anything related to public lands, wildlife, and conservation than this ridiculously incompetent and temporary administration. Keep pointing that out. Let's keep cutting through the noise, which is deafening right now. I will too.
Wes thanks again for the fact based clarity you bring to this USFS re-org. I admit I was caught up with the concern about what appeared to be more of this administration’s strategy since DOGE to re-org, move jobs, and just make long term federal civil servants miserable enough to leave to replace them with private contracts/contractors or employees without civil service protection. I’m still not sure how “effective” that was under the DOGE chaotic strategy. So it also sounds like congresses use of the CRA to bring these Management Plans to a grinding halt may actually push away many of the private users this administration intended to benefit due to the likely lawsuits and associated uncertainty that scares off big private investments. Maybe this admin are a bunch of closeted environmentalists? Also sounds like the similar unintended consequences to we’ve done on a macro basis by driving our most reliable partners like Canada, Mexico, Japan and the EU away from the US and toward China and other more reliable partners.
I mean the entire administration is expressly trying to make career civil service jobs so miserable that everyone will quit, all while expressly trying to turn America into a profit center for billionaires, no? The big upside here is that these people are as comically incompetent as they are evil.
Yes it is alot of hype. And I roll my eyes. But I will let you provide the critique.
I want to bring up a whole movement in another country and this is where locals slog it out to protect the most ancient of temperate rain forests, the takayna of Tasmania. This is the Bob Brown Foundation and I would argue it meets a high level of 'purity' test. Yes it is named after a former doctor turned probably the most effective Green politician in global history. The Australian Labor and Liberal parties have always both been extremely pro-extraction. Conservation and environmental movements have nearly always been from the people.
Please check their work out:
https://bobbrown.org.au/
Yep, you got it. So important to stay focused on the real threats. The one thing I would add is that one of my biggest worries is that, through the reorganization, they are deliberately undermining the efficacy of our USFS research organization. Good resource management is impossible without ongoing and robust research and monitoring. I saw firsthand during my USFS career, how this led to a better understanding of how to do things better, and was used for real-time adaptive management. Weakening and undermining this part of the USFS sends us backward, something we cannot afford in the era of climate change. It's not just the reduction of sites, it is the dismantling of the research leadership structure that is concerning.
The moving of regional offices to state offices and moving the location of the WO, actually look like improvements for many reasons for a career USFS employee. But the concern is what leadership structure will sit in those offices, and what laws, policies, direction, and targets/performance metrics they will be directed to follow.
The Trump administration is lying to all of us. The longer term goal of their disgusting plan is to make the U.S. Forest Service look as incompetent as possible and to be more easily able to sell off and lease our public lands to private top bidders,logging interests and oil, gas and mining interests. They have tried very hard to to keep this big insane plan as quiet as possible, it’s not working😡
I worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 30 years I totally understand how vital the current and long standing(since 1908) structure of the Forest Service is to the management and protection of our public national forests lands.
Their plan is nothing but gaslighting and destruction.
It is vital that the Washington Office, the 9 Regional offices, the Experiment/Research Stations, the Forest Supervisors Offices, and the Rangers Stations structure stays in place for the safety of all of us and for the safety and management of our national forest lands.💙🌲💚
My most recent info from holdover agency staff is that the Forest Supervisor offices will remain. Of course, that was April 3 and who knows what will happen next week from this totally incompetent administration.
Thank you again Wes for straightening me out. I read the entire 2700 words. I did send some emails to my Congress people this week and I hope I said the right thing. Or I hope I didn’t look like an asshole.
That urgency to call your rep about every little thing gives people false agency. Republicans do not care about you. Hopefully I am not the person breaking that news to you. Work to elect Democrats in November, work to get a Dem President in 2028, let's all work on rebuilding our institutions for a few years, then sometime around 2036 have a conversation about our two party system.
I still call. We don't have to agree on that.
Fortunately, both my senators are Democrat, and my congressman is a Democrat. I would not contact them if they were Republican.
Qn excellent, informative piece, Mr Silver. With this administration and its business cronies, however, the issue you raise about the mitigating effects of a more onerous permitting process is scant consolation. Remember the East Wing (incidentally, part of a National Park)? In the immortal words of John Belushi in an ancient, "old growth" Saturday Night Live skit, modified for this context: "Permits? We don't need no stinking permits."
Apologies, Mr. Siler.
Thank you Wes, so much
I read the entire article and tried hard to find any mention of outdoor recreation & tourism on the public lands as being a huge economic driver for rural communities. "Crickets."
But I found only that the purpose of the USFS is resource extraction by big business. Or as the late professor of law at the University of Colorado, Charles Wilkinson, put it in the 1980s: the "Lords of Yesterday."
Here on Colorado, COVID wreaked havoc on our trail systems by much heavier use, especially near the Front Range, as people needed to get out. Now with DOGE's gutting of the USFS and BLM last year, recreation staff have mostly left or been reassigned. At the least the Great American Outdoors Act is bringing in some amount of money to help with the huge backlog of trail maintenance, much of which is now being done by skilled volunteers (like me).
The maintenance backlog has more than doubled since passage of GAOA.
“Claim: “BUT THEY’RE RELOCATING THE AGENCY TO SALT LAKE CITY SO THAT MIKE LEE CAN DO SOME UNSPECIFIED EVIL!!!!1!”
Reality: The plan calls for 130 of 270 headquarters staff to be relocated from Washington D.C. to Lee-land sometime between summers 2026 and 2027.”
Honestly if I was a HQ staff I would love this move because I’d be closer to outdoor stuff I’d like to do. I’d just be mad that snowfall keeps sucking year over year.
I think a lot of HQ staff are just going to be very rooted in suburban DC. Especially the mid-to-late career ones who will have kids in high school or college, and as federal employees take advantage of services like public transport, public school, and good healthcare. Attempts to paint SLC as an outdoor mecca very much ignore its problems with religious extremism, hate, poor services and awful schools.
Oh absolutely! Completely agree. Picking up and moving your family is a traumatic experience even when everyone is on board (ask me how I know). The political/religious co-mingling is problematic at best to put it lightly. I just personally like big sky country with access to open BLM lands.
Haha, yeah. Son of two lifelong federal employees here. People ask me where I'm from and I'm like: how much time you got?
Great job pointing out the current issues in the conservation movement. A lot of is in, indeed, funded by memberships or subscribers, which is a huge problem in and of itself.
For some organizations and publications, every single new announcement, statement, or press release has become an opportunity to inflate what's being said or proposed just to draw attention to themselves and get quoted or shared somewhere else.
Unless it's actually urgent like the recent seven-day public comment period for Chaco Canyon, chasing breaking news should NOT be anyone's goal. Depth, nuance, facts, background, and real long-term solutions should be the goal.
This whole Forest Service outrage is just not based in that nuance or those facts. Like, there aren't even any real facts to work with here (yet). The only thing we have is one vague press release with a bunch of quotes from government officials. That's all.
While this may, in fact, end up being pretty bad, we just don't know at this point. And my biggest issue with all of this is that it's so incredibly distracting from the more serious, more important, and more pressing issues like the CRA, which you pointed out and rightly so.
Congress, in its current composition, is a FAR bigger threat to anything related to public lands, wildlife, and conservation than this ridiculously incompetent and temporary administration. Keep pointing that out. Let's keep cutting through the noise, which is deafening right now. I will too.
Wes thanks again for the fact based clarity you bring to this USFS re-org. I admit I was caught up with the concern about what appeared to be more of this administration’s strategy since DOGE to re-org, move jobs, and just make long term federal civil servants miserable enough to leave to replace them with private contracts/contractors or employees without civil service protection. I’m still not sure how “effective” that was under the DOGE chaotic strategy. So it also sounds like congresses use of the CRA to bring these Management Plans to a grinding halt may actually push away many of the private users this administration intended to benefit due to the likely lawsuits and associated uncertainty that scares off big private investments. Maybe this admin are a bunch of closeted environmentalists? Also sounds like the similar unintended consequences to we’ve done on a macro basis by driving our most reliable partners like Canada, Mexico, Japan and the EU away from the US and toward China and other more reliable partners.
I mean the entire administration is expressly trying to make career civil service jobs so miserable that everyone will quit, all while expressly trying to turn America into a profit center for billionaires, no? The big upside here is that these people are as comically incompetent as they are evil.