Where does Smokey belong: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (represented by pictures, above) or the U.S. Department of the Interior (represented by pictures, below)? Photos, above, left to right: Howard F. Schwartz, Colorado State University; Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Forestry Archive; Scott Bauer, Agricultural Research Service; Keith Weller, Agricultural Research Service. Photos, below, left to right: NOAA National Geophysical Data Center; Austin Post; Martha Carlisle; Indian Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
It can’t be a happy moment when a House subcommittee calls in the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to analyze a federal agency’s status. So the U.S. Forest Service snapped to attention in February after the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies asked the GAO to study the feasibility of transferring the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior.
The subcommittee’s concerns were many: members were repeatedly frustrated that neither the Forest Service nor its major land-management counterparts in Interior—the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management—have been able to coordinate routine budgetary information; they were worried about firefighting’s devastating impact on the agencies’ incredibly shrinking budgets; and they were baffled as to why such like-minded agencies were scattered throughout the executive branch.
In February 2008, Representative Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat and chair of the subcommittee, and his colleagues wondered aloud if re-shuffling the bureaucratic deck might resolve these nagging problems. Their subsequent charge to the GAO was straightforward: could a transfer generate more efficient management, better service and greater cost savings? Could it bring organizations whose work seems so similar into closer alignment?
As Dicks’ spokesman George Behan told the Washington Post, “You have more recreational campgrounds in the Forest Service than you do even in the Park Service. So there is a logical reason for considering it.”
The committee’s ranking Republican, Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, was even more direct. “Today the evolution of our forests has gone away from production and more towards preservation, and it seems to me that the natural move [is for the Forest Service to be relocated] under the umbrella of the Department of Interior rather than the Department of Agriculture.”
This bipartisan consensus, however ephemeral it may prove to be, is striking. Since when have Democrats and Republicans even pretended to agree on land-management issues or executive-branch restructuring? More importantly, why are they willing to do so now?
The quick answer is that both parties are positioning themselves for the coming presidential campaign and the political churning that will be the inevitable result of the November election. Regardless of who gains control of the White House and Congress, there will be new agendas, new leadership in place and new outcomes for old stalemates. In hopes of shaping these prospects, the House subcommittee requested a GAO report that will not be completed during this calendar year—the final report won’t be released until after every ballot is tabulated. At that point, the subcommittee will be positioned to provide a blueprint for the incoming administration and new legislative session to craft appropriate policy changes.
Or not. And I’m betting not. My skepticism is derived in large part from the lengthy and complex history of transfer schemes, none of which has come to fruition. Put another way: what single issue has been consistent across the quite-varied presidencies of Taft, Wilson and Harding; Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower; Carter, Reagan and Clinton? The failed attempt—sometimes emanating from the White House, sometimes from Capitol Hill—to consolidate or restructure the public land bureaus. The Forest Service has always been the focal point of these manifold efforts, and the battles that have erupted around where it should be housed and why have been complicated, even undercut by the wider political context in which these debates took place.
William Howard Taft would learn this lesson the hard way. In 1910, he fired the agency’s first chief, Gifford Pinchot, for insubordination after the chief forester publicly and successfully challenged Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger’s decision to give away coal fields on federal property in Alaska. The following year, hoping to extract an extra dose of revenge, the Taft administration proposed that the national forests—which had been transferred to the Department of Agriculture in 1905 with the creation of the Forest Service—be shipped back to the Department of the Interior. It never happened because in the run up to the 1912 election, former president Theodore Roosevelt, egged on by Pinchot, took vengeance on his backsliding, hand-picked successor by jumping into the presidential race. His bid for the nomination destroyed Taft’s bid for a second term and helped put Woodrow Wilson in office.
To the victor went the spoils. President Wilson picked up the transfer idea and broadened it. In 1916, the president carved land out of the national forests to create the National Park Service; it seemed a propitious moment to consolidate the nation’s two land-management agencies. Congress introduced legislation to return the forests to Interior, but it could not pass a bill. Nor was another shrewd suggestion from a nonpartisan, blue-ribbon commission even introduced on the floor—the creation of a new Department of Public Works that would replace Interior and would include all land and resource agencies. Such ideas, whatever their merits, seemed trivial amid World War I’s brutal trench warfare.
Once the Armistice was signed, the bureaucratic brawls broke out anew. Incoming president Warren G. Harding tapped New Mexico senator and longtime rancher Albert Fall as his Interior secretary, a choice that shocked many battle-hardened conservationists dismayed that Harding would align himself with a man who Pinchot lambasted as an “exploiter.” Apprehensive about the future of federal conservationism, Pinchot set his legal counsel, Harry Slattery, on the new secretary’s paper trail. After a year-long investigation, Slattery unearthed Fall’s criminal actions in the Teapot Dome scandal. The revelations had a two-fold impact—they sent Fall to jail and blunted his recently announced campaign to transfer the national forests back to Interior.
Given the political setbacks that previous advocates of reorganization had suffered, it’s surprising that any other administration took on the fight. But Franklin Roosevelt and his ambitious interior secretary, Harold Ickes, were convinced that the New Deal mandate freed them to streamline the executive branch’s clutter of bureaus, agencies and policy shops. Thus began what ended up being a decade-long attempt to restructure the federal government. Again, the Forest Service was the main target.
The president threw himself into the proposal. He authorized the transfer, forced Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace to accede to his (and Ickes) wishes and demanded the muzzling of the Forest Service itself. With Roosevelt’s full weight behind it, the initiative seemed destined to pass.
But no one counted on Pinchot, whom the agency had secretly asked to fight on its behalf because it could not defend itself. In a punishing battle, he took on Ickes from every available forum. Pinchot spent gobs of money to fund the anti-transfer campaign, and he cobbled together an odd network of grassroots activists, natural resource lobbies, conservation organizations and western politicos. In short, the old chief raised a loud and political ruckus. It become so costly that in 1940 the president conceded. The war in Asia and Europe required his full attention, and the maintenance of a stable domestic political coalition was paramount. At an Oval Office meeting with western legislators, Roosevelt reportedly tore up his executive order, a grandiloquent gesture that seemed finally to rip this page out of the presidential playbook.
Not quite. Subsequent administrations kept trying to reform the agencies’ structure. In 1947, President Truman appointed former president Herbert Hoover to overhaul the executive branch. The Hoover Commission concluded that the natural resource agencies should be co-located according to managerial activity—proposing therefore to merge the Forest Service and BLM—but their proposal gained no traction in Congress. In Richard Nixon’s first term, a serious attempt to create a Department of Natural Resources imploded; in his scandal-ridden second term he had no better luck establishing a Department of Energy and Natural Resources. As for Jimmy Carter, he understandably campaigned in 1976 for a cleaner, more transparent federal government. But mid-level bureaucrats and outside pressure groups crushed the president’s wide-ranging proposals for a new Department of Natural Resources. Carter’s plan to form an agency from the Forest Service, BLM and the U.S. Geological Survey, to be known as the National Forest and Land Administration, also dead-ended, as did proposals emanating from the Reagan and Clinton administrations.
This century-long saga of unsuccessful reorganization campaigns does not mean that the latest flutter of interest in combining agencies and missions will similarly collapse. Many of the interest groups that have roared to the Forest Service’s defense in the past are much less committed to its survival today; the timber industry is no longer a staunch ally, while environmentalists and recreationists have a love-hate relationship with the agency, an ambivalence that many western politicians share.
“The Forest Service now stands largely exposed, without public constituencies willing to advocate its cause,” argued resource economist Roger Sedjo in A Vision for the U.S. Forest Service (2000). “Given this lack of power, it is difficult to see how [it] could resist an attempt…to reorganize the agency, perhaps out of existence.”
Hints of this can be seen in the on-going blurring of the formerly hard-and-fast lines between the resource agencies. Informal collaborations were formalized and accelerated with Congress’ authorization of a program dubbed “Service First: Working Together” (1997). In particular, it sanctions the ability of the Forest Service and the BLM to share facilities and decision-making processes. This program paved the way to an innovative development: the Public Lands Office in Durango, Colorado, which is staffed by personnel from both agencies. Employees in the office are required to be conversant in each others’ regulations, be capable of signing off on their respective permits and must dress the part—each staffer owns two sets of uniforms.
This melding intensified in 2006 when the Forest Service, BLM, National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service inked a memorandum of understanding committing them “to carry out shared or joint management activities to achieve mutually beneficial resource management goals.” That may not sound overly substantive, but it is a significant collaborative gesture.
Yet it is doubtful that by themselves Service First projects will evolve into a broader restructuring of cabinet-level departments and their organizational flowcharts. Confounding such expectations is a dense tangle of regulations, laws and judicial decrees, as well as administrative findings and congressional management directions that constitute but a handful of the impediments that have derailed earlier dreams of building a better government.
Many of these are detailed in the bookshelf-straining report of the Public Land Law Commission (1964-70). As Ross W. Gorte of the Congressional Research Service points out in his recently released analysis, “Proposals to Merge the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management” (May 2008), the commission “took six years to complete its review, producing its recommendations in a 342-page volume (plus thirty-nine separately bound background documents).”
For all its heftiness, Gorte notes, this tome did not address such key matters as each agency’s differing water-management mandates; overlapping congressional jurisdictions and legislative oversight under which they operate; the oft-murky issues of agency culture, morale and temper; or the even-more bewildering “array of programs to compensate state and local governments for the tax-exempt status of federal lands.” Any wonder why agency consolidation has been such a tough nut to crack?
So tough that the latest in a long line of eager reconstructionists should prepare to be humbled and recall this send-up of William Marsh. In 1978, as Carter announced a sweeping agenda to reinvent the federal government, Marsh, the president’s point-man, called a meeting of Hill staffers whose portfolios included the federal lands. In attendance were two old hands, Bob Wolf and Bailey Guard. Dutifully listening as an earnest Marsh laid out the justifications for the proposed Department of Natural Resources, they were bemused by his self-confident assertion: “I didn’t come to town to take this job and fail.”
Guard leaned over to Wolf and whispered, “But he’s gonna.”