Can you provide a citation for where you’re getting this data indicating that the USFS budget has been declining over time?
Based on the data I found, the USFS budget has increased steadily from 2011-2024 [0]. The 2024 budget was $9.3b [1] versus $5.1b in 2011 [0]. The 2025 budget was cut from 2024, but still higher than the 2020 budget.
> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs.
i.e. subsidizing states with antiquated "just don't touch it, but also fight every little fire" forest management policy
If areas were having small semi-annual fires cleaning out the brush rather than these once per several decades monsters there wouldn't be the need for people to flee and there wouldn't be the same crime impact. And routinely dealing with small fires would make all the organizations involved better practiced when the big ones some around.
If forests are maintained as a tinderbox then that's unstable, regardless of whether the immediate cause of ignition is lightning or human activity.
For context: Just keeping up with inflation puts the 2011 budget at $7.1b in 2024.
They also claim to have "13 billion dollars contributed to the U.S. economy by visitor spending each year"[2].
Investing $9b into $13b of revenue sounds like a great use of government funds to me.
[2] https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/newsroom/by-the-numbers
No. By math alone, it is a horrible waste. It would be a good investment if those funds generated economic activity resulting 9+b in tax dollars. But this is about parks, not simply stimulating the economy. The value of parks cannot be expressed in dollars.
References to economic activity in relation to parks can be dangerous. Once we see them as engines of economic activity, then we will seek to maximize that activity. A national forest should not be described as a source of timber fees and tourist dollars. Down that road comes drilling for oil in parks, more roads, more hotels and the inevitable conversion of wild fields into condos.
Even if it makes financial sense, the fact that we can only quantify a public good in USD (or any other currency) is a tragedy.
Not all things have a monetary amount associated to them, but they are still somehow valuable.
Money is the way we quantify the relative value of anything vs anything else. That's all money is.
I think because it's state-run, the "value" is extremely hard to quantify, in many directions. It might be over-valued, as people who've never seen it have to pay for it, or under-valued, as money that people might've paid to visit the park has already been taken from their paycheques.
I dislike your framing of this.
The value of a privately-operated park would be no less difficult to quantify. National forests are not theme parks. They have a value even if nobody ever sets foot inside.
This requirement that everything must have some currency value attached to it is a societal disease. We can extrapolate this to say that anything that increases the country GDP should be done.
I can think of many awful examples. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to uproot every last tree to extract lumber. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just kill people with serious illnesses or disabilities instead of building more hospitals. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just put every damn child to work in the mines or in an Amazon fulfillment center instead of sending them to school.
I can go on. As long as we can only measure the value of anything in USD, we can justify quite a lot of things that would be pretty awful for society as a whole.
No it's not - I'm saying currency is how we measure the relative value of things. Money isn't separate to how we measure something's value; it's the thing we use to measure value. It's like saying "every object having a length value attached is a societal disease; we shouln't only attach a cm value to all objects".
That's not what the GP said, though. They said that the idea that everything needs to be valued in dollars is a societal disease. Not that everything that can be valued in dollars is a societal disease.
Most common != only
For example, a smallish local park in my neighborhood is completely free and generates $0. Various entities spend some decent amount of money to maintain the park. The value is in how many people visit the park and enjoy it, which is inherently not quantifiable.
The only thing you can quantify is how many people visit the park each day or week or whatever, and, say, the average number of person-hours it is used per time period. Maybe those are useful metrics that can help inform whether or not the park's existence is justified, or as to how much money should be spent maintaining and improving it, in a very rough sense. But that's not the same thing as quantifying its value.
But I also acknowledge ROI does help fend off alternate agendas. My state's investments in birdwatching, vineyards, hunting/fishing/gaming. etc have huge ROI. Thereby empowering the conservationsists in those never ending policymaking slap fights.
Adjacently, I've seen (local) budgets for pre-K get over the hump because of their outsized economic impact. Some people only see the world thru dollars signs.
Framing with positive ROI helps moot the "we can't afford it" zero sum scarcity mindset. Like exposing NIMBYs.
Based on the ROI, we can't afford TO NOT invest in our national parks. Taking away the economic counter arguments shows the opponents just don't want to. For reasons.
We just didn’t have to care, but now it is starting to catch up with is.
One hopes things will improve after November 5...
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...