US Forest Service firings decimate already understaffed agency
grist.org
grist.org
Visiting Europe, where most private land has access ways (and I believe laws regarding shared use, in some cases) gives feelings of respect towards both neighbors and the earth, which should (in my and woodie guthrie’s opinion, at least) be a shared experience.
I’m not sure if it’s at all related to the first point, but in America, it would probably be more common for visitors (or ‘trespassers’) to leave someone else’s land worse than they found it (when compared to the shared respect generally found in Europe). Speaking in broad strokes, of course.
https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/partiv/titlei/cha...
Shouldn't that elevate property values in rural areas? Being able to buy a get-away property with a large tract of land and its own forest/lake/mountain/whatever.
Thinking about comparable situations in Scotland, you can get a rural property cheaply, or even a spare castle, but .. that's not where the jobs are, that's not where people's friends or social scenes are, there's no shops, and often the weather isn't on your side. What people want is parks as an amenity they can visit. I suppose they'll be privatized and people will be charged to visit them.
They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
-- Joni Mitchell Tears of sorrow running deep
Running silent in my sleep
-- Joan Baez
The Forest Service has one of the most checkered pasts you can imagine, they're in many ways the opposite of what people imagine when they hear the name.
To quote Bill Bryson:
> “In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.”
That is the USFS. The guys who help loggers. The fools who so often mismanaged forest management based on Victorian ideas about "the woods". These are the geniuses who kill off fish in large waterways with rotenone.
A lot of what Trump is doing is highly questionable or outright terrible, but I don't shed a tear for this agency, and you shouldn't either. The wilds would be better without them.
Is the USFS not failing to protect old growth? Have their policies around controlled burns not been criticized for decades as antiquated? Do they not poison rivers to "control undesirable fish species"?
Or by contrast, what are they doing that you think excuses their shortcomings?
[Edit] polymarket bet on if federal land will be sold/auctionned within 2 years? Anyone?
Unless i misunderstood english (which is very much possible), saying "my pet theory" is equivalent to saying "i'm inclined to believe", i.e not a belief i hold strongly, but a belief nonetheless?
I don't see what is hidden, is it how i turned my sentence that bothered you? Was it bad english (which is totally possible, i'm not a native speaker)? Or you disagreed with it, and you chose to do moral criticism rather than criticize the logic?
There is no federal tax on land.
The little money that we as a country are saving (and we're not actually saving any money, it's being redirected to a large border security budget) is by no means conmensurate with the large amount of damage we are doing long term.
But if all you care about is extracting natural resources from our environment, then the USFS, BLM etc. are just a thorn in your side.
If it gets out-of-hand very much further, the appropriate stimulus would be thousands of farmers descending upon Washington with pitchforks in hand.
I mean I'm not confident they will, but it'd be nice.
Despite the common "wisdom" that the federal government is universally bloated, there's little evidence to suggest the forest service has an excessive number of employees given the size of their job. For context they're less than half the size of Facebook, and my non-expert hot take is that managing all that federal land sounds like the more complicated and labor intensive job. If they were running pretty lean already, firing 10% of the workforce could potentially result in job functions with no one to do them, and that goes downhill pretty fast.
The firings were also exclusively focused on firing new employees, regardless of role or performance, simply because they were easy to fire. That makes the forest service (and every other federal agency) as unattractive employer, which will make it much harder to recruit new employees as people naturally retire or leave. That 10% reduction is going to snowball into a larger number over time, even if more people don't get fired, which I suspect they will.
Less important but worth noting is that while the stated goal is to "drain the DC deep state swamp" or whatever, what that apparently really translates into is firing forest service employees, who are spread out all over the country and not what most people think of when it comes to "the deep state". In the name of fighting the bureaucratic boogeyman, they're hurting people like this.
Also, the government should be efficient but shouldn’t be required to break even or profit… it’s a public good.
Agencies generally aren't just given a big sack of money to do whatever with. It's allocated for specific types of things in specific amounts, and in particular, employee pay is separate from other things and governed mostly by a given number of employee slots rather than a specific dollar amount. The forest service couldn't save those jobs by just shifting funding from, say, vehicle purchases without much higher level approval.
It doesn't really matter though because the direction to the forest service and everyone else wasn't "reduce your budget by $Y". It was "fire all your new employees immediately". There was no opportunity for the forest service to "better manage its finances". I think giving the forest service and other agencies time and flexibility to figure out how to be more efficient based on specific domain knowledge is a fantastic idea. Even if that ultimately did lead to layoffs, at least it would be an informed decision. That's not at all what's happening, and whatever excuses proponents of this approach come up with, firing people like the woman in the article is exactly what was expected.
"Trump Quietly Plans To Liquidate Public Lands To Finance His Sovereign Wealth Fund"
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trump-quietly-plans...
The country is being outright looted.
Also in what universe does it make sense for a country with both a trade deficit and a large domestic spending deficit to have a sovereign wealth fund? A sovereign wealth fund makes sense for countries with large fiscal surpluses.
Seems like Trump is setting himself up to sell to the highest bidder on a case-by-case basis, according to which foreign parties he likes at the time, with no opportunity at all for any that make him whine.
Do you know what a billionaire *is*?
Hey, I think that!
> These people do not experience the world as we do.
They have the same senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, ...
They're subject to the same problems as all us: mental problems, health issues, death, ...
Yes, having infinite money can solve quite a few problems, but it also introduces new ones!
> And they do not care how we do. We are mere counter ants to them.
I'm sure some don't. And I'm also sure others do. It's disingenious to put all billionaires in the same bucket.
They also live in a world that is almost completely alien and disconnected from the one the rest of us live in. That's why they're not like the rest of us. They're socially aliens who have zero understanding of what life is like outside of their social fortresses.
No, its pretty clear that having that much money changes people. To even reach that level of wealth there has to be something "wrong" with you compared to regular people. A willingness to take risks regardless of the cost, exploit your fellow humans, and being so disconnected from that you think you achieved it solely through your own hard work and talent.
On top of that, if you have a billion dollars, and there is poverty and starving children in the world, and you're not giving as much as you can to fix it, then you're simply unethical. I give what I can, but I'm just a regular worker bee. If I had more money than I could spend in a hundred lifetimes, I don't know how I could sleep at night knowing there's kids going to bed hungry, and I could have a significant impact on fixing it.
That's one of the "new problems" referred to.
Then we will be ruled by trillionaires.
All while proposing to cut the Interior Dept budget by $1.5B.
https://www.npr.org/2017/04/04/522518472/trump-donates-salar...
They're going to Liz Truss the US Federal budget, and it's going to be extremely bad for a wide swathe of the middle classes via the financial markets.
It's funny how the politicians say they're going to create jobs but usually due to their policies, jobs evaporate. When will we call bullshit on these claims? FDR understood that the only way for a government to create jobs was to hire people. Neo-liberal conservatives love magic thinking like creating jobs through giving money to the rich when just hiring poor people with that money is more efficient (and obvious).
Start with any issue related to a commons — a "free market" will ALWAYS turn it into a Tragedy Of The Commons, literally destroying the thing that was most valued.
Plus, the entire concept of a "Free Market" is nonsense. No markets are ever completely free — there are ALWAYS regulations, whether codified or informal, enforced by official agents or vigilantes, and penalties for violating those regulations. The arguments are only about what are the regulations (and really, who the regulations are designed to benefit).
Capitalism & "Free Markets" are also extremely bad at providing for all members of society when they encounter accident, hardship, illness, or infirmity.
Ultimately, overly free markets result in extremely unequal and unproductive societies, where a few people hoard approximately all the wealth and the rest of the population is barely functional.
Fundamentally, all these types of theories are wrong because they assume a baseline of the benefits of a well-regulated society, with a social safety net. They assume their "free market interventions" will result in only improvements, when the actual result will be a highly stratified, mostly poor, and dysfunctional society. The remarkable thing about history is not only that we had great minds like Newton and Einstein, but how many similar-caliber minds lived their lives in subsistence mode — those "neo-xyz theories" ultimately ensure that 99.9% of all Newtons and Einsteins will never have a chance to achieve anything.
[edit: cull stray words]
A "market" is any place people come to exchange goods and services, and seems to be a sociological Truth. They appear in nearly every society, going back thousands of years, even before written history.
A "free market" is an academic ideal, where every actor in the market is perfectly rational, has complete information, and is not under any sort of coercion. This is, of course, impossible to achieve in practice, similar to solving a high school physics problem and ignoring friction.
Capitalism, then, is a tool for exploiting those imperfections for your own gain. Using your wealth or power to coerce others, acting on hidden information, preying on peoples' insecurities through advertising, and so on. Capitalism is explicitly opposed to a free market, and continuously tries to undermine it, for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
The role of democratically-elected governments should be to represent the peoples' interests in the market, in opposition to the elites. Like you said, through regulations to protect the commons, prevent monopolies and other exploitation, and so on.
The dilemma is that a weak government allows corporations and the wealthy to do whatever they want, and is powerless to stop it. A strong government can stop or slow their influence temporarily, but is also a jucier target for corruption.
I don't know how we get to that, though. We've now had two generations awash in propaganda, that the free market is good and capitalism is synonymous with the free market, and that any problems you're facing aren't the fault of the wealthy and powerful, but are because of the minorities that can't defend themselves.
* The government is generally the problem [with our economy], not the solution to our [economic] problems.
* Low taxes, low regulation, and low barriers to trade favor positive-sum economic development.
* The market will perform most regulatory tasks for us out of enlightened self interest.
* Ricardian specialization in international trade is to the benefit of all.
* Money made by the wealthy will trickle down to everyone else's quality of life.
* The Laffer Curve is self evident and we are self-evidently always on the right side of it; Cutting taxes will increase receipts.
Conservatism is highly compatible with this worldview, but it was embraced by liberals as well after the country re-elected Reagan in a landslide. Clinton's "Third Way" portrayed itself as an alternative to traditional Republican and Democratic concerns that was socially progressive but promoted a slightly softened version of this economic theory. Some version of or equivalent to the Third Way has basically been in control of the Democratic party ever since due to its superior ability to fundraise for campaigns, due to the slow death of the labor movement, and due to the death of the dream of international communism among fringe intellectuals.
In an attempt to differentiate itself, conservatives tilted hard, hard right on social politics (if not always policy), and brought the economic policies to an extreme that would have been nonsensical a generation earlier.
Most people who didn't spend the last two or three decades living off of returns on their investments, have been frustrated with the failed promises of neoliberalism, and it is losing traction with liberals; Or rather, [neo]liberals are losing traction with the electorate.
I don't think the claim that there is atleast one highest total tax collected point in between 0 and 100% tax is that wild? It aint that much more to it? (I agree with the rest of the point about missusing it)
You could argue that the model is too simple ofcourse. Or that 100% tax on certain things don't give 0 revenue and that 100% tax is not the roof. E.g. some people are paying to work at farms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States
I assume neoliberal conservatives are the conservatives who embrace neoliberalism, but both parties have embraced it for generations. We seem to be rolling it back somewhat since the main strategic benefit (containing the Soviet Union) is no longer as relevant (until recently I suppose).
Even when Carter is identified during the correct time frame, it's always best to remember that the oil crisis and runway inflation that followed were the complete doing of Nixon and OPEC beforehand.
Actually in current hindsight it could most realistically be said, pointing to the most prominent national leadership involved, that such distorted economic policy arose "during" Al Saudi.
> tribal relations specialist
???
The Office of Tribal Relations (OTR) serves as a single point of contact for Tribal issues and works to ensure that relevant programs and policies are efficient, easy to understand, accessible, and developed in consultation with the American Indians and Alaska Native constituents they impact.
From Forest Service-----
Tribal Relations Specialists play a critical role in the government-to-government trust responsibility that is crucial to the health and sustainability of many of our nation’s most treasured landscapes. They serve as the point of contact for American Indian Tribes; work with Tribal Councils, Tribal Leaders, and officials of other agencies; and serve as partnership coordinators for programs involving collaboration and consultation with American Indian Tribes.
maybe so, but then states have to raise taxes to pay for it
the fed gov gets to say "look at all the money we saved you"!! (actually they're putting the savings to border security, but anyway), but in the end taxpayers don't actually pay any less
that's besides the fact that these are federal lands, not state lands; and that centralized management is generally more cost effective
Illegal dumping at the edges of the national forests is also a big problem that they can’t keep up with, as well as preventing other illegal activities like poaching or unlawful harvesting of resourceg.
the US forest services also maintains forests in over 80 countries. why are we spending money there? i don't understand why they don't focus on keeping their employees if its such a devastating loss of goodwill and loyalty and expertise.
their 10% reduction in workforce saved them 1.5% of their total budget. they really can't save 1.5% somewhere else?
(A citation on their programs abroad would be nice, too.)
Why can’t they just hire the probationary people? I find it impossible to believe there isn’t a solution here
I don't think the current administration is currently politically incentivised to have a rationally-thought through solution, or plan, to making the USFS lean that keeps it doing the things we think are important.
> The federal agency does more than ensure that Americans have a place to hunt, hike, fish, or paddle. In the South, forest workers played a key role in helping western North Carolina and other communities recover from impacts of Hurricane Helene. In the West, they’re taking on fire risk mitigation and fighting wildfires. They’re also involved in fisheries management in places like Alaska. Across the country, agency biologists and foresters are busy working to strengthen the over 150 national forests and 20 grasslands it monitors in the face of changing climate.
> “That means you’re going to see those campgrounds close, the trails go unmaintained, roads closed, you’re going to feel the effects of wildfire and hurricane recovery work that’s just going to remain undone,” said Reynolds. “Communities are going to struggle.”
the US Forest Service maintains our parks, ensuring the safety and longevity of the park system. this involves emergency response and critical research in the face of climate change, among many, many other responsibilities.
> It seems to be working as far as I can tell.
... because overworked and underpaid public servants have been quietly making it work. how is this different from "we don't need an infosec team, we haven't had an incident in years!"
https://openpayrolls.com/rank/highest-paid-employees/forest-...
"n the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin decimatio 'removal of a tenth'[1]) was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort." [0]
So, a 10% cut fits the definition.
The immediately self-contradictory passive aggression is pointless.
> I never heard of 99% as the definition of decimated.
Most people hear decimated and think "totally gone" or "almost totally gone".
Not totally gone or almost gone, merely "severely" or in "large numbers".
"some 3,400 workers who had been targeted for layoffs — an estimated 10 percent of the workforce"
10% doesn't meet the traditional usage of the term 'decimate' (as few use the term only when it meets the dictionary definition).