Forest Service Pros And Cons

Introduction

As an agency with field offices across the country, the United States Forest Service (USFS) exhibits discrepancies between its national goals and policy in comparison to its on-the-ground operations. In fact, its procedural outcomes greatly vary across its field offices, and these localized outcomes differ from its on-the-books policy (Struthers et al. 2021, 688-689, 697-698; Shultz, Thompson, and McCaffrey 2019, 9). This variation elicits a broader question: why does the USFS produce inconsistent implementation of national goals and policy? In this essay, I propose that the USFS exhibits this inconsistency because stakeholders, on the national and local levels, complicate the agency’s uniform and effective implementation of federal

As a component of forest management, the Forest Service has increasingly sought to engage local communities across the US by establishing collaborative groups. Orth and Cheng’s case study of three of these “collaborative groups” demonstrates that rural communities have embedded themselves in field offices’ decision-making and operational processes by negotiating the USFS’s operational boundaries (Orth and Cheng 2017, 64-65). For instance, multiple field offices have co-founded Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) with community organizations to define “boundaries of responsibility.” Through these agreements, communities can channel their “expectations, communications, interactions, and resources” to their local field offices. These MOUs have “increas[ed] the [service’s] restoration actions,” delegated the Forest Service’s work to community partners, permitted community members to acquire knowledge typically reserved for forest service officers, and opened funding channels for field offices (Orth and Cheng 2017, 71-75). Since not all field offices have established MOUs and each MOU is unique, the Forest Service’s localized collaboration produces variation in work between its offices. How these field offices reconfigure their boundaries of information sharing and work responsibilities with the public creates

As mandated by federal law, “field offices are responsible for factoring in local needs when selecting actions, such as approving permits or beginning bureaucratic actions.” For constituent services, Members of Congress (MCs) often intervene on the behalf of their constituents with federal agencies. When field offices factor in community interests, “MCs can lobby field bureaucrats to initiate actions they prefer” and “influence the procedural rigor of [the] bureaucratic decision process” (Struthers et al. 2021, 687-693). To test whether this intervention may have had an impact on the USFS’s decisions, Struthers et al.’s empirical study found that “under low and moderate unemployment levels, forests with congressional representatives who oppose environmental regulation have higher rates of extractive actions and use less rigorous [bureaucratic] analyses than forests with” environmentally conscious representatives. These findings suggest that communities do influence the USFS’s procedures through their Congressional representatives depending on political attitudes. Making this explanation convincing, Forest Service officials have confirmed that MCs try to influence field offices’ decisions (Struthers et al. 202, 687-688). Although this study does not prove that MCs interfere or that this interference is successful, it offers a