The Best-Laid Plans. Randal O'Toole
This encouraged wildlife, recreation, watershed, and other experts inside the Forest Service to support timber sales.
Congress did not intentionally write the Knutson-Vandenberg Act to give forest managers incentives to lose money on timber sales. When the law passed in 1930, there was little support for national forest timber sales in Washington, D.C. The Depression had wiped out the value of private timber inventories, and major timber companies actually lobbied to prevent the Forest Service from driving down prices still further by flooding the market with cheap wood. Senator Vandenberg and Representative Knutson’s original goal was to ensure that there would always be funds for reforestation despite the Depression that was deepening at the time the law was passed.
After World War II, however, rising demand for wood and diminishing private timber supplies made the industry more supportive of national forest timber sales. In addition, timber made excellent pork barrel because sawmills were highly visible parts of a region’s economy. So Congress enthusiastically funded timber even when it was reluctant to fund other parts of the Forest Service program. In 1972, Weber State University economist Richard Alston reviewed 19 years of budget requests and found that Congress had given the Forest Service more than 95 percent of its requests for timber funds, but less than 80 percent of its requests for wildlife funds and only 70 percent of its requests for recreation, watershed, and reforestation funds.8
While the Forest Service was aware that Congress liked to fund timber sales, it was even more aware that the K-V fund allowed the Forest Service to turn every dollar Congress appropriated for timber sales into at least one more dollar for reforestation and other activities. No other resource provided that opportunity. By 1980, when forest planning began under the National Forest Management Act, all the biases resulting from the Knutson-Vandenberg Act were deeply ingrained in the Forest Service.
Natural selection explains how the idealistic young people who began working on forest plans straight out of school ended up biasing all their FORPLAN models so strongly toward more timber cutting. In any institution, a process of natural selection favors those who work best in that institution. In the Forest Service, the people who truly believed that all timber grows fast, that timber prices will rise rapidly, and that wilderness recreation benefits from new road construction were more likely to be promoted than the doubters.
This process of natural selection did not immediately affect the young FORPLAN planners, but it had worked on many of the people who submitted the data to use in FORPLAN. Most timber yield tables, for example, were designed by timber staff who had worked in the agency for years. Few of the economists, planners, and computer jockeys who ran FORPLAN had the expertise to question the yield tables, so they merely entered the numbers into the computer.
Economics was different. Few if any forests had staff economists before 1979, so the economists hired to work on the plans had to develop their own resource value and cost data. Even so, they usually followed guidelines set by the regional offices, leading to a situation in which all forests in a given region tended to make the same mistakes. National forest planners attended frequent meetings of planners in their regions during which the regional leaders presented the rationale for the numbers they used, with no dissenting views presented. Skeptics were sometimes allowed to go their own way. But often, as in the case of the Oregon and Washington economists who questioned the assumption of rising timber prices, they were told to follow the rules.
Forest planners were given more discretion to prepare some sorts of data, such as the relationships between timber and other resources. But any data or assumptions that threatened to reduce timber sales would be met with sharp criticism and require extensive documentation. Data or assumptions that supported high levels of timber sales would produce a pat on the back. With the presence of promised promotions and, in some cases, cash bonuses for getting the plans done on time, planners soon realized that those payoffs were more likely to come about if they supported timber. No doubt many reasoned—with some justification, as it turned out—that they needed to make some compromises so they could advance far enough in the agency to really make a difference.
The natural selection process eventually worked on the planners. One frustrated FORPLAN modeler in Montana quit the Forest Service and moved to Hawaii to surf. Some got jobs in other agencies. But those who could bend their ideals stayed in the Forest Service and a few went on to become district rangers and forest supervisors. The results would be surprising to everyone.
4. Analysis Paralysis
Far from helping the Forest Service resolve controversies over clearcutting, herbicides, wilderness, and other issues, forest planning ended up devastating the agency. In the 1970s, the Forest Service was still known as a can-do agency, famous for its esprit de corps and popular among members of Congress despite growing criticism that came mainly from environmental groups.
When Congress passed the National Forest Management Act, the chief of the Forest Service confidently predicted that the plans would be written in four years at a cost of about a million dollars a forest. The reality turned out to be far different: in the end, it took some 15 years and more than a billion dollars to write all the plans.
The first delay was in the preparation of rules to govern forest planning. The law specified that the rules should be written within two years of the law’s passage, but the Forest Service took three. Just two years later, the White House changed hands, and the new administration appointed former timber industry executive John Crowell as assistant secretary of agriculture in charge of the Forest Service. Crowell decided to rewrite the rules, and the changes he made forced some forests to start over.
Just months after the new rules were approved, Crowell fired another salvo at the Forest Service. The draft plans that had been passing through his office were unsatisfactory, he warned. “Appropriate changes would be made unless review drafts begin to improve significantly soon.”1 Many within the Forest Service took this as a threat that the administration would replace the chief and regional foresters, who historically had all been promoted from within the agency, with political appointees. In response, the regional forester for Oregon and Washington ordered all his forests—including one that was about to send its final plan to the printer—to start over from scratch.2
Planners were frustrated by a variety of other delays. If the Fish and Wildlife Service listed a species as threatened or endangered, planners would have to revise their FORPLAN model so they could track the effects of the plan on that species. New timber inventories revealed that the data used in some FORPLAN models were hopelessly optimistic. Major forest fires in 1987 burned enough timber in California to force several forests to start over. It became clear that planners couldn’t plan fast enough to keep up with the pace of everyday change. As one planner explained, “There is never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it twice.”
Even when the plans were done, they weren’t done. Environmental groups appealed almost every plan to the chief of the Forest Service, and some of those appeals were successful. The Santa Fe National Forest was ordered to redo its plan with corrected yield tables. Embarrassed by the “did-as-I-was-told” memo of its recreation specialist, the Hoosier National Forest withdrew its plan and didn’t sell any timber sales for years after. The chief or the secretary of agriculture sent plans for the Black Hills, San Juan, George Washington, Ouachita, Texas, and many other national forests back to the planners. Plans for the Rio Grande and other national forests survived their appeals only to be overturned in court.
Eventually, the Forest Service came up with the curious legal argument that plans made no decisions and so there was nothing anyone could challenge in court. The Supreme Court bought this argument in 1998, but by that time the damage was long done. No one could explain why the agency had devoted more than a billion dollars to a planning process that the agency itself said reached no decisions.
Far from taking just four years, some forest plans remained unfinished a dozen years after planning began. Far from costing a mere million dollars a plan, many plans cost tens of millions of dollars. Far from resolving controversies, the plans just increased polarization as environmental and industry leaders used the plans as rallying points for their troops. Delayed by, among other things, the Reagan administration’s new planning rules,