Political Order and Political Decay (73 page)

The creation of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) under Bernard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot was the premier example of American state building during the Progressive Era. Prior to passage of the 1883 Pendleton Act and the spread of merit-based bureaucracy, American government was a clientelistic system in which public offices were allocated by the political parties on the basis of patronage. The Forest Service, by contrast, was staffed with university-educated agronomists and foresters, chosen on the basis of merit and technical expertise. Its defining struggle, chronicled in chapter 11 above, was the successful effort by Pinchot to secure for the USFS authority over the General Land Office in the face of vehement opposition by Joe Cannon, the legendary Speaker of the House of Representatives. The central issue in this formative stage of American state building was bureaucratic autonomy: the idea that professionals in the USFS and not politicians in Congress should be the ones to make decisions on allocations of public lands, and that they should be in charge of recruiting and promoting their own staff. The U.S. Forest Service for many years afterward remained the shining example of a high-quality American bureaucracy.

SMOKEY THE BEAR; OR, HOW THE FOREST SERVICE LOST ITS AUTONOMY

It may be surprising to learn, then, that the Forest Service is today regarded by many observers as a highly dysfunctional bureaucracy performing an outmoded mission with the wrong tools. Although it is still staffed by professional foresters, many of whom are highly dedicated to the agency's mission, it has lost a great deal of the autonomy it won under Pinchot. It operates under multiple and often contradictory mandates from Congress and the courts that cannot be simultaneously fulfilled, and in the process ends up costing taxpayers a huge amount of money. The service's internal decision-making system is often gridlocked, and the high degree of staff morale and cohesion that Pinchot worked so hard to foster has been lost. The situation is sufficiently bad that entire books have been written arguing that the Forest Service ought to be abolished altogether.
1
No political institution lasts forever, and the current condition of the Forest Service tells us a great deal about the forces that work to undermine high-quality government.

Civil service reform in the late nineteenth century was promoted by academics and activists like Francis Lieber, Woodrow Wilson, and Frank Goodnow, who had a great deal of faith in the ability of modern natural science to solve human problems. Wilson, like his contemporary Max Weber, distinguished between politics and administration. Politics was a domain of final ends subject to democratic contestation, whereas administration was a realm of implementation that could be studied empirically and subjected to scientific analysis. A similar intellectual revolution had been going on in the business world, with the rise of Frederick Winslow Taylor's doctrine of “scientific management,” which used among other things time-and-motion studies to maximize the efficiency of factory operations. Many of the Progressive Era reformers sought to import scientific management into government, arguing that public administration could be turned into a science and protected from the irrationalities of politics. They hoped that the social sciences one day could be made as rigorous as the natural sciences.
2

After the experiences of the twentieth century, this early faith in science, and the belief that administration could be turned into a science, seems naïve and misplaced. This period was one in which natural science created weapons of mass destruction, and bureaucratic management ran death camps. But the context in which these early reformers operated was one where governments were run by political hacks or corrupt municipal bosses, much like many developing countries today. No public university today would want hiring and tenure decisions to be made by the state legislature, nor would anyone want Congress to choose the staff of the Centers for Disease Control. So it was perfectly reasonable to demand that public officials be selected on the basis of education and merit.

The problem with scientific management is that even the most qualified scientists occasionally get things wrong, and sometimes get them wrong in a big way. This was what happened to the Forest Service with regard to what became its central mission, fighting forest fires.

The evolution in the Forest Service's mission began with the Great Idaho Fire of 1910, which burned some three million acres in Idaho and Montana, and led to the death of eighty-five people. The political outcry over the damage caused by this conflagration led the USFS to increasingly focus on wildfire suppression. William Greeley, a Forest Service chief, asserted that “fire fighting is a matter of scientific management”—that is, readily accommodated under its existing mandate.
3
By the 1980s, this mission had ballooned in size in what one observer called a “war on fire.” The Forest Service, whose permanent staff had grown to around thirty thousand, employed tens of thousands of firefighters in peak fire years, owned a large fleet of planes and helicopters, and spent as much as $1 billion a year on the firefighting mission.
4

The problem with fighting wildfires is that the early proponents of “scientific forestry” didn't properly understand the role of fires in woodland ecology. Forest fires are a natural occurrence and play an important function in maintaining the health of western forests. Shade-intolerant trees like giant ponderosas, lodgepole pines, and sequoias require periodic fires to clear areas in which new trees can regenerate; the forests were invaded by species like Douglas firs once fires were suppressed. (Lodgepole pines in fact require fires to propagate their seeds.) Over the years, these forests developed high tree densities and huge buildups of dry understory, such that fires that did occur became much larger and more destructive. Instead of destroying the small invasive species, these fires now burned the larger old-growth trees. The public began to take notice after the huge Yellowstone fire in 1988, which ended up burning nearly eight hundred thousand acres and took several months to control. Ecologists began criticizing the very objective of fire prevention, which led the Forest Service to reverse course by the mid-1990s and implement a “let burn” policy.

Years of misguided policies could not simply be reversed, however, since the western forests had become gigantic tinderboxes. Moreover, as a result of population growth in the West, more people were living in areas close to forests and therefore vulnerable to wildfires. By one estimate, the wildland-urban interface expanded more than 52 percent from 1970 to 2000 and would continue to expand well into the future. Like people choosing to live on floodplains and on barrier islands, these individuals were exposing themselves to undue risks that were mitigated by government-subsidized insurance. Through their elected representatives, they lobbied hard to make sure the Forest Service and the other federal agencies responsible for forest management were given the resources to continue fighting fires that could threaten their property. Ultimately, it proved very difficult to do any kind of rational cost-benefit analysis; the government could easily spend $1 million to protect a $100,000 home because it was politically impossible to justify a decision not to act.
5

In the meantime, the original mission of the Forest Service around which Pinchot had created a high-quality agency had eroded. That mission, it will be recalled, was neither fire suppression nor conservation per se but rather the sustainable exploitation of forest resources—in other words, timber harvesting. This original mandate was greatly diminished in scope: in the last decade of the twentieth century, timber harvests in national forests plunged from twelve to four billion board-feet per year.
6
The reason for this had partly to do with the economics of timber, but it more importantly reflected a change in national values that had taken place over the previous century. With the rise of environmental consciousness, natural forests were increasingly seen not as resources to be exploited for economic purposes but as preserves to be protected for their own sake. This shift was of a piece with many other changes in social attitudes taking place at the time. Dams and other big hydroelectric projects, earlier seen as heroic efforts to master nature, were later understood to entail huge unintended environmental consequences. In North America, dams had virtually ceased being built by the 1970s. The change in the Forest Service's mission was written into law when President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Wilderness Act, which enjoined the Forest Service along with the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service to review and protect the more than nine million acres of land under their control.
7

Even in its original core mission of sustainably harvesting timber, a number of critics noted that the Forest Service was not doing a good job. Timber was being marketed at well below the cost of operations, meaning that the government was failing to derive proper benefit from what should have been a productive asset. The reasons for this were multiple: timber pricing was inefficient, and many of the agency's fixed costs were not taken into account in setting prices. Like all government agencies, the Forest Service could not retain earnings and therefore had no incentive to contain costs. Quite the contrary, it had an incentive to increase its own budget and staffing year to year regardless of the revenues this would generate.
8

Why did the performance of the Forest Service deteriorate over the decades? The story is suggestive in pointing to the broader forces underlying the phenomenon of political decay.

Gifford Pinchot's original USFS was regarded as the gold standard of American bureaucracies because he won a high degree of autonomy for an organization of well-trained professionals dedicated to a central mission, the sustainable exploitation of American forests. The old Forest Bureau, and the Department of Agriculture of which it was a branch, had been part of the clientelistic party-based nineteenth-century political system, whose main purpose was to deliver political benefits to members of Congress. The Forest Service's ability to appoint and promote its own staff, and its freedom from congressional interference in individual transactions, was critical to its mission.

The problem began when the Forest Service's clear, single mission was replaced by multiple and potentially conflicting mandates. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the firefighting mission began to supersede the timber exploitation focus both in budgetary and personnel terms. But then, firefighting became controversial and was itself supplanted by a preservationist/environmentalist function. None of the old missions were discarded, however, and each one tended to link up to different external interest groups that supported different factions within the Forest Service: consumers of timber, environmentalists, homeowners, western developers, young people seeking temporary jobs as firefighters. Congress, which had been excluded from the micromanagement of land sales back in 1905, reinserted itself. This came about not through old-style corruption typified by the Ballinger affair in 1908 that led to Pinchot's firing by President Taft; rather, it worked through the issuing of legislative mandates that forced the Forest Service to pursue differing and often contradictory goals. For example, the protection of the properties of the increasing number of homeowners living at the wildland-urban interface meant that the “let burn” policy desired by environmentalists could not be implemented in any straightforward way. What was good for the long-term health of forests was not good for individual homeowners, and each of the parties to this process used their access to Congress and the courts to try to force the agency to protect their favored interests.

The small, cohesive agency created by Pinchot and celebrated by Herbert Kaufman in
The Forest Ranger
slowly evolved into a large, balkanized one. It became subject to many of the maladies affecting government agencies more generally: bureaucrats came to be more interested in protecting their budgets and jobs than in the efficient performance of their mandates. And they clung to old mandates even when both science and the society around them were changing. Like Pinchot, many reached out to interest groups to protect their autonomy, but without a single, coherent mandate, they ultimately could not avoid recolonization by their clients.

ACROSS THE BOARD

It would be one thing if the U.S. Forest Service were an isolated case of political decay. Unfortunately, there is substantial evidence from public administration specialists that the overall quality of the American government has been deteriorating steadily for more than a generation. In the words of Paul Light, “The federal government has become a destination of last resort for [young people wanting to make] a difference”; according to Patricia Ingraham and David Rosenbloom, the federal service has been in the process of “decomposing” since the 1970s.
9
This conclusion is supported by the work of the two Volcker Commissions on public service in 1989 and 2003.
10

Many Americans have the impression that the size of the U.S. government has been growing relentlessly over the decades. This is only partly true: the mandates placed on the government to do various things, from reducing child poverty to fighting terrorism, have indeed expanded dramatically. However, the actual size of the federal workforce has been capped at approximately 2.25 million since the end of World War II, and subject to repeated bouts of downsizing; in 2005 it numbered about 1.8 million. What has expanded are, first, a series of public authorities that perform public functions while remaining separate from government, and an army of unaccountable contractors who do everything from providing cafeteria services to protecting diplomats to managing the computer systems for the National Security Agency.
11