Gao: Forest Service Has Costly ‘Split Personality’ Agency And Congress Need To Determine Its Priority, Audit Concludes

The Forest Service has an identity crisis that is costing taxpayers millions and probably can’t be resolved until Congress and the agency decide whether its priority is logging, recreation or wildlife protection, a congressional audit said Thursday.

“The Forest Service’s decision-making process is clearly broken and in need of repair,” said the report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

“However, any legislation that may be needed to clarify or modify the Congress’ intent and expectations requires that the Forest Service and the Congress reach agreement on the agency’s long-term strategic goals,” the audit said.

The agency’s current split personality is costing taxpayers as much as $100 million a year in the form of inefficient environmental reviews and decisions regarding logging operations and other activities across 192 million acres of national forests, the GAO said.

“This lack of agreement is the result of a more fundamental disagreement, both inside and outside the Forest Service, over which uses the agency is to emphasize under its broad multiple-use and sustained-yield mandate and how best to ensure the long-term sustainability of these uses, the audit said.

The Forest Service has increasingly shifted its emphasis from consumption to conservation as it established management plans for individual national forests over the past 10 years, the audit said.

“The increasing emphasis on sustaining wildlife and fish conflicts with the older emphasis on producing timber and underlies the Forest Service’s inability to achieve the goals and objectives for timber production set forth in many of the first forest plans,” the GAO said.

“While the agency continues to reduce its emphasis on consumption and increase its emphasis on conservation, the Congress has never explicitly accepted this shift in emphasis or acknowledged its effects on the availability of other uses of national forests.”

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee on forests who is critical of the downturn in federal logging, has been urging changes in U.S. environmental laws to improve efficiency.

“The report’s conclusions - while not particularly surprising - are deeply troubling given this era of tight federal budgets and shrinking discretionary spending,” Craig said.

They “provide further testimony that fundamental changes are needed if our public land management agencies are to work in the way they ought to,” he said.

Environmentalists and Clinton administration officials have resisted such changes.

“Without agreement on the Forest Services’ mission priorities, we see distrust and gridlock prevailing in any effort to streamline the agency’s statutory framework,” the GAO said Thursday.

The Forest Service spends more than $250 million a year conducting environmental analyses and preparing environmental documents to support projectlevel decisions such as timber sales, an estimated 20,000 documents annually.

Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck said the agency already is taking steps to streamline the reviews and conduct broad analyses like the Interior Columbia Basin ecosystem project which will be used to update a variety of forest management plans in the Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains.