I'm a camp host for a USFS campground. It takes 3+ seasonal employees to clean the bathrooms, remove the trash, monitor the chlorine content of the drinking water and repair things. Together they maintain a dozen or so campgrounds.
As a camp host I occasionally do these tasks when these employees are absent as well as my usual duties. For this I theoretically receive a small stipend. I say theoretically because the payroll operation is so understaffed it is five months behind in paying me.
Without the seasonal staff, I don't see any way the USFS can keep the campgrounds open as well as do many other functions.
I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
> I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
Can you provide a citation for where you’re getting this data indicating that the USFS budget has been declining over time?
Based on the data I found, the USFS budget has increased steadily from 2011-2024 [0]. The 2024 budget was $9.3b [1] versus $5.1b in 2011 [0]. The 2025 budget was cut from 2024, but still higher than the 2020 budget.
The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades
> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs.
Doesn’t this mainly go to wildfire suppression, and in fact as wildfires have multiplied over that decade, hasn’t the service regularly raided its normal accounts in order to cover its bills for fire prevention and control?
It's hard to imagine how these services are being cut when we're running a $1.8 trillion deficit this year. Clearly the priorities of our current FedGov admin are askew.
Unlikely. It's easy to find out where federal spending goes as it is all public. The biggest outlays are for health care, education, and social security and other pensions. I don't hear much call for less spending in any of those areas from people who actually want to be elected.
I say convert it all to dispersed camping. Leave the zoos, I mean national parks, to the common overcrowding. Let us have our forests back. It’s obvious that their policies have led to many of it burning down in mega fires that get so hot it kills every living thing in its path.
While you're right, undeniably there are many parks where fencing and parking lots have desertified or made unsightly much of what is in and around the "preserved" areas. Very sad.
USFS campgrounds are setup (generally) in places to reduce the damage caused by the public, because given enough people, the ‘public’ becomes abusive and we can’t have nice things. And in many areas, there will always more enough people that it will cross that threshold, regardless of what anyone calls the place.
USFS campgrounds in truly remote areas excepted, but any available camping near a highway is going to be a public safety hazard quickly without someone responsible for keeping it clean and somewhat organized/policed.
USFS ‘managed’ campgrounds generally were setup where there was already a problem area.
So are you proposing Rangers sit there and drive anyone away trying to do what they want to do? Or we turn these spots into National parks? Because just saying ‘dispersed camping’ doesn’t work either without someone sitting there enforcing it.
This pattern has been played out time and time again. The next steps will be:
"Camp bathrooms are always so dirty, and there's never anyone to staff to help!"
"How can the bureaucracy fail so badly, I don't know why we even pay for the USFS if this is the best they can muster"
"We should privatize this. Maybe we could even sell naming rights. Colgate campgrounds, anyone?"
"(Private companies continue to run shitty camp, citing 'hey, at least we're better than the USFS')"
"Remember how the USFS failed so badly? You can't trust the government to do anything!"
It's been the playbook of every government agency that has not been funded properly for about a generation now (thanks, Reagan). Slowly defund a service so the quality degrades, then complain about the quality and say you couldn't possibly fund the service if the quality is that low.
It drives me up the wall how bleeding obvious this is, time and time again, and yet, here we are, doing it again to the USFS, one of the most important agencies we have in (for instance) ensuring people have access to nature, preventing wildfires, managing our timber stocks, and sequestering carbon.
But this is the government failing! What's more, privatizing it to buddies with uncompetitive corrupt bidding processes and terrible contracts would also be government failure.
For everything that isn't social security, medicare, or the military, continued federal support requires explicitly convincing enough members of Congress that it is important so that they will campaign in their committees for even basic inflation-level funding increases to be included in the next budget. National Park Service has a backlog of billions of dollars in maintenance it knows it needs to do across the US, but Congress won't give them the money to do it. They'll toss $18 billion to Israel though even while Israeli politicians and the Israeli public and Israeli lobbying groups in the US criticizes the US for not being generous or supportive enough and gets involved in domestic US politics. We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to.
> We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to
You’re exemplifying the problem. NPS and foreign aid funding aren’t competing with each other. They’re both rounding errors in the grand scheme. But everyone has their hobby horse that they have or must cut so we get some oscillation.
Non-defense US federal spending dwarfs defense spending, for whatever it's worth. The US is essentially a benefits management firm with a standing army.
Social Security is not an expense of the government. Well, for the most part. It’s a pension plan that people pay into. Similarly for Medicare. People pay into it before retirement. Then at a certain age they get this insurance benefit. Private insurers will not insure the elderly. If anything you should characterize this as a private insurance industry subsidy. It allows insurers to offload their riskiest clients to another entity.
Your characterization is badly wrong.
EDIT: Until recently Social Security took in more money than it paid out. It’s run by the government so its expenditures are counted as a budget item. But it is a sound pension system whose defects can be easily fixed if a certain party would actually govern. It is not the largest expense by the government. It’s just that it is a government run pension system. It’s not an entitlement either.
This is incorrect per the US Supreme Court e.g. Flemming v Nestor in 1960. Social Security contributions are purely an income tax like any other, it is explicitly neither a pension nor insurance plan. Contributions create no obligation for the government to give you anything in return, same as the other income taxes you pay. The government largely treats it as tax revenue.
It is intentionally (mis)represented as a pension plan where contributions are connected to benefits but that fiction is solely to maintain popular political support, they can disqualify citizens from eligibility at any time regardless of contributions and, on occasion, have.
The main issue with Social Security is that most people in prior generations took far more out than they contributed, in part because it wasn’t really a requirement since it wasn’t actually a pension.
If the Supreme's deem it so then it must be. Are there any decisions they've gotten wrong?
Your benefit is based on what you pay in. It pays out less than what it takes in. If it were privatized you and the Supremes would call it a pension. It acts like a pension, quacks like a pension and is a pension.
Notably, if the gov’t starts making pensioners subsist on cat food because they refuse to honor their obligations, hopefully a whole lot of senators will be out of jobs ASAP.
SS is explicitly sold as a pension. If it stops acting like one, there will be consequences - even if it means rewriting laws.
If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could. If it did this, keeping in place Social Security “taxes” that would then go to the new corporation, we would not consider Social Security a budget expense. Being government owned or private doesn’t matter in terms of how the expenditures should be considered. This is why Social Security and Medicare are not part of the normal budget negotiations at budget time. These are obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them.
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
> obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them
Everyone pays taxes. Social Security and Medicare obligations are treated differently because of politics. Otherwise, they’re like any other expense: the Congress can amend them at will. (As is currently expected, e.g. with Social Security benefits beginning to be curtailed from 2035.)
I agree on Medicare. But it's plausible that the Supreme Court could find government meddling on Social Security unconstitutional, because similar decisions have already been made in other countries.
In Finland, the mandatory pension system is similar to Social Security, except that it aims to replace ~60% of earned income without any limits. Pensions based on past contributions have been established as constitutionally protected private property. If the system seems to be out of balance, the basic tools are raising the contribution rates without increasing the benefits and increasing the retirement age for younger generations. Any changes that would substantially lower the pensions that have already been earned would have to go through the same process as constitutional amendments. (There is also a third tool: increasing the tax rates for all retirement income, regardless of the source. But that is understandably unpopular.)
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
I'm not a lawyer so I'll rephrase. In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is.
Congress can amend them at will.
All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years.
> In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is
If the U.S. then explicitly guaranteed that corporation's liabilities, sure.
> All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years
No. Many state legislatures, for instance, are constitutionally prohibited from fucking with certain obligations, commonly pensions.
Can was kicked too far, it is not easy to fix. It's easy to make the mathematical problem go away by reducing benefits AND raising taxes. Nonstarter. We will need a tragedy to illicit change.
Social Security is not a pension plan, it's pay-as-you-go and barring massive tax increases and/or benefit cuts, its collapse is more-or-less inevitable in the next couple decades because of locked-in demographic changes.
I've been hearing that since the eighties. Congress can change contribution rates and/or benefit rates at any time to keep it solvent, just like they have in the past.
The Social Security Retirement benefit is a monthly check that replaces part of your income when you reduce your hours or stop working altogether.
Most people would refer to this as a “pension”. Call it whatever you want to. The fact is that its issues are easily fixable and your benefit is based on how much you put into it.
This is not a very useful semantic argument. Pension programs routinely pay out to workers more than what was paid in; that's practically the definition of a defined-benefit pension plan. Either way: it's money the government pays out.
That 13% is still more than the next 9 highest military budgets in the world combined. We're not financing our military, we're lining the pockets of the military industrial complex, on the taxpayer's dime.
Many/most countries have national tax and not (any or as much) state taxes. To compare across nations you’d need to divide the expenditure by the national sum of the taxes of the various government levels.
The military industrial complex is a socialist jobs program, both for those directly on the DOD's payroll and for the employees of the firms that contract with the government under the auspices of the military.
Seems kinda like we're talking about my $1,300/mo budget for candles and you're pointing out "yeah, but your mortgage is $5,000/mo, for whatever it's worth; you're basically just a homeowner with a candle budget".
Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment. Defense spending is largely discretionary.
Social security is not a debt repayment and the point I'm making would stand if you took it out of the budget, even though you shouldn't. Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
> Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment.
How is it not practically a debt repayment?
The common understanding is "you pay money in, you get money back when you retire". Do you think you could cut it without widespread backlash? Do you think you could cancel it without borderline revolt?
"It's not a debt. It's just that if you don't pay me I'll kill you."
The US Supreme Court asserted in 1960 that no one is entitled to Social Security. There is no connection between contributions and future benefits. Many people are under the misapprehension that this is not the case.
Without a doubt it would not be popular if the government eliminated some or all of Social Security. But it would be strictly legal and Constitutional, popular backlash notwithstanding. This is an important distinction. There are no Constitutional protections that ensure Social Security benefits. Ignorance of this fact doesn’t change its reality.
The constitutional protection is that if Congress tried to do that, they would be replaced in the next election. As stupid as they sometimes appear to be, they are not that stupid.
You pay a tax. You receive a benefit. The benefit's connection to your tax payment is nominal at best. It's one of many direct benefits the government awards, none of which are debts.
I dont know how we can know this. My understanding is that the pentagon has an unknown total budget. Once you wrap up all the CIA, NSA type stuff too I'm not sure how we can know this?
The DoD has a "black budget", but that's money you don't get a breakdown of, not money you don't know about: it's voted in by Congress as a blind total. Total spending is profoundly tilted towards non-defense spending (even more so if you include state and local government spending, but that's not germane to the Forest Service) --- the amount of "secret" money going to defense, if it existed, would have to be economy-breaking to alter the balance.
Not really. When counting not just DoD spending but DoE nuclear weapons spending, NASA (now Space Force) and satellite spending, VA and veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending and so forth, military spending takes up a large chunk of the pie. It is only small if defined very, very narrowly (which is what they, and you, do).
They call it mandatory spending but this is a misnomer. When you pay into a pension system and pre-pay for insurance it’s expected that you receive the benefits you paid for. That it is government run is irrelevant to how it should be viewed. Social Security is not an expense of the government. It’s a government run pension system.
This is not at all how the accounting for Social Security, Medicare, and other mandatory spending programs work. Generally, Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in (invariably they do with Medicare). And, obviously, everyone receiving Medicaid and SSDI do. I don't think this technical point about Social Security is going to salvage the argument that the US pays more in defense than anything else.
Apparently you don't understand how pensions work. Take a 401(k). Under normal circumstances what you take out of the 401(k) far exceeds what you put into it. This is what happens with investments generally speaking.
Saying, "Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in..." indicates you don't know what you are talking about. And, believe it or not, Social Security does invest money.
And yes, it does salvage the argument. Defense spending (all of it not just DOD) is the largest expense of the government. This is expected when you are the hegemon.
Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
It's simply an enormous, vast economy, and 13% of a vast economy is a huge number, large enough to outspend the next several countries combined. That's all.
Regardless, social security is funded totally separately from the rest of the budget, with a dedicated tax, and does not contribute to the deficit. It’s typically excluded from budget discussions, for that reason.
You could change the law to axe social security, keep its highly-regressive tax, and instead use that to pay for other stuff—but lots of things are possible with a change in the law, and that’s not possible now without such a change. That’s not something that can happen as an ordinary part of the budgeting process.
I'm not saying I like everything about federal spending (or even defense spending), just that the argument that we spend most of our money on defense (or even a plurality of it) is false.
For this reason it’s pretty unusual to see an analysis of the US budget aimed at policy nerds that includes Social Security. Almost all serious discussion about it excludes that.
You tend to only see it included when the full total of money disbursed by the government from any pot and for any purpose is expressly relevant (it’s usually not) or in writing that is not aimed at policy nerds, but at everyday voters (to convince them whatever batshit crazy spending we’re doing in the author’s preferred non-social-spending item isn’t bad after all, usually)
Agreed, although seeing as the economic plans laid out by both current presidential candidates would result in an increase in deficit the political will to do so does not seem to be there. In reality it feels like the spending is just being shifted elsewhere.
The US normally gives Israel around $3 billion dollars a year to buy our weapons -- they are in fact required to spend it on buying weapons from US defense industry. It's kind of an, um, gift certificate.
This year they gave Israel $18 billion, so much more than usual.
In one sense, all of this is actually a jobs program for the US defense industry, since all that money is required to turn around as weapons purchases from US companies.
Even $18 billion is less than 1% of the US non-military budget, this isn't the reason we "can't afford" the USFS, or the reason to stop giving weapons to Israel -- the US certainly can afford both. (The reason to stop supplying Israel is that those weapons are actually destabilizing the region and encouraging violence and gross human rights violations).
But, no, Israel "buys" US weapons with US money, they are indeed a gift.
I think two different accounting methods are being conflated here which leads to the huge $3B vs $18B difference. Congress periodically authorizes spending for military aid to Israel and other countries. Later, the executive branch actually disburses that aid. In recent years, the US has on average given Israel $3B. This year, congress authorized an additional $18B to be disbursed through 2026 - which is what recent news stories about US giving Israel $18B are referring to, as far as I know. You would end up double-counting every dollar, if you did the math that way on an ongoing basis.
But if you know of a clean source of data on the actual amount of aid provided each year, that would be useful. I’d guess the number this year would be a lot more than $3B given the physical reality of tons of expensive offensive and defense missiles fired.
They literally use tanks to keep avalanches off roads. Here is a video near Seattle of the Dept of Transportation using a couple M-60 Sherman tanks to launch artillery into the snowpack in an effort to control avalanches along the Highway 2 corridor.
Nitpick: the M-60 is a Patton tank, not a Sherman. The M-4 Sherman was the primary medium tank used by the US during WW2. The M-60 is much more modern, used by the US military until 1997, and several countries still use them today. I only bring that up because an M-60 tank still running today is perfectly normal, while a Sherman that’s still running would be much more unusual!
Interesting fact, but is it really necessary to go to those lengths? Surely something like a handgun or detonated explosive would be cheaper and just as effective (though less fun). I don't think this use case needs the vehicle to be armored.
A pistol would be hilariously inadequate. As for "detonating explosives", what do you think they are doing? They are shooting high-explosive artillery rounds from a tank that detonate on impact.
As for "why artillery", how do you plan on getting explosives into the snowpack, especially under conditions of severe avalanche risk? Those areas of the mountains are inaccessible by vehicle even in the summertime. A tank can drive on a road and deliver the explosives where needed. They often target 20+ separate snowfields so being able to do it in a timely and efficient manner matters.
While the armor doesn't contribute much, it happens to be what the artillery gun is attached to. It would cost far more to rig some special-purpose vehicle. Sherman tanks are free, the government has loads of them lying around waiting to be scrapped, you just pay for fuel and upkeep.
Handguns don't have the range or power. Explosives are used, but you have to get them up there, which means either schleping up the mountain or using a helicopter, which is wildly more expensive.
Most of these crews were already short handed and in districts relying extensively on labor from youth conservation corps and private contractors. The private trail building sector has exploded in the last decade or so. More often than not the USFS (and other agencies with some variability) trail crews will work on high profile projects or simply as liaisons/project managers for the private outfits. Even though the work is often just scratching at dirt, building /maintaining trails and the structures they rely on is technical trades work and needs a local culture to maintain standards. Funding solutions should look towards the outdoor recreation industry and cutting fat in bloated non-profit admin. They benefit from selling the lifestyle and all its accessories while contributing relatively little to resource maintenance.
There are volunteer groups that do a large percentage of the trail maintenance in some areas. There is the Pacific Crest Trail Association with their local chapters. In Washington state, there is the Washington Trails association. In Oregon, there is Trailkeepers of Oregon, who I volunteer with almost every weekend. There are also numerous local groups across the western US.
This article from a backpacking website is better written and reported than most major newspaper stories I read. Good quotes, and even edited. Probably fact checked too! Kudos.
What portion of the national budget that is devoted to spaceflight would it take to shower the USFS in riches? I'd much rather see it going to the latter.
Spaceflight is not what you want to be picking as a point of comparison if you want to talk about funding government agencies.
> The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official. That's more than NASA's budget.
What we pay for what we get is insane though. Imagine what SpaceX (or other enterprising group of engineers) could do with a guaranteed $20B of annual funding.
How exactly is it useful? Seems to be only rather fringe science experiments going on (neat, of course!) and vague pre-work for going multiplanetary, which IMO is not a super compelling idea upon inspection.
Honest curiosity here, I don't know what a lot of the purpose is!
This is exactly my question. I wish I could better justify the value of spaceflight, but I’m wholly unconvinced. The arguments for investing in it always seem like vague references to the future with no specific value delivered today.
I understand historically that it has produced incredibly valuable "exhaust", but is that really the strategy? Is that the purpose? Do we have a reason to believe we will always (and are today receiving) positive ROI, even aside from reaching any valuable "destination", so to speak?
There’s a lot of good that shows up all across the economy from satellites.
For example, how important is weather prediction to you? Genuinely, I’m not sure how much it is to me, but the value isn’t nothing.
GPS is another thing like that: it’s only a little bit useful to me, but it enables a lot of economic activity (like farm automation). And the fact that getting lost went from a regular thing that happens to rarely is probably at least somewhat valuable.
Remote telecom is another thing. For sure, there are diminishing returns, but going from no access to some access for very remote places (think ships at sea, polar research stations, oil rigs, very rural communities) is probably valuable. How many ships haven’t sunk because they got a satellite weather update?
You’re absolutely right, it’s not a strategy to invest randomly. And it’s quite possible that we’re over-investing in space. But there are direct returns in addition to the “exhaust”.
You think we wouldn't have bothered with GPS and imaging if we weren't also firing humans up there?
There may be some cross talk in this thread where some people are talking about space programs in general and other people are talking about sending people to space.
Technically it was a forecast of your reason for the purposes of gambling since your position was irrational. You claim to have a different irrational reason for hating on space spending so out with it.
Military and healthcare are the astronomical expenses that dwarf both space and the usfs.
Both are plagued with inefficiencies but the military is largely the most useless expense because we aren't at any huge risk that justifies this level of spending.
An opinion piece from the head of the Atlantic Council, whose job is basically to convince Americans they need to have lots of defense spending, is hardly something I’d take at face value. It’s more revealing of where that particular set of (heavily foreign-funded) lobbyists are trying to steer us, than anything else.
Why on earth would you try and take money away from spaceflight rather than the host of other ridiculous things we fund. How about what percentage of oil subsidies?
For those who are disappointed in this, don't blame Ukraine or defense spending, blame Republicans. The Forest Service budget is set by the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies subcommittee which is majority Republican. Their press release on the FY25 bill is here:
If you don't believe they're partisan, read through the "key takeaways" section. They are responsible for this budget shortfall. Their games of government shutdown chicken are also the reason the budget hasn't even been finalized yet.
> The only exception to the hiring freeze are the roughly 11,300 firefighters hired by the agency every year.
You probably wouldn't need first responders if you could hire & not fire all the people you have proactively managing your lands. (So many face-palms.)
Can anyone explain the mission of USFS? Why does the US maintain a bunch of wilderness when it’s buried in debt. Why not use federal assets to generate income instead of burdening taxpayers with taxes & debt payments?
People who don't hike or use nature recreationally tend to view it as completely useless.
They do have a bit of a point. The asset isn't really being maintained. It's being maintained for human use as recreation. Overall you don't need to really maintain wilderness to preserve it. Overall you just leave it untouched.
You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
>You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
That would work until a mining company wanted to extract oxygen from Yellowstone Quartz and met with zero public opposition to making use of "empty land."
This is even more short term thinking and a bit of ignorance. Where do you think all of the ‘stuff’ around you came from? Everything starts as raw materials, most of them organic.
And besides how selfish would it be to preserve nothing for the future generations.
It's a political problem. If people can't actually use the wilderness, you will lose public support for keeping the wilderness. It will all end up being sold to the highest bidder and destroyed.
Why does it need to be profitable to exist? Why does it need to generate income? Why can’t we be fine with subsidizing and paying for wilderness and public transportation? Because some well connected business man could charge us money for it and pocket the difference and still barely maintain it and sell it off to be developed into concrete malls?
Many parts of the US government have an egalitarian mission. Beyond USFS, there's the parks, flood insurance, education programs, grant making organizations (as people on this forum are very very aware of), land management and more.
You can object to the overall non-profit egalitarian mission (and I do in many cases) but it's not unique to the forest service.
I do wonder why the USFS hasn't been rolled into the Dept. of the Interior alongside e.g. the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. Putting it under the Dept. of Agriculture (as it is now) seems like it'd lead to some perverse incentives, and the overlap in mission and jurisdiction between the USFS and the BLM and NPS seems like it'd produce administrative/managerial redundancies (the cost of which would be better spent on the very jobs being cut right now).
There are really really weird organizational divisions. You have the DEA and the FDA very far apart despite one having the scientific expertise and the other having enforcement expertise. You have police in every branch of the government, and the DOJ for good measure. You have food stamps in the ag department as well.
For basically all future years, an even greater proportion (more than two thirds) of federal government spending will be for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (old and sick and poorer people).
You're confusing the budget (maintenance spending) with the value of the real estate assets. That is, all of the land, e.g. 95% of Nevada, about 70% of the entire western USA
If that land was generating income, we could pay off the entire $35+T debt in no time.
All National Forests have a forestry plan that involves selling a certain amount of timber cut from the forest every year.
However, forest recreation (which obviously requires the forests to still have trees) also generates a lot of money — both for the local economy around the forest and via things like permits for the government itself.
Basically the goal is to maintain the forests as long term assets, not sell them off in one go.
I see a lot of things that the Forest Service does listed but I don’t see the purpose of why they do them.
For example, this quote is not a mission, “The U.S. Forest Service is a federal agency that manages 193 million acres of land, an area about the size of Texas.”
It might be part of what they do to accomplish their mission, but it’s not a mission.
Could you quote the part of the article that makes their mission clear?
The mission of the USFS is not to "maintain a bunch of wilderness". Its mission, and the reason is is under the Dept. of Agriculture, is to provide forest products in perpetuity to Americans.
> “I moved across the country to work here, for a seasonal job,” she says. “We have people who have worked here for 10 years as seasonals, and made a career out of these positions. They trusted that the jobs wouldn’t go away.”
I suspect the other part of these careers involve seasonal work that covers a different part of the year, such as working at ski resorts.
Often the US hires young Americans to do these jobs. It is huge for helping young people with job training and class mobility. Without these jobs it will be that much harder to find a job with no experience in the outdoor industry.
Although I downvoted you, I admit having a grudging admiration for people like you who are openly and smugly conceited. Honestly, that's much better than those who hide their real sentiment in a cloak of high-emotional IQ yet sociopathic virtue signaling obfuscation.
> Even with these sobering financial details, it’s clear that the agency’s decision to balance the books by cutting seasonal jobs came as a shock to many employees.
Time for this to stop being a shock. The country needs some harsh belt tightening and stories like these will become commonplace if real reform is practiced.
I don't really know what reform you're expecting. It doesn't really make sense that we could afford to hire people to maintain a trail system in the '60s and '70s, and now, with 50+ additional years of economic growth and ostensibly increased productivity, we can't. I suspect it has less to do with needed belt tightening, so much as mandated administrative bloat plus endless tax cuts.
I wonder why a truthful statement like that is being downvoted?
I could eat steak at a lavish restaurant every night but I realize that if I did so my credit card balance would eventually come to the point I would be using the total of my income to pay the interest. Instead I do the sustainable option and buy groceries and cook at home.
Continuing deficit spending at the federal level will eventually bankrupt our government and make this a worse world to live in.
Raise taxes back to what they were back in the 1950s when the top marginal rate was over 90%.
Close off the methods rich people use to legally lower their true tax rate. Buffet famously pointed out his tax rate was lower than his secretary's. Bezos back in 2011 when he was worth $18 billion got a $4,000 tax credit because he reported investment losses.
Why are we paying for Bezos' steak?
Fund the IRS to go after rich people, instead of targeting poor people simply because it's cheaper and easier than going after wealthy ones. ("we estimate that each dollar spent on auditing an individual in the 70–80th percentiles produces a return of $9.06. Each dollar spent auditing an individual in the 90–99th percentiles produces a return of $12.48.", https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31376/w313...)
Create a global wealth tax.
Stop paying for all this ridiculously expensive road transportation system and housing sprawl on the backs of our children's future.
And yes, stop eating steak. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
This would be like eating steak at a lavish restaurant every night (defense spending), and someone else (USFS) eats a spoonful of beans, and then you saying 'we need some belt-tightening'.
We don't, you do. The USFS is already working with a tightened belt.
It's not even that. It's more like eating at a lavish restaurant every night, and paying with pieces of paper that you just printed your picture on. Eventually that game might indeed end, but it has much more to do with other factors than basic arithmetic.
Talk about deficit spending is basically nonsense from the vein of fake austerity politics of the past several decades, whose real purpose was to starve most government functionality while distracting from the many trillions of dollars given out as artificially low interest loans, basically shameless handouts to the financial industry and asset holders (see: the everything bubble).
I'm a camp host for a USFS campground. It takes 3+ seasonal employees to clean the bathrooms, remove the trash, monitor the chlorine content of the drinking water and repair things. Together they maintain a dozen or so campgrounds.
As a camp host I occasionally do these tasks when these employees are absent as well as my usual duties. For this I theoretically receive a small stipend. I say theoretically because the payroll operation is so understaffed it is five months behind in paying me.
Without the seasonal staff, I don't see any way the USFS can keep the campgrounds open as well as do many other functions.
I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
> I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
Can you provide a citation for where you’re getting this data indicating that the USFS budget has been declining over time?
Based on the data I found, the USFS budget has increased steadily from 2011-2024 [0]. The 2024 budget was $9.3b [1] versus $5.1b in 2011 [0]. The 2025 budget was cut from 2024, but still higher than the 2020 budget.
[0]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46557
[1]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12396
The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades
> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs.
> The 2024 budget was $9.3b [1] versus $5.1b in 2011 [0]
For context: Just keeping up with inflation puts the 2011 budget at $7.1b in 2024.
They also claim to have "13 billion dollars contributed to the U.S. economy by visitor spending each year"[2].
Investing $9b into $13b of revenue sounds like a great use of government funds to me.
[2] https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/newsroom/by-the-numbers
Doesn’t this mainly go to wildfire suppression, and in fact as wildfires have multiplied over that decade, hasn’t the service regularly raided its normal accounts in order to cover its bills for fire prevention and control?
Notably, there has never been a sustainable level of fire fighting and forest management funding in the USFS as far as I know.
We just didn’t have to care, but now it is starting to catch up with is.
While that’s a large change, it’s worth keeping in mind more than half the difference is just inflation. $5.1b in 2011 is $7.3b in ‘24
It's hard to imagine how these services are being cut when we're running a $1.8 trillion deficit this year. Clearly the priorities of our current FedGov admin are askew.
One hopes things will improve after November 5...
Unlikely. It's easy to find out where federal spending goes as it is all public. The biggest outlays are for health care, education, and social security and other pensions. I don't hear much call for less spending in any of those areas from people who actually want to be elected.
Don't worry, soon we will outsource these services to private companies for 5x the price, but then the budget will get approved due to lobbying!
Then we will ask why we even have the government owning parks in the first place, and privatize the national parks!
You will pay $500 to park and you will like it!
I say convert it all to dispersed camping. Leave the zoos, I mean national parks, to the common overcrowding. Let us have our forests back. It’s obvious that their policies have led to many of it burning down in mega fires that get so hot it kills every living thing in its path.
Ah, yes, make it harder for people to enjoy and admire nature. Then people will lobby to raze it down as “no one uses it anyway.”
While you're right, undeniably there are many parks where fencing and parking lots have desertified or made unsightly much of what is in and around the "preserved" areas. Very sad.
USFS campgrounds are setup (generally) in places to reduce the damage caused by the public, because given enough people, the ‘public’ becomes abusive and we can’t have nice things. And in many areas, there will always more enough people that it will cross that threshold, regardless of what anyone calls the place.
USFS campgrounds in truly remote areas excepted, but any available camping near a highway is going to be a public safety hazard quickly without someone responsible for keeping it clean and somewhat organized/policed.
USFS ‘managed’ campgrounds generally were setup where there was already a problem area.
So are you proposing Rangers sit there and drive anyone away trying to do what they want to do? Or we turn these spots into National parks? Because just saying ‘dispersed camping’ doesn’t work either without someone sitting there enforcing it.
This pattern has been played out time and time again. The next steps will be:
"Camp bathrooms are always so dirty, and there's never anyone to staff to help!"
"How can the bureaucracy fail so badly, I don't know why we even pay for the USFS if this is the best they can muster"
"We should privatize this. Maybe we could even sell naming rights. Colgate campgrounds, anyone?"
"(Private companies continue to run shitty camp, citing 'hey, at least we're better than the USFS')"
"Remember how the USFS failed so badly? You can't trust the government to do anything!"
It's been the playbook of every government agency that has not been funded properly for about a generation now (thanks, Reagan). Slowly defund a service so the quality degrades, then complain about the quality and say you couldn't possibly fund the service if the quality is that low.
It drives me up the wall how bleeding obvious this is, time and time again, and yet, here we are, doing it again to the USFS, one of the most important agencies we have in (for instance) ensuring people have access to nature, preventing wildfires, managing our timber stocks, and sequestering carbon.
But this is the government failing! What's more, privatizing it to buddies with uncompetitive corrupt bidding processes and terrible contracts would also be government failure.
This is what happens when your deficit is increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days.
This is not OK. We pay more than enough to fund the Forest Service.
And I live the Forest Service. They make my life better and I value that very highly.
I do not want private companies polluting our rec lands like they have done damn near everywhere else.
One of the few things I actually want the government doing. We have weapons to give to foreign countries though.
We can spend money on both, but we have one party making up issues to be outraged about.
There is more than two things to spend money on.
Like both.
It's not clear which party you think is doing this because both of them do it so frequently.
Have to say, there’s no more apt moment to point that this is missing the forest for trees.
This is a drop in the bucket compared to military spending; apparently no one cares?
For everything that isn't social security, medicare, or the military, continued federal support requires explicitly convincing enough members of Congress that it is important so that they will campaign in their committees for even basic inflation-level funding increases to be included in the next budget. National Park Service has a backlog of billions of dollars in maintenance it knows it needs to do across the US, but Congress won't give them the money to do it. They'll toss $18 billion to Israel though even while Israeli politicians and the Israeli public and Israeli lobbying groups in the US criticizes the US for not being generous or supportive enough and gets involved in domestic US politics. We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to.
> We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to
You’re exemplifying the problem. NPS and foreign aid funding aren’t competing with each other. They’re both rounding errors in the grand scheme. But everyone has their hobby horse that they have or must cut so we get some oscillation.
I support Israel, but it's time for us to pull the reigns.
Non-defense US federal spending dwarfs defense spending, for whatever it's worth. The US is essentially a benefits management firm with a standing army.
Social Security is not an expense of the government. Well, for the most part. It’s a pension plan that people pay into. Similarly for Medicare. People pay into it before retirement. Then at a certain age they get this insurance benefit. Private insurers will not insure the elderly. If anything you should characterize this as a private insurance industry subsidy. It allows insurers to offload their riskiest clients to another entity.
Your characterization is badly wrong.
EDIT: Until recently Social Security took in more money than it paid out. It’s run by the government so its expenditures are counted as a budget item. But it is a sound pension system whose defects can be easily fixed if a certain party would actually govern. It is not the largest expense by the government. It’s just that it is a government run pension system. It’s not an entitlement either.
This is incorrect per the US Supreme Court e.g. Flemming v Nestor in 1960. Social Security contributions are purely an income tax like any other, it is explicitly neither a pension nor insurance plan. Contributions create no obligation for the government to give you anything in return, same as the other income taxes you pay. The government largely treats it as tax revenue.
It is intentionally (mis)represented as a pension plan where contributions are connected to benefits but that fiction is solely to maintain popular political support, they can disqualify citizens from eligibility at any time regardless of contributions and, on occasion, have.
The main issue with Social Security is that most people in prior generations took far more out than they contributed, in part because it wasn’t really a requirement since it wasn’t actually a pension.
If the Supreme's deem it so then it must be. Are there any decisions they've gotten wrong?
Your benefit is based on what you pay in. It pays out less than what it takes in. If it were privatized you and the Supremes would call it a pension. It acts like a pension, quacks like a pension and is a pension.
Notably, if the gov’t starts making pensioners subsist on cat food because they refuse to honor their obligations, hopefully a whole lot of senators will be out of jobs ASAP.
SS is explicitly sold as a pension. If it stops acting like one, there will be consequences - even if it means rewriting laws.
Money is fungible. The government takes in money, and pays it out. Money paid out is called an expense.
But to be clear, I favor social security, and I agree with your other points about it.
If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could. If it did this, keeping in place Social Security “taxes” that would then go to the new corporation, we would not consider Social Security a budget expense. Being government owned or private doesn’t matter in terms of how the expenditures should be considered. This is why Social Security and Medicare are not part of the normal budget negotiations at budget time. These are obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them.
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
> obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them
Everyone pays taxes. Social Security and Medicare obligations are treated differently because of politics. Otherwise, they’re like any other expense: the Congress can amend them at will. (As is currently expected, e.g. with Social Security benefits beginning to be curtailed from 2035.)
I agree on Medicare. But it's plausible that the Supreme Court could find government meddling on Social Security unconstitutional, because similar decisions have already been made in other countries.
In Finland, the mandatory pension system is similar to Social Security, except that it aims to replace ~60% of earned income without any limits. Pensions based on past contributions have been established as constitutionally protected private property. If the system seems to be out of balance, the basic tools are raising the contribution rates without increasing the benefits and increasing the retirement age for younger generations. Any changes that would substantially lower the pensions that have already been earned would have to go through the same process as constitutional amendments. (There is also a third tool: increasing the tax rates for all retirement income, regardless of the source. But that is understandably unpopular.)
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
I'm not a lawyer so I'll rephrase. In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is.
Congress can amend them at will.
All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years.
> In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is
If the U.S. then explicitly guaranteed that corporation's liabilities, sure.
> All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years
No. Many state legislatures, for instance, are constitutionally prohibited from fucking with certain obligations, commonly pensions.
Can was kicked too far, it is not easy to fix. It's easy to make the mathematical problem go away by reducing benefits AND raising taxes. Nonstarter. We will need a tragedy to illicit change.
elicit
Social Security is not a pension plan, it's pay-as-you-go and barring massive tax increases and/or benefit cuts, its collapse is more-or-less inevitable in the next couple decades because of locked-in demographic changes.
I've been hearing that since the eighties. Congress can change contribution rates and/or benefit rates at any time to keep it solvent, just like they have in the past.
You are wrong. From ssa.gov:
The Social Security Retirement benefit is a monthly check that replaces part of your income when you reduce your hours or stop working altogether.
Most people would refer to this as a “pension”. Call it whatever you want to. The fact is that its issues are easily fixable and your benefit is based on how much you put into it.
This is not a very useful semantic argument. Pension programs routinely pay out to workers more than what was paid in; that's practically the definition of a defined-benefit pension plan. Either way: it's money the government pays out.
If anyone is curious, there's a good breakdown here:
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Social Security, Health, and Medicare alone account for 49% of the budget, to National Defense's 13%.
That 13% is still more than the next 9 highest military budgets in the world combined. We're not financing our military, we're lining the pockets of the military industrial complex, on the taxpayer's dime.
Many/most countries have national tax and not (any or as much) state taxes. To compare across nations you’d need to divide the expenditure by the national sum of the taxes of the various government levels.
The military industrial complex is a socialist jobs program, both for those directly on the DOD's payroll and for the employees of the firms that contract with the government under the auspices of the military.
18% is more accurate as it includes veteran care.
Seems kinda like we're talking about my $1,300/mo budget for candles and you're pointing out "yeah, but your mortgage is $5,000/mo, for whatever it's worth; you're basically just a homeowner with a candle budget".
Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment. Defense spending is largely discretionary.
Social security is not a debt repayment and the point I'm making would stand if you took it out of the budget, even though you shouldn't. Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
> Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment.
How is it not practically a debt repayment?
The common understanding is "you pay money in, you get money back when you retire". Do you think you could cut it without widespread backlash? Do you think you could cancel it without borderline revolt?
"It's not a debt. It's just that if you don't pay me I'll kill you."
Is there any practical difference from a debt?
The US Supreme Court asserted in 1960 that no one is entitled to Social Security. There is no connection between contributions and future benefits. Many people are under the misapprehension that this is not the case.
Without a doubt it would not be popular if the government eliminated some or all of Social Security. But it would be strictly legal and Constitutional, popular backlash notwithstanding. This is an important distinction. There are no Constitutional protections that ensure Social Security benefits. Ignorance of this fact doesn’t change its reality.
The constitutional protection is that if Congress tried to do that, they would be replaced in the next election. As stupid as they sometimes appear to be, they are not that stupid.
You pay a tax. You receive a benefit. The benefit's connection to your tax payment is nominal at best. It's one of many direct benefits the government awards, none of which are debts.
You replied to none of the questions I asked.
I dont know how we can know this. My understanding is that the pentagon has an unknown total budget. Once you wrap up all the CIA, NSA type stuff too I'm not sure how we can know this?
The DoD has a "black budget", but that's money you don't get a breakdown of, not money you don't know about: it's voted in by Congress as a blind total. Total spending is profoundly tilted towards non-defense spending (even more so if you include state and local government spending, but that's not germane to the Forest Service) --- the amount of "secret" money going to defense, if it existed, would have to be economy-breaking to alter the balance.
Not really. When counting not just DoD spending but DoE nuclear weapons spending, NASA (now Space Force) and satellite spending, VA and veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending and so forth, military spending takes up a large chunk of the pie. It is only small if defined very, very narrowly (which is what they, and you, do).
NASA is a separate agency from space force. The former is directly under the President as an independent agency while the latter is under the DoD.
Defense benefits and pensions are a tiny fraction of mandatory federal spending.
They call it mandatory spending but this is a misnomer. When you pay into a pension system and pre-pay for insurance it’s expected that you receive the benefits you paid for. That it is government run is irrelevant to how it should be viewed. Social Security is not an expense of the government. It’s a government run pension system.
This is not at all how the accounting for Social Security, Medicare, and other mandatory spending programs work. Generally, Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in (invariably they do with Medicare). And, obviously, everyone receiving Medicaid and SSDI do. I don't think this technical point about Social Security is going to salvage the argument that the US pays more in defense than anything else.
Apparently you don't understand how pensions work. Take a 401(k). Under normal circumstances what you take out of the 401(k) far exceeds what you put into it. This is what happens with investments generally speaking.
Saying, "Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in..." indicates you don't know what you are talking about. And, believe it or not, Social Security does invest money.
And yes, it does salvage the argument. Defense spending (all of it not just DOD) is the largest expense of the government. This is expected when you are the hegemon.
Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
It's simply an enormous, vast economy, and 13% of a vast economy is a huge number, large enough to outspend the next several countries combined. That's all.
Regardless, social security is funded totally separately from the rest of the budget, with a dedicated tax, and does not contribute to the deficit. It’s typically excluded from budget discussions, for that reason.
You could change the law to axe social security, keep its highly-regressive tax, and instead use that to pay for other stuff—but lots of things are possible with a change in the law, and that’s not possible now without such a change. That’s not something that can happen as an ordinary part of the budgeting process.
I'm not saying I like everything about federal spending (or even defense spending), just that the argument that we spend most of our money on defense (or even a plurality of it) is false.
For this reason it’s pretty unusual to see an analysis of the US budget aimed at policy nerds that includes Social Security. Almost all serious discussion about it excludes that.
You tend to only see it included when the full total of money disbursed by the government from any pot and for any purpose is expressly relevant (it’s usually not) or in writing that is not aimed at policy nerds, but at everyday voters (to convince them whatever batshit crazy spending we’re doing in the author’s preferred non-social-spending item isn’t bad after all, usually)
Indeed! They've done a great job at muddying the waters. Otherwise knowledgeable people don't understand how this works.
In a political system shaped by lobbyists, those without lobbyists go without.
Startup idea: like reddit, but upvoting costs money and all the posts are tickets for paid staff lobbyists.
Trust/transparency would be the tricky problems.
Military spending is being superseded by interest payments on debt. We need to tackle the deficit.
Tackling the deficit, in the absence of a realistic way to raise taxes, is why the Forest Service is losing 2400 jobs.
Agreed, although seeing as the economic plans laid out by both current presidential candidates would result in an increase in deficit the political will to do so does not seem to be there. In reality it feels like the spending is just being shifted elsewhere.
As I recall, two presidents in history have submitted balanced budgets to Congress: Thomas Jefferson and Jimmy Carter.
As I understand it, Ukraine is mostly getting old outdated equipment, and Israel is actually buying weapons, not just receiving them as gifts.
The US normally gives Israel around $3 billion dollars a year to buy our weapons -- they are in fact required to spend it on buying weapons from US defense industry. It's kind of an, um, gift certificate.
This year they gave Israel $18 billion, so much more than usual.
In one sense, all of this is actually a jobs program for the US defense industry, since all that money is required to turn around as weapons purchases from US companies.
Even $18 billion is less than 1% of the US non-military budget, this isn't the reason we "can't afford" the USFS, or the reason to stop giving weapons to Israel -- the US certainly can afford both. (The reason to stop supplying Israel is that those weapons are actually destabilizing the region and encouraging violence and gross human rights violations).
But, no, Israel "buys" US weapons with US money, they are indeed a gift.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIs...
I think two different accounting methods are being conflated here which leads to the huge $3B vs $18B difference. Congress periodically authorizes spending for military aid to Israel and other countries. Later, the executive branch actually disburses that aid. In recent years, the US has on average given Israel $3B. This year, congress authorized an additional $18B to be disbursed through 2026 - which is what recent news stories about US giving Israel $18B are referring to, as far as I know. You would end up double-counting every dollar, if you did the math that way on an ongoing basis.
But if you know of a clean source of data on the actual amount of aid provided each year, that would be useful. I’d guess the number this year would be a lot more than $3B given the physical reality of tons of expensive offensive and defense missiles fired.
Good to know and thanks for that link. I am curious why this was downvoted, is that not a trustworthy resource?
It's not downvoted.
Old, outdated equipment compared to what? What Ukraine produces?
Israel is on the USA tit as well.
I don't think you can use tanks, missiles, shells, and drones to clean trails
Challenge accepted.
(Hilariously, the USFS does use artillery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forest_Service#/...)
lmao
ok maybe we should keep a few shells for avalanche stuff
They literally use tanks to keep avalanches off roads. Here is a video near Seattle of the Dept of Transportation using a couple M-60 Sherman tanks to launch artillery into the snowpack in an effort to control avalanches along the Highway 2 corridor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZLfboCceGA
Nitpick: the M-60 is a Patton tank, not a Sherman. The M-4 Sherman was the primary medium tank used by the US during WW2. The M-60 is much more modern, used by the US military until 1997, and several countries still use them today. I only bring that up because an M-60 tank still running today is perfectly normal, while a Sherman that’s still running would be much more unusual!
Not any longer. They now use a 105mm Howitzer among other means.
https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/operations-services/avalanche-co...
Interesting fact, but is it really necessary to go to those lengths? Surely something like a handgun or detonated explosive would be cheaper and just as effective (though less fun). I don't think this use case needs the vehicle to be armored.
A pistol would be hilariously inadequate. As for "detonating explosives", what do you think they are doing? They are shooting high-explosive artillery rounds from a tank that detonate on impact.
As for "why artillery", how do you plan on getting explosives into the snowpack, especially under conditions of severe avalanche risk? Those areas of the mountains are inaccessible by vehicle even in the summertime. A tank can drive on a road and deliver the explosives where needed. They often target 20+ separate snowfields so being able to do it in a timely and efficient manner matters.
While the armor doesn't contribute much, it happens to be what the artillery gun is attached to. It would cost far more to rig some special-purpose vehicle. Sherman tanks are free, the government has loads of them lying around waiting to be scrapped, you just pay for fuel and upkeep.
Handguns don't have the range or power. Explosives are used, but you have to get them up there, which means either schleping up the mountain or using a helicopter, which is wildly more expensive.
Artillery works great.
Alaska recently starting experimenting with using drones to drop explosives on snowpacks, so that's another relatively cost-effective option.
At least, you really shouldn’t
You could certainly use military drones to map out trails and mark sections for cleaning. Beating milspec drones into plowdrones, etc.
Sure.
Although it's literally cheaper to use a crop duster with LIDAR mounted, civilian hand held drones, etc.
We (an air geophysics crowd I worked with) used to take contracts to map vegetation height and density under power lines in Australian bush.
You can use the Army Corps of Engineers....
Damn, we should send the USFS HIMARS. I bet that will help.
Most of these crews were already short handed and in districts relying extensively on labor from youth conservation corps and private contractors. The private trail building sector has exploded in the last decade or so. More often than not the USFS (and other agencies with some variability) trail crews will work on high profile projects or simply as liaisons/project managers for the private outfits. Even though the work is often just scratching at dirt, building /maintaining trails and the structures they rely on is technical trades work and needs a local culture to maintain standards. Funding solutions should look towards the outdoor recreation industry and cutting fat in bloated non-profit admin. They benefit from selling the lifestyle and all its accessories while contributing relatively little to resource maintenance.
1. Cut fire service funding and jobs
2. Cut forest service funding and jobs
3. “The forest fires are so bad this year, how could this have happened to us??”
That sucks. Its tough work, if you live near any of these trails and frequent them they have volunteer days which are totally worth doing.
It practically means trails won't get the love they deserve and it will be harder to make use of the resource.
There are volunteer groups that do a large percentage of the trail maintenance in some areas. There is the Pacific Crest Trail Association with their local chapters. In Washington state, there is the Washington Trails association. In Oregon, there is Trailkeepers of Oregon, who I volunteer with almost every weekend. There are also numerous local groups across the western US.
Crazy how the money printer only works on some projects.
I would like to share this link with my outdoorsy friends, but the inability to opt out of cookies triggers my morals.
Dark pattern: "To opt out, click the link in the footer that you can't reach because this popup blocks it until you accept all the cookies"
ublock origin with annoyance filters
This article from a backpacking website is better written and reported than most major newspaper stories I read. Good quotes, and even edited. Probably fact checked too! Kudos.
What portion of the national budget that is devoted to spaceflight would it take to shower the USFS in riches? I'd much rather see it going to the latter.
Spaceflight is not what you want to be picking as a point of comparison if you want to talk about funding government agencies.
> The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official. That's more than NASA's budget.
https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-...
What we pay for what we get is insane though. Imagine what SpaceX (or other enterprising group of engineers) could do with a guaranteed $20B of annual funding.
Spaceflight is arguably one of the better uses of public funds, so I'm curious why you picked exactly this topic.
How exactly is it useful? Seems to be only rather fringe science experiments going on (neat, of course!) and vague pre-work for going multiplanetary, which IMO is not a super compelling idea upon inspection.
Honest curiosity here, I don't know what a lot of the purpose is!
This is exactly my question. I wish I could better justify the value of spaceflight, but I’m wholly unconvinced. The arguments for investing in it always seem like vague references to the future with no specific value delivered today.
Our pursuit of space travel has lead to an incredible number of innovations that are used accross almost every industry in this country.
The use of orbital based technologies like GPS and satellite imaging have unlocked entirely new capabilities.
It's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been transformed in some way by space.
Dollar for dollar, the only better return on our federal spending is education.
I understand historically that it has produced incredibly valuable "exhaust", but is that really the strategy? Is that the purpose? Do we have a reason to believe we will always (and are today receiving) positive ROI, even aside from reaching any valuable "destination", so to speak?
There’s a lot of good that shows up all across the economy from satellites.
For example, how important is weather prediction to you? Genuinely, I’m not sure how much it is to me, but the value isn’t nothing.
GPS is another thing like that: it’s only a little bit useful to me, but it enables a lot of economic activity (like farm automation). And the fact that getting lost went from a regular thing that happens to rarely is probably at least somewhat valuable.
Remote telecom is another thing. For sure, there are diminishing returns, but going from no access to some access for very remote places (think ships at sea, polar research stations, oil rigs, very rural communities) is probably valuable. How many ships haven’t sunk because they got a satellite weather update?
You’re absolutely right, it’s not a strategy to invest randomly. And it’s quite possible that we’re over-investing in space. But there are direct returns in addition to the “exhaust”.
You think we wouldn't have bothered with GPS and imaging if we weren't also firing humans up there?
There may be some cross talk in this thread where some people are talking about space programs in general and other people are talking about sending people to space.
Because currently the manned spaceflight component of NASA is more like a jobs program than a useful contributor to science and space exploration.
my money is on irrational hatred of a certain billionaire. Lets wait and see what they say.
Here we have a perfect specimen of an assumption-laden, chronically online take. I’m not a fan of the man but it has nothing to do with my question.
Technically it was a forecast of your reason for the purposes of gambling since your position was irrational. You claim to have a different irrational reason for hating on space spending so out with it.
A lot of NASA spending seems eminently worthwhile, but the manned space program seems like a boondoggle
Wishing the SLS had a budget of $0 is hardly irrational, and that alone is a large line-item.
Ditto the associated contracts for moon lander modules.
Perhaps rational hatred that leads to irrational hatred of the things he is associated with.
USFS received $9.23B in 2024. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12396/3
NASA's is about $25B. Bigger, but both are pretty small in the overall Federal budget.
Military and healthcare are the astronomical expenses that dwarf both space and the usfs.
Both are plagued with inefficiencies but the military is largely the most useless expense because we aren't at any huge risk that justifies this level of spending.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/us-elec...
“Americans on November 5 will be electing a wartime president. This isn’t a prediction. It’s reality.”
An opinion piece from the head of the Atlantic Council, whose job is basically to convince Americans they need to have lots of defense spending, is hardly something I’d take at face value. It’s more revealing of where that particular set of (heavily foreign-funded) lobbyists are trying to steer us, than anything else.
Why on earth would you try and take money away from spaceflight rather than the host of other ridiculous things we fund. How about what percentage of oil subsidies?
Ethanol subsidies. Part of the demented legacy of the Bush era. And it's only getting sillier: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/biden-team-sets-out-e...
For those who are disappointed in this, don't blame Ukraine or defense spending, blame Republicans. The Forest Service budget is set by the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies subcommittee which is majority Republican. Their press release on the FY25 bill is here:
https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/house-v...
If you don't believe they're partisan, read through the "key takeaways" section. They are responsible for this budget shortfall. Their games of government shutdown chicken are also the reason the budget hasn't even been finalized yet.
That's crap. We need more access to nature, not less.
> The only exception to the hiring freeze are the roughly 11,300 firefighters hired by the agency every year.
You probably wouldn't need first responders if you could hire & not fire all the people you have proactively managing your lands. (So many face-palms.)
Can anyone explain the mission of USFS? Why does the US maintain a bunch of wilderness when it’s buried in debt. Why not use federal assets to generate income instead of burdening taxpayers with taxes & debt payments?
I don't mean for this reply to sound rantish... but this is pretty short term thinking.
Not maintaining a tremendously valuable asset (nearly priceless) is a waste.
People who don't hike or use nature recreationally tend to view it as completely useless.
They do have a bit of a point. The asset isn't really being maintained. It's being maintained for human use as recreation. Overall you don't need to really maintain wilderness to preserve it. Overall you just leave it untouched.
You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
>You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
That would work until a mining company wanted to extract oxygen from Yellowstone Quartz and met with zero public opposition to making use of "empty land."
oh good point. Public opposition is what stops it from happening not the word of law.
See: Designated wilderness areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wilderness_areas_of_th...
This is even more short term thinking and a bit of ignorance. Where do you think all of the ‘stuff’ around you came from? Everything starts as raw materials, most of them organic.
And besides how selfish would it be to preserve nothing for the future generations.
I'm literally saying preserve it by keeping everyone out.
It's a political problem. If people can't actually use the wilderness, you will lose public support for keeping the wilderness. It will all end up being sold to the highest bidder and destroyed.
I'm talking about the value of the land , not the maintenance costs
Why does it need to be profitable to exist? Why does it need to generate income? Why can’t we be fine with subsidizing and paying for wilderness and public transportation? Because some well connected business man could charge us money for it and pocket the difference and still barely maintain it and sell it off to be developed into concrete malls?
Because it’s literally one of the greatest things about the US, and once it’s gone.. it’s gone.
Only about 36% of US forests are older than 80 years old. They will grow back, but we should do our best to protect older growth forests.
That's not true. The Appalachians were basically clear cut in the 1800s.
And as a result they're way less remarkable than the older forests.
it doesn't have to go anywhere to be productive.
Many parts of the US government have an egalitarian mission. Beyond USFS, there's the parks, flood insurance, education programs, grant making organizations (as people on this forum are very very aware of), land management and more.
You can object to the overall non-profit egalitarian mission (and I do in many cases) but it's not unique to the forest service.
I do wonder why the USFS hasn't been rolled into the Dept. of the Interior alongside e.g. the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. Putting it under the Dept. of Agriculture (as it is now) seems like it'd lead to some perverse incentives, and the overlap in mission and jurisdiction between the USFS and the BLM and NPS seems like it'd produce administrative/managerial redundancies (the cost of which would be better spent on the very jobs being cut right now).
There are really really weird organizational divisions. You have the DEA and the FDA very far apart despite one having the scientific expertise and the other having enforcement expertise. You have police in every branch of the government, and the DOJ for good measure. You have food stamps in the ag department as well.
The budget for this has very little bearing on the debt. See where the money actually goes here: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I like this website, even though the numbers are a few years old:
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...
For basically all future years, an even greater proportion (more than two thirds) of federal government spending will be for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (old and sick and poorer people).
You're confusing the budget (maintenance spending) with the value of the real estate assets. That is, all of the land, e.g. 95% of Nevada, about 70% of the entire western USA
If that land was generating income, we could pay off the entire $35+T debt in no time.
"The U.S. government has spent $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024 to ensure the well-being of the people of the United States."
Reads like something straight out of George Orwell
Only if you don't know Orwell was an lifelong socialist.
Contrary to popular belief, socialism is not "when the government does stuff".
All National Forests have a forestry plan that involves selling a certain amount of timber cut from the forest every year.
However, forest recreation (which obviously requires the forests to still have trees) also generates a lot of money — both for the local economy around the forest and via things like permits for the government itself.
Basically the goal is to maintain the forests as long term assets, not sell them off in one go.
All good. obviously they aren't productive enough. It's about 70% of the western usa. surely they could be more productive.
What do you recommend?
This is in the article.
I see a lot of things that the Forest Service does listed but I don’t see the purpose of why they do them.
For example, this quote is not a mission, “The U.S. Forest Service is a federal agency that manages 193 million acres of land, an area about the size of Texas.”
It might be part of what they do to accomplish their mission, but it’s not a mission.
Could you quote the part of the article that makes their mission clear?
The mission of the USFS is not to "maintain a bunch of wilderness". Its mission, and the reason is is under the Dept. of Agriculture, is to provide forest products in perpetuity to Americans.
It does however maintain a bunch of wilderness.
> In response to a shrinking budget, the land management agency is suspending seasonal hiring next year. Public lands will bear the cost.
These aren’t careers.
The article clearly lists multiple "careers" including biologists, timber workers and maintenance staff.
The only reason they're not careers now and are forced to be seasonal hires is due to ongoing defunding of the forest service over decades
They should be!
Seasonal hiring for intermittent tasks that are best done in the summer is cheap for USFS and makes sense. They don't need to be careers.
What are you saying? These are vital positions. I'm not sure what it matters to the discussion if they are 'career' or not?
It’s probably related to this:
> “I moved across the country to work here, for a seasonal job,” she says. “We have people who have worked here for 10 years as seasonals, and made a career out of these positions. They trusted that the jobs wouldn’t go away.”
I suspect the other part of these careers involve seasonal work that covers a different part of the year, such as working at ski resorts.
And now they aren't even jobs.
Don't worry they'll hire migrants after a while when people forget this story.
Often the US hires young Americans to do these jobs. It is huge for helping young people with job training and class mobility. Without these jobs it will be that much harder to find a job with no experience in the outdoor industry.
Better migrants than no one?
Although I downvoted you, I admit having a grudging admiration for people like you who are openly and smugly conceited. Honestly, that's much better than those who hide their real sentiment in a cloak of high-emotional IQ yet sociopathic virtue signaling obfuscation.
Nah. They’re just plainly and proudly wrong. Nothing admirable about that, it’s essentially the default state of human kind.
> In addition, the agency is freezing all external hiring for permanent positions.
How is saying “these aren’t careers” smug and conceited??
I can't begin to guess how many layers of irony to read into this.
I'm upvoting him for that reason.
> Even with these sobering financial details, it’s clear that the agency’s decision to balance the books by cutting seasonal jobs came as a shock to many employees.
Time for this to stop being a shock. The country needs some harsh belt tightening and stories like these will become commonplace if real reform is practiced.
I don't really know what reform you're expecting. It doesn't really make sense that we could afford to hire people to maintain a trail system in the '60s and '70s, and now, with 50+ additional years of economic growth and ostensibly increased productivity, we can't. I suspect it has less to do with needed belt tightening, so much as mandated administrative bloat plus endless tax cuts.
Are you from Argentina??
I wonder why a truthful statement like that is being downvoted?
I could eat steak at a lavish restaurant every night but I realize that if I did so my credit card balance would eventually come to the point I would be using the total of my income to pay the interest. Instead I do the sustainable option and buy groceries and cook at home.
Continuing deficit spending at the federal level will eventually bankrupt our government and make this a worse world to live in.
You never go bankrupt when you can print your own money.
I don't know how old you are, but I predict you will not see a balanced federal budget in your lifetime.
At best it is incomplete.
Raise taxes back to what they were back in the 1950s when the top marginal rate was over 90%.
Close off the methods rich people use to legally lower their true tax rate. Buffet famously pointed out his tax rate was lower than his secretary's. Bezos back in 2011 when he was worth $18 billion got a $4,000 tax credit because he reported investment losses.
Why are we paying for Bezos' steak?
Fund the IRS to go after rich people, instead of targeting poor people simply because it's cheaper and easier than going after wealthy ones. ("we estimate that each dollar spent on auditing an individual in the 70–80th percentiles produces a return of $9.06. Each dollar spent auditing an individual in the 90–99th percentiles produces a return of $12.48.", https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31376/w313...)
Create a global wealth tax.
Stop paying for all this ridiculously expensive road transportation system and housing sprawl on the backs of our children's future.
And yes, stop eating steak. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
This would be like eating steak at a lavish restaurant every night (defense spending), and someone else (USFS) eats a spoonful of beans, and then you saying 'we need some belt-tightening'.
We don't, you do. The USFS is already working with a tightened belt.
It's not even that. It's more like eating at a lavish restaurant every night, and paying with pieces of paper that you just printed your picture on. Eventually that game might indeed end, but it has much more to do with other factors than basic arithmetic.
Talk about deficit spending is basically nonsense from the vein of fake austerity politics of the past several decades, whose real purpose was to starve most government functionality while distracting from the many trillions of dollars given out as artificially low interest loans, basically shameless handouts to the financial industry and asset holders (see: the everything bubble).