Forest Service Decision-Making

The decision-making process used by the Forest Service to carry out its mission is costly and time-consuming, and the agency often fails to achieve its objectives. The agency has spent more than 20 years and $250 million to develop multiyear plans for managing national forests. It also spends about $250 million annually on environmental studies to support individual projects. According to an internal Forest Service report, however, this process is plagued by inefficiencies that have cost as much as $100 million annually at the project level alone. Moreover, by the time the agency completes its decision-making, it often finds that it is unable to achieve the plans' objectives or implement planned projects because of new information and events, as well as changes in funding and natural conditions. GAO found that the agency has made little progress in holding its managers accountable for their performance, which has forced it to request more funds to accomplish fewer objectives. This report discusses the internal and external causes of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the Forest Service's decision-making process. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress and discussed how the Forest Service has revised its land management plan for the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska; see: Tongass National Forest: Lack of Accountability for Time and Costs Has Delayed Forest Plan Revision, by Barry T. Hill, Associate Director for Energy, Resources, and Science Issues, before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (GAO/T-RCED-97-153, Apr. 29).

GAO noted that: (1) some of the inefficiency in developing forest plans and reaching project-level decisions, as well as the ineffectiveness in achieving the plans' objectives, has occurred because the Forest Service has not given adequate attention to improving its decisionmaking process, including improving accountability for its performance; (2) as a result, the Forest Service: (a) must request more funds to accomplish fewer objectives during the yearly budget and appropriation process; and (b) has not corrected long-standing deficiencies within its decisionmaking process that have contributed to increased costs and time and/or the inability to achieve planned objectives; (3) strengthening accountability for performance within the Forest Service and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its decisionmaking is contingent on establishing long-term strategic goals that are based on clearly defined mission priorities; (4) however, agreement does not exist on the agency's long-term strategic goals; (5) 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; (6) issues that transcend the agency's administrative boundaries and jurisdiction also affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the agency's decisionmaking; (7) in particular, the Forest Service has had difficulty reconciling the administrative boundaries of the national forests with the boundaries of natural systems, such as watersheds and vegetative and animal communities, both in planning and in assessing the effects of federal and nonfederal activities on the environment; (8) finally, the requirements of planning and environmental laws, enacted primarily during the 1960s and 1970s, have not been harmonized; (9) differences among the requirements of various laws and their differing judicial interpretations require some issues to be analyzed or reanalyzed at different stages in the Forest Service's decisionmaking process without any clear sequence leading to their timely resolution; (10) additional differences among the statutorily required approaches for protecting various resources have also sometimes been difficult to reconcile; and (11) however, GAO believes that statutory changes to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the Forest Service's decisionmaking process cannot be identified until agreement is first reached on the agency's mission priorities.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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