The U.S. Forest Service is considering a massive restructuring that would remove scientists and land management planners from individual forests, affecting one in four jobs throughout the agency.

While the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility group maintains that the restructuring is imminent, a Forest Service spokesman counters that there is no timeline for the change.

Libertarian think tanks and management consulting groups that advocate both restructuring and outsourcing of federal jobs to private business generally support the concepts of "business process re-engineering" and outsourcing, while environmentalists are highly skeptical.

The Forest Service plan would consolidate virtually all work performed under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA - the basic planning law that shapes significant agency resource management actions. For national forests in Wyoming, the jobs would be consolidated into a NEPA work center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

All together, nearly 8,000 employees out of the agency's 30,000-person work force now perform NEPA-related work. Almost all of this work is done at the forest level.

"It is awfully late in the Bush administration to begin a gigantic game of bureaucratic musical chairs with thousands of people's jobs that may be reversed by the next Forest Service chief," Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

He noted that the Forest Service contracted out its feasibility study to a Virginia consultant, Management Analysis Inc.

"Rather than relying on consultants, the Forest Service should first consult Congress, the public and its own employees," he said.

PEER and Forest Service documents indicate that this agency-wide action would:

* Remove thousands of employees with firefighting responsibilities from national forests and relocate them in far-away service centers. Nearly half (3,564) of all Forest Service employees doing NEPA work have collateral all-hazard duties.

* Result in likely job cuts. A main objective of the re-engineering study is to combine work now done on 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands. The agency's feasibility study, dated Aug. 1, 2007, projects a nearly 20 percent reduction in environmental positions.

Under a "Need for Change" section in the Management Analysis report, consultants noted that the Forest Service is frequently challenged in court on its NEPA analyses and subsequent decisions. Administrative appeals and litigation often force the Forest Service into expensive do-overs and delay management actions.

The consultant's report added that "this report includes recommendations designed to improve the Agency's ability to produce consistent, quality NEPA documentation while simultaneously increasing productivity and efficiencies."

Skepticism

Journalist and "Science Under Siege" author Todd Wilkinson suspects there's much more going on here than a laudable effort to increase productivity.

"Throughout federal land management agencies today, there is a sense of declining morale and a perception that scarce human and financial resources are being invested more to expedite extraction activities, such as oil and gas drilling, than in encouraging biologists and other scientists to go about their monitoring work unimpeded. This atmosphere has caused many career professionals to leave the Forest Service," he said.

Published in 1997, Wilkinson's book explored what happens when politicians, in the service of extractive industries and other commercial enterprises, lean on the federal government's scientists and planners. He concluded that neither political party has a monopoly on misusing or ignoring science. He said he's frequently getting e-mails and phone calls from federal scientists and planners, venting their frustrations.

"Now is hardly the time to be pulling experts out of the field and back into bureaucratic fiefdoms,

they say," Wilkinson said. "While there certainly are areas where agency compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act can be streamlined, many fear the latest maneuverings are an attempt to undermine Congress' intent when it created the law three decades ago, which was to require agencies and their staff experts to anticipate the effects of natural resource development prior to granting approval rather than dealing with harmful impacts after the fact when it is often too late to mitigate them."

Patricia Dowd of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition had more pragmatic concerns.

"It would take all the locals out of the NEPA process," she said, noting that adjoining national forests in Montana and Colorado would have all NEPA work done in Colorado Springs and Boise, Idaho. How, she asked, would Forest Service staff members in these regional centers know anything at all about local ecology, local people and local politics?

Union view

The National Federation of Federal Employees union also calls the proposed Forest Service reorganization a bad idea.

"While the union and agency employees are still concerned, I've been told by agency officials that the specific consolidation plan in the report is not written in stone," said Mark Davis, a union representative. "The agency has not rejected centralization as an option; however, the plan's specific recommendations have been characterized to me as preliminary, and a willingness to consider other options expressed."

Davis does not dispute that NEPA could be administered better.

"The feasibility report generated a good deal of anxiety, but perhaps in the long run it has accomplished a good thing: It has started a dialogue between the agency's real experts - front-line employees who actually do the work - and agency leadership," he said.

Savings and efficiency?

The Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Mont., has staff members who study these issues, bringing market principles to resolving environmental problems.

PERC's Tim Cranston notes that "business process re-engineering" and outsourcing can bring tremendous efficiencies and savings. He noted that Vice President Al Gore had a long-term program called "Reinventing Government," which enjoyed many successes in achieving those goals.

Allison Berry, a PERC research fellow, said there's lots of room for improvement with NEPA. However, PERC extolls local control, she said, and this policy moves away from local control.

"A better solution might be to look at what forests are doing NEPA right, and model on that," she said.