Planning Creates Power Without Responsibility

David Schoenbrod is an attorney who once worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and now teaches at New York Law School. His 1993 book, Power Without Responsibility, argues that legislators often avoid responsibility for their actions by delegating power to bureaucracies. If the bureaucracies succeed, the legislators can take credit; if they fail, the legislators can blame the bureaucrats.

This explains why planning is so popular in a country that supposedly opposed central planning for most of the twentieth century. The planners gladly accept the power that legislators are so eager to delegate. Yet even the planners do not face any responsibility for their actions. If they screw up, their usual “punishment” will be more money and power to try to fix the problems they created.

The Forest Service is a prime example of an agency rewarded for screwing up, particularly in the area of wildfire policy. The standard story goes like this: From 1905 to 2000, the Forest Service worked hard to keep fire out of federal forests. But forests need occasional fires or twigs, shrubs, and other fuels will build up and create conditions for catastrophic fire.

In 2000, such a catastrophic fire on the Santa Fe National Forest burned through Los Alamos, destroying hundreds of homes collectively worth more than $1 billion. The Forest Service has now learned its lesson and understands that fire is a necessary part of forest ecosystems. But a century of fuel build ups means that forest managers can’t just let fires run wild through the forests. Instead, we need to go in and treat the fuels through thinnings and careful prescribed fires — all of which costs money.

Congress bought this story, giving the Forest Service a 38-percent increase in its budget in 2001. Congress also directed the Forest Service to write a “National Fire Plan” that would describe what has to be done to make the forests safe again. Agency leaders realized that the more they admitted their past screw ups, the bigger the budgets they would get. So they greatly exaggerated the fire problem and the National Fire Plan called for sustained funding for large-scale programs to treat the forests.

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To convince Congress of the urgency of the problem, the Forest Service printed a series of photos on a poster titled “80 Years of Change in a Ponderosa Pine Forest” (the same photos can be seen here). The photos show a supposedly natural, open stand of trees in 1909 that, over the years, is steadily invaded by grasses, shrubs, logs, and other fuel until by 1989 it appears to be far more fire prone.

The only problem was that the 1909 photo was hardly of “natural” conditions. For one thing, you can see stumps in the photo. An environmentalist named Keith Hammer discovered a photo taken before any timber cutting in the forest that the truly natural forest was nearly as dense as the 1989 forest.

Thanks to large fires in 2002, Hammer’s revelation was ignored and Congress gave the Forest Service even more money and power in 2003. But last August, Science magazine published research showing that climate, not fuels, was responsible for large fires in recent years. The study looked back to the 1970s and found that changes in fire size and intensity could be attributed solely to droughts, not changes in forest structure.

(The article implied that global warming was the cause. But if the researchers had looked back a few more decades, as I have done, they would have seen that the 1970s were the wettest, coolest decade of the twentieth century, and that recent droughts were no worse than droughts in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1950s.)

In any case, the Forest Service learned that it will not be punished for making mistakes. In fact, the bigger mistakes it makes, the bigger the rewards it gets to fix those mistakes. In the same way, many urban planners today have persuaded elected officials that past generations of planners screwed up by writing zoning plans that limited density and separated uses, and so now planners are writing plans that mandate densities and mixed uses (and in some cases heavily subsidize those uses). If those plans turn out to be wrong, future planners will merely seek power and money to “fix” them with more coercive and expensive plans.