Strategic Planning: Another Waste of Your Tax Dollars

Our society lets markets handle the production of most things that are easily measured and asks government to produce things that are harder to quantify. This makes it easy for government agencies to suffer mission creep, meaning they start doing things other than the purposes for which they were created because the new things are easier to measure or have a more powerful political constituency.

Back in 1993, some bright bulb in Congress tried to solve this problem through strategic planning. Specifically, a law called the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) required every federal agency to write a plan that specified the outcomes the agency was trying to produce and showed how each part of the agency’s budget contributed to those outcomes.

Like so many other planning ideas, this one hasn’t worked. Instead, it has become just one more hoop for agency officials to jump through, adding to taxpayer costs without producing any results.

I was reminded of this when I downloaded and read the Forest Service’s proposed 2008 budget (2.6 mb) last week. The budget includes a thirteen-page section on the agency’s strategic plan (physical pages 89-101).

As a point of historical interest, a free-market institute called the Mercatus Center asked me to review the strategic plans that the Forest Service had written in 2000. My review noted that GPRA specifically required that plans be “outcome-related.” In other words, agencies should specify the outcomes they expect to achieve, and not the inputs they use to achieve them.

Unlike many government agencies, the Forest Service could easily write an outcome-related plan because nearly everything it produces is also produced in the private sector: wood, water, wildlife, recreation, minerals, and so forth. Yet the Forest Service plan was build around inputs, not outcomes.

The number one goal of national forest management, said the plan, was “ecosystem health.” But this is not an outcome — ecosystem health is only important because healthy ecosystems contribute to outcomes that people want, such as clean water, diverse wildlife, recreation, and wood products. Other goals, such as “technical assistance to private landowners” and “effective public service,” were similarly input oriented.

The Forest Service’s 2008 strategic plan is no better. Here are the agency’s stated goals, listed in order of their share of the budget:

1. Reduce catastrophic wildland fire risk (42 percent of the budget)
2. Improve watershed condition (21 percent)
3. Provide outdoor recreation opportunities (16 percent)
4. Other programs and activities (16 percent)
5. Reduce impacts from invasive species (3 percent)
6. Help meet energy resource needs (2 percent)

Right up front, watershed condition, recreation opportunities, and other programs and activities are not outcomes.

• Watershed condition, like ecosystem health, is a mean to achieving outcomes, not an outcome in itself.
• Recreation opportunities are not outcomes; the outcome is the actual recreation. The Forest Service could provide tons of opportunities, but if no one uses them, it is a waste.
• Other programs and activities could include some outcomes, but on close examination the Forest Service used this as a catch-all for such things as inventories, research, financial audits, employee safety standards (not safety but meeting safety standards), and of course forest planning.

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Reducing fire risk is sort of an outcome, in the sense that “We didn’t burn your house down last year, and if you give us more money we’ll try not to burn it down again this year” is an outcome. However, nearly all of the performance measures under this goal are inputs, such as the number of acres treated for hazardous fuels.

There is only one genuine outcome: “number of acres burned by unplanned and unwanted wildland fires.” The Forest Service has been doing real well on that one, as it has set records for the total number of acres burned in each of the last three years.

Similarly, the invasive species goal includes three performance measures, only one of which is outcome-oriented: “Percent change in the rate of spread of selected invasive species.” The energy goal includes two measures, one of which — “Total biomass from small-diameter and low-value trees used for energy production” — is outcome oriented.

I count a total of 42 performance measures in the strategic plan, and only three of them are outcome related. Moreover, there are many huge gaps in the measures.

The recreation measures, for example, deal exclusively with motorized recreation. What about hunting, fishing, picnicking, sightseeing, wilderness backpacking, river rafting, and skiing? These are all very valuable and quantifiable outcomes, yet they are not mentioned at all in the plan.

Here is where the “recreation opportunities” goal really sticks in the craw: Forest Service research has shown that the most valuable forest recreation is non-motorized, and it is also in the shortest supply. By focusing on motorized, the plan provides lots of opportunities that no one will use but ignores lots of actual uses that are incompatible with motorized recreation.

Where does timber fit into the strategic plan? Two decades ago, timber dominated the Forest Service’s budget, consuming about 40 percent of the agency’s resources. Today it isn’t even mentioned in the plan. You would think that the agency would argue that timber sales are needed to reduce wildfire risk, but surprisingly it turns out the strategic plan puts timber money (now known as “forest products”) under the “improve watershed condition” goal.

“Timber sales,” says another part of the Forest Service budget, “help accomplish large-scale watershed restoration needs by reducing accumulated ground and ladder” (physical page 217). Say what? Ground and ladder? Those are fire terms, so there is a word missing here: “ground and ladder fuels.” But that means they are justifying timber sales based on their contribution to reducing fire risk after all. I suspect the strategic plan puts it under watershed instead of fire because the fire budget was already way too big and they did not want to make it seem even larger.

The strategic plan makes it appear that the Forest Service has become little more than a protection racket. Taxpayers are spending billions of dollars each year mainly to keep from burning down some second homes, most of which are owned by people wealthier than the average taxpayer. If that is all the Forest Service is good for, it is time to abolish the agency.

Yet it is clear that someone slapped together the strategic plan without giving any serious thought to GPRA requirements or the real purposes and goals of the national forests. Even if the plan were more carefully written to account for all outcomes of national forest management, it is doubtful that it would have any influence on the agency’s budget or activities. At the very least, Congress should repeal GPRA as a waste of time and money.