Crowning Cronies in a Circus of Stalemate

Why You’ll Probably Need More Than DOGE to Clean Up the Mess

The birth of the U.S. Forest Service under Bernard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot was a swaggering flex of Progressive Era ambition. Back when the American government was little more than a grubby patronage racket the Forest Service strutted onto the scene as a radical middle finger to that corrupt old order.

Out went the party hacks; in came university-trained agronomists and foresters, their credentials gleaming like badges of honor. Pinchot, that relentless bulldog of a man, clawed his way to victory over Joe Cannon, the cigar-chomping Speaker who’d sooner sell public lands to his buddies than let a bunch of bookish tree-huggers run the show.

It was a philosophical cage match over who gets to call the shots—technocrats with slide rules or politicians with sticky fingers. Pinchot’s triumph was a clarion call for bureaucratic autonomy, a vision where experts, not vote-grubbing congressmen, dictated the fate of America’s wild spaces. For a while, the USFS stood tall, a monument to meritocracy in a nation drowning in mediocrity.

But oh, how the mighty have fallen, how the tables have shifted. Today’s Forest Service is a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from contradictory mandates and left to stagger through a swamp of dysfunction. Don’t be fooled by the crisp uniforms and earnest foresters still trudging through the woods—the agency’s soul has been gutted.

Congress and the courts, those twin tyrants of indecision, have saddled it with a mission impossible: protect the land, appease loggers, coddle ranchers, and play nice with every environmentalist with a clipboard—all while balancing a budget that bleeds taxpayers dry. The result? A decision-making apparatus so snarled it makes Kafka’s nightmares look streamlined. Staff morale? Shattered. Cohesion? A distant memory.

Pinchot’s dream of a nimble, expert-led institution has been replaced by a creaking relic, a punchline to the joke that government can ever solve anything. Entire tomes—thick, angry ones—argue for torching the whole mess and starting over. And honestly, who could blame them? It’s a taxpayer-funded slow-motion train wreck.

Let’s talk economics, shall we? The Forest Service is a textbook case of what happens when political meddling strangles market logic. Public choice theory lays it bare: bureaucrats and politicians don’t serve the public—they serve themselves. The USFS hemorrhages cash propping up timber sales that lose money, grazing permits that degrade land, and firefighting budgets that balloon while prevention rots.

Compare that to private land management—say, a timber company with skin in the game. They’d cut the fat, prioritize profit, and ditch the sentimental nonsense. Sure, they’d log the hell out of it, but at least the books would balance. The Forest Service, meanwhile, flails under a system where every decision is a political football, kicked around by lobbyists and lawmakers who couldn’t tell a pine from a parking lot.

Now, let’s rewind to the late nineteenth century, where a gaggle of starry-eyed intellectuals—Francis Lieber, Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow—strutted onto the stage, clutching their precious tomes of natural science like holy relics. These self-appointed saviors of civilization genuinely believed they could distill human chaos into neat little equations, as if governing were just a matter of finding the right formula.

Wilson cribbed a page from Max Weber and split the world in two: politics, a messy sandbox where the rabble squabble over grand ideals, and administration, a pristine laboratory where sober men in spectacles could tweak the machinery of state with surgical precision.

Across the industrial landscape, Frederick Winslow Taylor was peddling his own gospel of “scientific management”—stopwatches in hand, he turned factory workers into cogs, all to squeeze a few more pennies from the assembly line. The Progressive reformers, drunk on this technocratic Kool-Aid, salivated at the prospect of dragging government into the same sterile paradise. Public administration as a science? Oh, please. They dreamed of a day when sociology might rival physics, when the squishy mess of human behavior could be pinned down like a butterfly under glass.

Fast forward through the blood-soaked twentieth century, and that rosy faith looks less like vision and more like a bad fever dream. Science, their golden calf, churned out atomic bombs and nerve gas, while bureaucracy greased the wheels of death camps with chilling efficiency.

Yet, let’s not be too smug in our hindsight. These reformers weren’t tilting at windmills in a vacuum. They were staring down a government staffed by drooling political hacks and municipal bosses who’d sell their grandmothers for a vote.

Imagine a state legislature picking professors for tenure—picture the droves of unqualified cousins and donors clogging university halls. Or Congress hand-selecting CDC staff based on who kissed the right rings. Absurd, right? So, yes, demanding merit over patronage wasn’t just reasonable—it was a desperate lunge for sanity in a system drowning in its own filth.

But even the sharpest minds can blunder, and when they do, the fallout’s spectacular. “Scientific management” sounds grand until you realize it’s only as good as the humans wielding it—and humans are prone to screwing up royally.

Take the Forest Service, poor Smokey’s beleaguered home. Somewhere along the line, these brainiacs decided their raison d’être was to wage an all-out war on forest fires. Armed with their charts and theories, they turned firefighting into a crusade against climate change, a shining mission to prove their scientific chops.

Never mind that forests have been burning and regenerating since before humans figured out how to rub sticks together. No, the USFS, in its infinite wisdom, doubled down, convinced it could outsmart nature itself. Spoiler alert: it couldn’t. And the consequences? Piles of fuel building up, budgets spiraling, and a legacy of ecological chaos that makes you wonder if these “experts” ever stepped outside their offices to smell the smoke.

The Forest Service’s grand pivot kicked off with the Great Idaho Fire of 1910, a monstrous blaze that torched three million acres across Idaho and Montana, leaving eighty-five souls in its ashen wake. Politicians, ever eager to grandstand, wailed and gnashed their teeth over the carnage, shoving the USFS into a frenzied obsession with wildfire suppression.

Enter William Greeley, a Forest Service chief with the smug assurance of a man who thinks he’s cracked the code. “Firefighting is a matter of scientific management,” he crowed, as if nature could be tamed with a clipboard and a stern lecture. By the 1980s, this fixation had metastasized into what you could aptly dub a “war on fire.”

The agency’s ranks swelled to thirty thousand permanent staff, bolstered by tens of thousands of seasonal firefighters in peak years. They amassed a shiny armada of planes and helicopters, hurling a cool billion dollars annually at the inferno—proof, if nothing else, that bureaucracy knows how to spend like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

Those early apostles of “scientific forestry” strutted around with their fancy degrees, blissfully ignorant of how forests actually work. Fires aren’t just nature’s tantrums—they’re her pruning shears. Western woods, with their majestic ponderosas, lodgepole pines, and sequoias, thrive on periodic burns to clear space for new growth. Lodgepoles won’t even release their seeds without a good roasting. But the Forest Service stamped out flames like they were cigarette butts, letting shade-happy invaders like Douglas firs muscle in.

Decades of this meddling turned forests into overcrowded powder kegs, choked with dry underbrush and teetering tree densities. When fires finally broke loose, they weren’t the tidy little cleansers of old—they were apocalyptic beasts, torching ancient giants instead of pesky saplings.

The wake-up call came with the 1988 Yellowstone blaze, a nearly 800,000-acre monster that raged for months, mocking every water bomber and shovel in its path. Ecologists finally piped up, pointing out the blindingly obvious: fire prevention was a fool’s errand. By the mid-1990s, the USFS, tail between its legs, rolled out a “let burn” policy—a belated nod to reality, delivered with all the grace of a toddler caught raiding the cookie jar.

But you can’t just wave a wand and undo decades of boneheaded policy. Those western forests are now tinderboxes of biblical proportions, primed to go up like a matchstick cathedral. While the Forest Service was busy playing fire cop, people flooded the West, building wood-based mansions right up to the tree line.

Population growth turned vulnerable foothills into suburban sprawl, putting more lives and property in the crosshairs of the very disasters the USFS helped amplify. Years of suppression didn’t just screw the ecology—it set the stage for a human catastrophe, all while the agency’s budget ballooned and its credibility shriveled.

So much for “scientific management”—turns out, when you ignore nature’s playbook, she doesn’t just shrug and move on. She burns your house down and sends you the bill.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service’s original raison d’être crumbled into irrelevance. Pinchot’s vision was cold and sharp—sustainable timber harvesting was a simple exploitation of forest resources without bleeding them dry. Yet by the tail end of the twentieth century, that mission had shriveled like a neglected sapling.

Timber harvests in national forests plummeted from a robust twelve billion board-feet annually to a measly four billion. Economics played a role, sure—timber markets aren’t what they used to be—but the real culprit was a shift in the national psyche.

The rise of environmentalism turned forests from profit engines into sacred shrines, untouchable by grubby human hands and dams, once hailed as titanic triumphs over nature, morphed into ecological villains by the 1970s, their concrete hulks no longer welcome in North America.

The Forest Service’s about-face was cemented in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson, with a flourish of his pen, signed the Wilderness Act, roping the agency—alongside the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service—into safeguarding over nine million acres as pristine preserves.

Yet even when judged by its founding yardstick—sustainably harvesting timber—the Forest Service floundered like a ship with a drunk captain. Critics, sharpening their knives, pointed out the agency was peddling timber at prices so low it couldn’t cover the light bill, let alone turn a profit. It was a taxpayer-subsidized fiasco.

A productive asset—public timber—should’ve been a cash cow, but instead, the government was left holding the bag. Why? Pricing was a mess, a hodgepodge that ignored fixed costs like staff salaries and equipment upkeep. Worse, the Forest Service operated under the perverse logic of all bureaucracies: it couldn’t pocket its earnings, so why bother trimming the fat? Instead, it gorged itself, ballooning budgets and headcounts year after year, revenue be damned. It’s the kind of self-serving nonsense that would make a private logger laugh—or weep—while the agency stumbled along, blind to the simplest incentives that keep businesses afloat.

Gifford Pinchot’s Forest Service once stood as the crown jewel of American bureaucracies, a fortress of autonomy carved out by a man who knew how to wield power. His USFS was different; that independence, that insulation from meddling politicians haggling over every stump and acre, was the secret sauce. It let the agency move with purpose, unburdened by the petty dealmaking that defined its predecessors.

Then came the rot. The crisp, unified mission that Pinchot hammered into place didn’t just fade—it got buried under a pile of clashing directives. As said, by the mid-twentieth century, firefighting muscled its way to the forefront, gobbling up budgets and bodies while timber took a back seat. Fair enough—until that, too, turned into a circus. The war on fire lost its luster, and in swooped the preservationists, waving their green flags and demanding forests be locked away like museum pieces.