As a forestry consultant and chief economist for the Thoreau Institute, I have studied federal forest management for more than two decades. Since 1980, I have visited more than half the national forests, including forests in every region of the country, as well as numerous BLM district and state offices, to review their forest plans, timber sale programs, inventory data, and computer models. One of the things I learned during these visits is that the federal forests are run by well-educated people who truly care about the forests and who want to do the best job possible for the land and the people who use it. But I also learned that large bureaucracies such as the Forest Service and BLM have a life of their own, and that such bureaucracies are driven primarily by incentives to maintain and increase their budgets. Virtually all of the conflicts over federal forest management can be traced to differences between the incentives managers face and the desires of forest users.
Appropriations effectively give managers an incentive to lose money .
Appropriations for federal forests are not really necessary because nearly all federal forest resources can be funded out of user fees. But user fees can also create misincentives when managers are allowed to charge for some resources and not for others. For example, recreationists expect a variety of experiences on federal forests. But forest managers are not allowed to collect user fees from most recreationists and they are not allowed to keep most of the recreation fees they collect. This gives the agencies less of an incentive to pay attention to recreationists than to other forest users.