I'm a camp host for a USFS campground. It takes 3+ seasonal employees to clean the bathrooms, remove the trash, monitor the chlorine content of the drinking water and repair things. Together they maintain a dozen or so campgrounds.
As a camp host I occasionally do these tasks when these employees are absent as well as my usual duties. For this I theoretically receive a small stipend. I say theoretically because the payroll operation is so understaffed it is five months behind in paying me.
Without the seasonal staff, I don't see any way the USFS can keep the campgrounds open as well as do many other functions.
I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
> I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
Can you provide a citation for where you’re getting this data indicating that the USFS budget has been declining over time?
Based on the data I found, the USFS budget has increased steadily from 2011-2024 [0]. The 2024 budget was $9.3b [1] versus $5.1b in 2011 [0]. The 2025 budget was cut from 2024, but still higher than the 2020 budget.
The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades
> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs.
How relevant is that though? If eg lightning can do the same thing isnt it only a matter of time? Genuine question, im new to west coast and lightly thinking about it, arent our options ultimately either regular burns, cutting trees down, or a mix? I see the insane amounts of underbrush and it seems impossible to clear it all regularly in a cost effective way, to avoid then need to burn. But IDK, very curious.
There is a non-trivial crime factor in every crisis that provokes a large subset of society to flee.
If areas were having small semi-annual fires cleaning out the brush rather than these once per several decades monsters there wouldn't be the need for people to flee and there wouldn't be the same crime impact. And routinely dealing with small fires would make all the organizations involved better practiced when the big ones some around.
Those areas would be burning exactly the same as before, starting in 20 places at 4 AM in the most windy night of the year. The criminals just would bring a can of gasoline.
>> Investing $9b into $13b of revenue sounds like a great use of government funds
No. By math alone, it is a horrible waste. It would be a good investment if those funds generated economic activity resulting 9+b in tax dollars. But this is about parks, not simply stimulating the economy. The value of parks cannot be expressed in dollars.
Obviously, I wholly agree with your preference for moral and values based justifications.
But I also acknowledge ROI does help fend off alternate agendas. My state's investments in birdwatching, vineyards, hunting/fishing/gaming. etc have huge ROI. Thereby empowering the conservationsists in those never ending policymaking slap fights.
Adjacently, I've seen (local) budgets for pre-K get over the hump because of their outsized economic impact. Some people only see the world thru dollars signs.
Framing with positive ROI helps moot the "we can't afford it" zero sum scarcity mindset. Like exposing NIMBYs.
Based on the ROI, we can't afford TO NOT invest in our national parks. Taking away the economic counter arguments shows the opponents just don't want to. For reasons.
No doubt they spend lots of money, but if net economic activity was quantizable then we wouldn't need to spend tax dollars. We could charge use fees and have the RV producers and hiking boot makers contribute in order to safeguard their business. But parks have value beyond the economic. They are valuable as cultural centerpieces. They define national identity. Without Yellowstone, the US would be less of a country. Without Central Park, New York would not be as iconic a city. These things need to be funded without regard to economic activity. They are beyond math.
References to economic activity in relation to parks can be dangerous. Once we see them as engines of economic activity, then we will seek to maximize that activity. A national forest should not be described as a source of timber fees and tourist dollars. Down that road comes drilling for oil in parks, more roads, more hotels and the inevitable conversion of wild fields into condos.
> the fact that we can only quantify a public good in USD (or any other currency) is a tragedy
Money is the way we quantify the relative value of anything vs anything else. That's all money is.
I think because it's state-run, the "value" is extremely hard to quantify, in many directions. It might be over-valued, as people who've never seen it have to pay for it, or under-valued, as money that people might've paid to visit the park has already been taken from their paycheques.
Maybe it is not supposed to be quantified. At least not in a monetary value.
This requirement that everything must have some currency value attached to it is a societal disease. We can extrapolate this to say that anything that increases the country GDP should be done.
I can think of many awful examples. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to uproot every last tree to extract lumber. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just kill people with serious illnesses or disabilities instead of building more hospitals. Maybe it makes more monetary sense to just put every damn child to work in the mines or in an Amazon fulfillment center instead of sending them to school.
I can go on. As long as we can only measure the value of anything in USD, we can justify quite a lot of things that would be pretty awful for society as a whole.
>> because it's state-run, the "value" is extremely hard to quantify
The value of a privately-operated park would be no less difficult to quantify. National forests are not theme parks. They have a value even if nobody ever sets foot inside.
Probably true, but I think if you offered a billion dollars for a square foot of national park, you might be able to buy that square foot. There is a value somewhere in it that's negotiable between the people who have it and the people who might want to buy some of it. A billion dollars (as an obviously extreme example) could set up a lot of conservation elsewhere in the park, or elsewhere in the country.
Doesn’t this mainly go to wildfire suppression, and in fact as wildfires have multiplied over that decade, hasn’t the service regularly raided its normal accounts in order to cover its bills for fire prevention and control?
It's hard to imagine how these services are being cut when we're running a $1.8 trillion deficit this year. Clearly the priorities of our current FedGov admin are askew.
Unlikely. It's easy to find out where federal spending goes as it is all public. The biggest outlays are for health care, education, and social security and other pensions. I don't hear much call for less spending in any of those areas from people who actually want to be elected.
I say convert it all to dispersed camping. Leave the zoos, I mean national parks, to the common overcrowding. Let us have our forests back. It’s obvious that their policies have led to many of it burning down in mega fires that get so hot it kills every living thing in its path.
While you're right, undeniably there are many parks where fencing and parking lots have desertified or made unsightly much of what is in and around the "preserved" areas. Very sad.
USFS campgrounds are setup (generally) in places to reduce the damage caused by the public, because given enough people, the ‘public’ becomes abusive and we can’t have nice things. And in many areas, there will always more enough people that it will cross that threshold, regardless of what anyone calls the place.
USFS campgrounds in truly remote areas excepted, but any available camping near a highway is going to be a public safety hazard quickly without someone responsible for keeping it clean and somewhat organized/policed.
USFS ‘managed’ campgrounds generally were setup where there was already a problem area.
So are you proposing Rangers sit there and drive anyone away trying to do what they want to do? Or we turn these spots into National parks? Because just saying ‘dispersed camping’ doesn’t work either without someone sitting there enforcing it.
This pattern has been played out time and time again. The next steps will be:
"Camp bathrooms are always so dirty, and there's never anyone to staff to help!"
"How can the bureaucracy fail so badly, I don't know why we even pay for the USFS if this is the best they can muster"
"We should privatize this. Maybe we could even sell naming rights. Colgate campgrounds, anyone?"
"(Private companies continue to run shitty camp, citing 'hey, at least we're better than the USFS')"
"Remember how the USFS failed so badly? You can't trust the government to do anything!"
It's been the playbook of every government agency that has not been funded properly for about a generation now (thanks, Reagan). Slowly defund a service so the quality degrades, then complain about the quality and say you couldn't possibly fund the service if the quality is that low.
It drives me up the wall how bleeding obvious this is, time and time again, and yet, here we are, doing it again to the USFS, one of the most important agencies we have in (for instance) ensuring people have access to nature, preventing wildfires, managing our timber stocks, and sequestering carbon.
But this is the government failing! What's more, privatizing it to buddies with uncompetitive corrupt bidding processes and terrible contracts would also be government failure.
See, there is a difference between 'government' as in the workers who make the government run daily, and 'government' as in the politicians that make the policies.
The parent poster you replied to is speaking about the first, and you are speaking about the second.
No I'm not, I'm talking about the entire machine of government. Politicians don't make decisions in isolation. Bureaucrats and public servants aren't immune from incompetence or corruption.
No. They certainly enter into and administer contracts with private companies that are unfit, incompetent, and corrupt though. I've seen it more than once.
You didn't actually believe elected politicians all personally carry out the bidding and contract process and oversee the projects themselves, hopefully.
The person you responded to was making the point that by underfunding government agencies, then they couldn't do their jobs properly and then that would be evidence that government was ineffective at doing that job, which would be used to rationalize privatizing that job.
Then you said that it was the government which was responsible for doing that in the first place so that is evidence that the government is bad at its job.
I then pointed out that there are policy makers in government, and employees of government, and that the two have separate responsibilities.
Are you saying that employee corruption and private contracts are directly responsible for government agencies being given inadequate funding and staff so that they cannot be effective?
I seems to me that policy makers cutting the budget or not allocating enough of a budget for staffing would be responsible for this, and that private contracting is more of an effect of not being able to hire adequate staff.
The thread is right here to read. The attempted point was basically that privatization is bad, but the poster made up this convoluted scenario that seemed to miss the fact that this is a government service, and in any case horrible and corrupt privatization contracts are made by governments.
> Are you saying that employee corruption and private contracts are directly responsible for government agencies being given inadequate funding and staff so that they cannot be effective?
Also no. I'm saying what I wrote, no more or less.
That scenario has been used since the Reagan administration to destroy government services. If you want to say that it hasn't, then argue for that. Don't bring up unrelated issues related to contracts and corruption. Address the 'convoluted scenario'.
> Also no. I'm saying what I wrote, no more or less.
> But this is the government failing!
So you are saying that defunding government is a government failure. Is there another way to read that?
I can't do all your work for you. If you want to say something, why don't you say it, instead of repeating 'the thread is there, read it' when you wrote one sentence and then refused any given interpretation of it.
It is like asking a child what they want and they repeat the same ambiguous thing over and over.
I have decided either you have no idea what you mean or you do not care to make it known, so, good luck with that.
> That scenario has been used since the Reagan administration to destroy government services. If you want to say that it hasn't, then argue for that. Don't bring up unrelated issues related to contracts and corruption. Address the 'convoluted scenario'.
That "scenario" of government incompetence and corruption makes for government waste and poor services yes. I didn't bring up anything unrelated.
> So you are saying that defunding government is a government failure. Is there another way to read that?
Trying to put words in my mouth and taking wild stabs in the dark or deliberately misconstructing what I am saying is not "doing all my work", lol. DOn't do the stupid internet arguing style of "Oh so you're saying ...". I'm saying what I'm saying, if you're unclear about it just ask a normal proper question.
Continuing to say 'I am saying what I am saying' without clarifying anything despite repeated request while scolding me for being stupid after specifically asked you what else it could mean is hands down the the most asinine thing I have heard from anyone on the whole internet for this past month.
>It's been the playbook of every government agency that has not been funded properly for about a generation now
Has the funding stagnated or has the mandate of these organizations expanded.
Way back when Regan was cutting things the median USFS camp ground "with bathrooms" probably had an outhouse and the fire rings were probably literally old truck rims tossed on the ground, If a camper wanted toilet paper or a grill they brought. And when they wanted to move the outhouse or add more campsites they probably didn't do a formalized environmental impact study (even if done in house that sort of stuff still costs something) because that wasn't considered within the scope of their jobs. Funding has not kept pace.
These things develop over a long period of time and much of this mentality was planted by Reagan (and other conservative economists, mostly inspired by Reagan). The push to privatization is a slow process. We're seeing it catch up in many areas, particularly education. In the next coming decades, I'm not confident free public education will be viable or even available.
This partisanism is useless. I'm not a democrat, I'm not a republican, but it's absolutely clear that Reagan represented a policy change that every admin thereafter has been happy to uphold.
For everything that isn't social security, medicare, or the military, continued federal support requires explicitly convincing enough members of Congress that it is important so that they will campaign in their committees for even basic inflation-level funding increases to be included in the next budget. National Park Service has a backlog of billions of dollars in maintenance it knows it needs to do across the US, but Congress won't give them the money to do it. They'll toss $18 billion to Israel though even while Israeli politicians and the Israeli public and Israeli lobbying groups in the US criticizes the US for not being generous or supportive enough and gets involved in domestic US politics. We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to.
> We need a serious talk about the strings our very generous foreign aid needs to come attached to
You’re exemplifying the problem. NPS and foreign aid funding aren’t competing with each other. They’re both rounding errors in the grand scheme. But everyone has their hobby horse that they have or must cut so we get some oscillation.
Non-defense US federal spending dwarfs defense spending, for whatever it's worth. The US is essentially a benefits management firm with a standing army.
Social Security is not an expense of the government. Well, for the most part. It’s a pension plan that people pay into. Similarly for Medicare. People pay into it before retirement. Then at a certain age they get this insurance benefit. Private insurers will not insure the elderly. If anything you should characterize this as a private insurance industry subsidy. It allows insurers to offload their riskiest clients to another entity.
Your characterization is badly wrong.
EDIT: Until recently Social Security took in more money than it paid out. It’s run by the government so its expenditures are counted as a budget item. But it is a sound pension system whose defects can be easily fixed if a certain party would actually govern. It is not the largest expense by the government. It’s just that it is a government run pension system. It’s not an entitlement either.
This is incorrect per the US Supreme Court e.g. Flemming v Nestor in 1960. Social Security contributions are purely an income tax like any other, it is explicitly neither a pension nor insurance plan. Contributions create no obligation for the government to give you anything in return, same as the other income taxes you pay. The government largely treats it as tax revenue.
It is intentionally (mis)represented as a pension plan where contributions are connected to benefits but that fiction is solely to maintain popular political support, they can disqualify citizens from eligibility at any time regardless of contributions and, on occasion, have.
The main issue with Social Security is that most people in prior generations took far more out than they contributed, in part because it wasn’t really a requirement since it wasn’t actually a pension.
Notably, if the gov’t starts making pensioners subsist on cat food because they refuse to honor their obligations, hopefully a whole lot of senators will be out of jobs ASAP.
SS is explicitly sold as a pension. If it stops acting like one, there will be consequences - even if it means rewriting laws.
If the Supreme's deem it so then it must be. Are there any decisions they've gotten wrong?
Your benefit is based on what you pay in. It pays out less than what it takes in. If it were privatized you and the Supremes would call it a pension. It acts like a pension, quacks like a pension and is a pension.
If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could. If it did this, keeping in place Social Security “taxes” that would then go to the new corporation, we would not consider Social Security a budget expense. Being government owned or private doesn’t matter in terms of how the expenditures should be considered. This is why Social Security and Medicare are not part of the normal budget negotiations at budget time. These are obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them.
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
> obligations that need to be paid to the people who paid for them
Everyone pays taxes. Social Security and Medicare obligations are treated differently because of politics. Otherwise, they’re like any other expense: the Congress can amend them at will. (As is currently expected, e.g. with Social Security benefits beginning to be curtailed from 2035.)
I agree on Medicare. But it's plausible that the Supreme Court could find government meddling on Social Security unconstitutional, because similar decisions have already been made in other countries.
In Finland, the mandatory pension system is similar to Social Security, except that it aims to replace ~60% of earned income without any limits. Pensions based on past contributions have been established as constitutionally protected private property. If the system seems to be out of balance, the basic tools are raising the contribution rates without increasing the benefits and increasing the retirement age for younger generations. Any changes that would substantially lower the pensions that have already been earned would have to go through the same process as constitutional amendments. (There is also a third tool: increasing the tax rates for all retirement income, regardless of the source. But that is understandably unpopular.)
> If the government decided to make Social Security a private corporation it could
No, it couldn’t. There were promises made with the full faith and credit of the United Stares.
I'm not a lawyer so I'll rephrase. In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is.
Congress can amend them at will.
All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years.
> In an alternate universe the U.S. government created a corporation to run Social Security. It mandated that people participate in it. Everyone called it a pension system because that it what it is
If the U.S. then explicitly guaranteed that corporation's liabilities, sure.
> All pension systems are subject to amendment. Many pension systems have been amended over the years
No. Many state legislatures, for instance, are constitutionally prohibited from fucking with certain obligations, commonly pensions.
> entire idea of a truly guaranteed pension is not feasible and always leads to a pyramid scheme and then insolvency
Sure. But the point of full faith and credit is it's irreversible. (Actually, the point of credit, period. You can't declare your past debts pyramid schemes and unilaterally absolve yourself of them.)
Irreversibly, like all political concepts, is a fiction that humans choose to believe in rather than a law of physics. If social security became insolvent while the US was distracted by some other future national crisis, I'm certain that the people of the future would find a way to cut the pension while staying within the letter of the law (probably via inflation or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRgRz3nSG7o).
They're not part of negotiations because there was such a backlash during the Reagan era. Part of his campaign platform was to reel in the entitlements. Then he discovered that people like their entitlements. George Bush tried to privatize Social Security, and the idea went nowhere in a hurry.
The value of Social Security is the expectation that it will be bailed out by the government if it goes bust, for instance if the trust fund is depleted.
You do not understand how this all works. Social Security "spending" does not add to the deficit. It is not the source of any budgetary imbalances or of any structural budgetary issues in the United States. It is a pension system that is funded by workers that happens to be run by the government.
Social Security is not a pension plan, it's pay-as-you-go and barring massive tax increases and/or benefit cuts, its collapse is more-or-less inevitable in the next couple decades because of locked-in demographic changes.
The Social Security Retirement benefit is a monthly check that replaces part of your income when you reduce your hours or stop working altogether.
Most people would refer to this as a “pension”. Call it whatever you want to. The fact is that its issues are easily fixable and your benefit is based on how much you put into it.
This is not a very useful semantic argument. Pension programs routinely pay out to workers more than what was paid in; that's practically the definition of a defined-benefit pension plan. Either way: it's money the government pays out.
I've been hearing that since the eighties. Congress can change contribution rates and/or benefit rates at any time to keep it solvent, just like they have in the past.
Beyond a certain point, the working population will not be able to afford to pay for the retired population. It's a mathematical inevitability unless birth rates increase or people stop living as long any more (both probably impossible). Maybe the benefits could be eliminated/reduced, but this is politically untenable because older people generally vote while younger people don't.
immigration solves the birth rate problem, and is one of the big reasons why illegal immigrants is a hilariously terrible wag-the-dog wedge issue. make them legal, tax them, and have them contribute to the system as well.
Can was kicked too far, it is not easy to fix. It's easy to make the mathematical problem go away by reducing benefits AND raising taxes. Nonstarter. We will need a tragedy to illicit change.
That 13% is still more than the next 9 highest military budgets in the world combined. We're not financing our military, we're lining the pockets of the military industrial complex, on the taxpayer's dime.
Many/most countries have national tax and not (any or as much) state taxes. To compare across nations you’d need to divide the expenditure by the national sum of the taxes of the various government levels.
The military industrial complex is a socialist jobs program, both for those directly on the DOD's payroll and for the employees of the firms that contract with the government under the auspices of the military.
To put a finer point on it, VA care for Irag+Afghanistan is expected to drive the cost of these two wars to something in the ballpark of $2 Trillion USD.
Like I went to Iraq twice and I'm only 40. They're gonna be covering me for probably another ~40 years, and the US is owned lock and stock by healthcare companies that sure as hell aren't going to lower the costs of medicines.
It is a moral imperative to include the cost of looking after the people you feed through a meat grinder once you have ground them up and spat them out in the calculation of how much the machine costs.
A big chunk of that healthcare would just be under Medicare/Medicaid anyways though, so it doesn't seem reasonable to ascribe all veteran health spending as military.
It does when a huge portion of the injuries military personnel sustain are quite different from the genteel public, and wouldn't have happened if that person decided to be a teacher instead.
Seems kinda like we're talking about my $1,300/mo budget for candles and you're pointing out "yeah, but your mortgage is $5,000/mo, for whatever it's worth; you're basically just a homeowner with a candle budget".
Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment. Defense spending is largely discretionary.
Social security is not a debt repayment and the point I'm making would stand if you took it out of the budget, even though you shouldn't. Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
> Social security is, even if not legally then practically, a debt repayment.
How is it not practically a debt repayment?
The common understanding is "you pay money in, you get money back when you retire". Do you think you could cut it without widespread backlash? Do you think you could cancel it without borderline revolt?
"It's not a debt. It's just that if you don't pay me I'll kill you."
The US Supreme Court asserted in 1960 that no one is entitled to Social Security. There is no connection between contributions and future benefits. Many people are under the misapprehension that this is not the case.
Without a doubt it would not be popular if the government eliminated some or all of Social Security. But it would be strictly legal and Constitutional, popular backlash notwithstanding. This is an important distinction. There are no Constitutional protections that ensure Social Security benefits. Ignorance of this fact doesn’t change its reality.
The constitutional protection is that if Congress tried to do that, they would be replaced in the next election. As stupid as they sometimes appear to be, they are not that stupid.
You pay a tax. You receive a benefit. The benefit's connection to your tax payment is nominal at best. It's one of many direct benefits the government awards, none of which are debts.
It would be more accurate to call it insurance than a debt, because the tax is called "Federal Insurance Contribution Act." The insurance product that Social Security is most similar to is an annuity, a contract that specifies that you pay in and then the insurance pays out when you reach a certain age.
I would be pretty upset if I paid into an annuity plan my whole adult working life and then the insurer reneged on their obligation. Social security not paying out would be even more upsetting, because you're legally obligated to pay for it, whereas buying an annuity is a choice.
I dont know how we can know this. My understanding is that the pentagon has an unknown total budget. Once you wrap up all the CIA, NSA type stuff too I'm not sure how we can know this?
The DoD has a "black budget", but that's money you don't get a breakdown of, not money you don't know about: it's voted in by Congress as a blind total. Total spending is profoundly tilted towards non-defense spending (even more so if you include state and local government spending, but that's not germane to the Forest Service) --- the amount of "secret" money going to defense, if it existed, would have to be economy-breaking to alter the balance.
Not really. When counting not just DoD spending but DoE nuclear weapons spending, NASA (now Space Force) and satellite spending, VA and veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending and so forth, military spending takes up a large chunk of the pie. It is only small if defined very, very narrowly (which is what they, and you, do).
They call it mandatory spending but this is a misnomer. When you pay into a pension system and pre-pay for insurance it’s expected that you receive the benefits you paid for. That it is government run is irrelevant to how it should be viewed. Social Security is not an expense of the government. It’s a government run pension system.
This is not at all how the accounting for Social Security, Medicare, and other mandatory spending programs work. Generally, Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in (invariably they do with Medicare). And, obviously, everyone receiving Medicaid and SSDI do. I don't think this technical point about Social Security is going to salvage the argument that the US pays more in defense than anything else.
Apparently you don't understand how pensions work. Take a 401(k). Under normal circumstances what you take out of the 401(k) far exceeds what you put into it. This is what happens with investments generally speaking.
Saying, "Social Security beneficiaries receive more than they paid in..." indicates you don't know what you are talking about. And, believe it or not, Social Security does invest money.
And yes, it does salvage the argument. Defense spending (all of it not just DOD) is the largest expense of the government. This is expected when you are the hegemon.
Defense spending isn't even the majority of discretionary spending.
It's simply an enormous, vast economy, and 13% of a vast economy is a huge number, large enough to outspend the next several countries combined. That's all.
Regardless, social security is funded totally separately from the rest of the budget, with a dedicated tax, and does not contribute to the deficit. It’s typically excluded from budget discussions, for that reason.
You could change the law to axe social security, keep its highly-regressive tax, and instead use that to pay for other stuff—but lots of things are possible with a change in the law, and that’s not possible now without such a change. That’s not something that can happen as an ordinary part of the budgeting process.
I'm not saying I like everything about federal spending (or even defense spending), just that the argument that we spend most of our money on defense (or even a plurality of it) is false.
For this reason it’s pretty unusual to see an analysis of the US budget aimed at policy nerds that includes Social Security. Almost all serious discussion about it excludes that.
You tend to only see it included when the full total of money disbursed by the government from any pot and for any purpose is expressly relevant (it’s usually not) or in writing that is not aimed at policy nerds, but at everyday voters (to convince them whatever batshit crazy spending we’re doing in the author’s preferred non-social-spending item isn’t bad after all, usually)
Agreed, although seeing as the economic plans laid out by both current presidential candidates would result in an increase in deficit the political will to do so does not seem to be there. In reality it feels like the spending is just being shifted elsewhere.
They literally use tanks to keep avalanches off roads. Here is a video near Seattle of the Dept of Transportation using a couple M-60 Sherman tanks to launch artillery into the snowpack in an effort to control avalanches along the Highway 2 corridor.
Nitpick: the M-60 is a Patton tank, not a Sherman. The M-4 Sherman was the primary medium tank used by the US during WW2. The M-60 is much more modern, used by the US military until 1997, and several countries still use them today. I only bring that up because an M-60 tank still running today is perfectly normal, while a Sherman that’s still running would be much more unusual!
Interesting fact, but is it really necessary to go to those lengths? Surely something like a handgun or detonated explosive would be cheaper and just as effective (though less fun). I don't think this use case needs the vehicle to be armored.
A pistol would be hilariously inadequate. As for "detonating explosives", what do you think they are doing? They are shooting high-explosive artillery rounds from a tank that detonate on impact.
As for "why artillery", how do you plan on getting explosives into the snowpack, especially under conditions of severe avalanche risk? Those areas of the mountains are inaccessible by vehicle even in the summertime. A tank can drive on a road and deliver the explosives where needed. They often target 20+ separate snowfields so being able to do it in a timely and efficient manner matters.
While the armor doesn't contribute much, it happens to be what the artillery gun is attached to. It would cost far more to rig some special-purpose vehicle. Sherman tanks are free, the government has loads of them lying around waiting to be scrapped, you just pay for fuel and upkeep.
Handguns don't have the range or power. Explosives are used, but you have to get them up there, which means either schleping up the mountain or using a helicopter, which is wildly more expensive.
The US normally gives Israel around $3 billion dollars a year to buy our weapons -- they are in fact required to spend it on buying weapons from US defense industry. It's kind of an, um, gift certificate.
This year they gave Israel $18 billion, so much more than usual.
In one sense, all of this is actually a jobs program for the US defense industry, since all that money is required to turn around as weapons purchases from US companies.
Even $18 billion is less than 1% of the US non-military budget, this isn't the reason we "can't afford" the USFS, or the reason to stop giving weapons to Israel -- the US certainly can afford both. (The reason to stop supplying Israel is that those weapons are actually destabilizing the region and encouraging violence and gross human rights violations).
But, no, Israel "buys" US weapons with US money, they are indeed a gift.
I think two different accounting methods are being conflated here which leads to the huge $3B vs $18B difference. Congress periodically authorizes spending for military aid to Israel and other countries. Later, the executive branch actually disburses that aid. In recent years, the US has on average given Israel $3B. This year, congress authorized an additional $18B to be disbursed through 2026 - which is what recent news stories about US giving Israel $18B are referring to, as far as I know. You would end up double-counting every dollar, if you did the math that way on an ongoing basis.
But if you know of a clean source of data on the actual amount of aid provided each year, that would be useful. I’d guess the number this year would be a lot more than $3B given the physical reality of tons of expensive offensive and defense missiles fired.
OK good point that the $18 billion is not all to be spent this year, thanks for correction, I didn't realize that, it is good to be clear! The best source i have for understanding this stuff is the study from professors at Brown University I linked above, but I haven't read/assimilated the whole thing yet.
But my main point is we DO give Israel money to buy our weapons, they are indeed a gift. I don't know if Israel spends any of their own budget on US weapons -- my guess would be very little, because they would _rather_ be funding their own Israeli domestic defense industry (which is of course quite developed), they spend our military aid $$ on US defense industry because it is required as a condition of the gift.
(There was a time in the past, when Israel, alone of all military aid recipients, was allowed to spend a portion of military aid on their own domestic defense industry, I guess becuase the US wanted to support the develpment of that specially among all other recipients of US military aid. It worked, Israel now sells $billions of weapons to autocratic Arab regimes in the middle-east and north africa: Notably Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco. Saudi Arabia would love in on that too. But those provisions expired a few years ago, now all US military aid to Israel has to be spent on weapons from the US, just like other US military aid recipients.)
It prob got initially downvoted and then later up-voted just cause it's so political, and i mentioned my personal support for ending US weapons supply to Israel, and people vote based on their political agreement or disagreement with sentiments, explicit or implied, but here I was explicit.
Most of these crews were already short handed and in districts relying extensively on labor from youth conservation corps and private contractors. The private trail building sector has exploded in the last decade or so. More often than not the USFS (and other agencies with some variability) trail crews will work on high profile projects or simply as liaisons/project managers for the private outfits. Even though the work is often just scratching at dirt, building /maintaining trails and the structures they rely on is technical trades work and needs a local culture to maintain standards. Funding solutions should look towards the outdoor recreation industry and cutting fat in bloated non-profit admin. They benefit from selling the lifestyle and all its accessories while contributing relatively little to resource maintenance.
There are volunteer groups that do a large percentage of the trail maintenance in some areas. There is the Pacific Crest Trail Association with their local chapters. In Washington state, there is the Washington Trails association. In Oregon, there is Trailkeepers of Oregon, who I volunteer with almost every weekend. There are also numerous local groups across the western US.
What portion of the national budget that is devoted to spaceflight would it take to shower the USFS in riches? I'd much rather see it going to the latter.
Spaceflight is not what you want to be picking as a point of comparison if you want to talk about funding government agencies.
> The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official. That's more than NASA's budget.
What we pay for what we get is insane though. Imagine what SpaceX (or other enterprising group of engineers) could do with a guaranteed $20B of annual funding.
How exactly is it useful? Seems to be only rather fringe science experiments going on (neat, of course!) and vague pre-work for going multiplanetary, which IMO is not a super compelling idea upon inspection.
Honest curiosity here, I don't know what a lot of the purpose is!
I understand historically that it has produced incredibly valuable "exhaust", but is that really the strategy? Is that the purpose? Do we have a reason to believe we will always (and are today receiving) positive ROI, even aside from reaching any valuable "destination", so to speak?
There’s a lot of good that shows up all across the economy from satellites.
For example, how important is weather prediction to you? Genuinely, I’m not sure how much it is to me, but the value isn’t nothing.
GPS is another thing like that: it’s only a little bit useful to me, but it enables a lot of economic activity (like farm automation). And the fact that getting lost went from a regular thing that happens to rarely is probably at least somewhat valuable.
Remote telecom is another thing. For sure, there are diminishing returns, but going from no access to some access for very remote places (think ships at sea, polar research stations, oil rigs, very rural communities) is probably valuable. How many ships haven’t sunk because they got a satellite weather update?
You’re absolutely right, it’s not a strategy to invest randomly. And it’s quite possible that we’re over-investing in space. But there are direct returns in addition to the “exhaust”.
Ah, satellites yes I agree. I wasn't thinking of this critique against putting things in space, but against manned missions to outer space. I'm all for sending up robots and sending those to other planets to figure out the situation.
Manned spaceflight has brought and continues to bring many important advances in science. I would argue that the science dividends of the ISS (which is mainly a research station) are quite worth the relativly low costs. How familiar are you with the science currently being done on the ISS? It often doesnt get heavily talked up, so I suspect your "fringe" assertion is coming drom a place of ignorance. Do you have speficic experiments that you think are a waste of time and money?
Manned expeditions to the moon are harder to justify. However, given the track record of technological and scientific payoffs, betting against a positive return, if even from the "exhaust" isn't safe. I do wish that Artemis wasn't our approach though.
FYI we spend more money subsidizing fossil fuels than we do on space travel. If we can afford handouts to oil companies that are killing our planet, we can afford to pay for the research that will help save it.
> How familiar are you with the science currently being done on the ISS? It often doesnt get heavily talked up, so I suspect your "fringe" assertion is coming drom a place of ignorance. Do you have speficic experiments that you think are a waste of time and money?
If you'll recall from my initial comment: "How exactly is it useful?... Honest curiosity here, I don't know what a lot of the purpose is!"
Which you haven't answered.
P.S. I'm not the one who said spaceflight as all, though yes I did interpret it as manned spaceflight, as I just stated
I thought that most technically interested folks saw growing into the stars as a worthy endeavor. It is indeed the only way for humanity to survive in the (long) long term. I’m surprised to see that there are so many people here that don’t share that view.
Space is way, way, way bigger and way, way, way less hospitable than "technically interested" folks on here understand. And being multiplanetary isn't really a great hedge against the types of risks that are existential to a species that's capable of being multiplanetary.
I can't speak for most people, but I am aware of the size and inhospitality of space, which is why I think we should be be studying and reaching into it now, to give us as much as time as possible to succeed.
I really don't think you are. Without looking it up: how far away is Proxima Centauri and how long do you think it'd take to reach it given our current propulsion technology?
Obviously propulsion will continue to get better and better, but it's a good way to anchor oneself back to technical reality.
What's your gut feeling on how long it'd take to reach our nearest neighbor if we were to travel at the top speed of the fastest spacecraft we've ever made?
I don't know the answers to these questions confidently without looking them up, and if you think that means my opinion isn't worth much then so be it. I have no influence on space exploration beyond being a voting US citizen if it makes you feel better.
I believe that Proxima Centauri is ~10 light years away, and that it would take tens of millions of years to travel that distance based on current propulsion.
Looks like I wasn't wildly off.
I still think that putting humans in space is a worthwhile endeavor, and that the amount we spend on it relative to many other things is not disproportionately high.
This isn't an appropriate rhetorical technique. For HN. If you want to make a point about the size of space, make it without demeaning the intelligence and understanding of the people you are talking to.
You think we wouldn't have bothered with GPS and imaging if we weren't also firing humans up there?
There may be some cross talk in this thread where some people are talking about space programs in general and other people are talking about sending people to space.
This is exactly my question. I wish I could better justify the value of spaceflight, but I’m wholly unconvinced. The arguments for investing in it always seem like vague references to the future with no specific value delivered today.
to be fair, almost all technological progress started out as something vague with no obvious purpose. not the best example but a famous one is number theory which was admired by the likes of hardy specifically because of its supposed uselessness - they considered this a feature. now everything encryption is based on it. but yes, i think space flight is a billionaire's fever dream and the rest cares about it because it is kind of cool or whatever. i think it distracts us from here and now. it's stupid to argue we need mars to save the species when inhabiting mars would be much more difficult and unpleasant than make do with this planet here. also it's mostly just military arms race disguised by peaceful and civil motivation.
Also a lot of wastes of money started as a waste of money... so it's hard to make heuristic judgments from your first observation (which of course I agree with).
Technically it was a forecast of your reason for the purposes of gambling since your position was irrational. You claim to have a different irrational reason for hating on space spending so out with it.
Why on earth would you try and take money away from spaceflight rather than the host of other ridiculous things we fund. How about what percentage of oil subsidies?
Military and healthcare are the astronomical expenses that dwarf both space and the usfs.
Both are plagued with inefficiencies but the military is largely the most useless expense because we aren't at any huge risk that justifies this level of spending.
An opinion piece from the head of the Atlantic Council, whose job is basically to convince Americans they need to have lots of defense spending, is hardly something I’d take at face value. It’s more revealing of where that particular set of (heavily foreign-funded) lobbyists are trying to steer us, than anything else.
the huge risk that justifies this level of spending is maintaining the global socio-economic system.
and that may not have been in jeopardy a decade ago but there are groups actively, openly, and unambiguously aimed at destroying that, e.g. Russia and China's "no limits partnership". Which has show that it will invade and annihilate people.
The middle east is also popping off, and you have the Yemenis shooting at cargo vessels off the coast.
One potential alternative that springs to mind is to repurpose these lands for use with AI datacenters and power generation for AI applications. Locate an AI data center in these forested regions, that could help pay for the workers needed to maintain the land. Tesla Optimus robots could be made to do the jobs of at least 2-3 of these forest workers, and could be shut down and stored when not in use. This will eliminate the significant expense of having to seasonally offload workers, as it really changes it to be more of a storage vs. labor problem.
I’m not comfortable with the government giving more corporate welfare to some of the richest companies in humanity.
Also really not comfortable with giving more welfare to a single individuals company that routinely breaks the law and brags about firing unionized workers.
> The only exception to the hiring freeze are the roughly 11,300 firefighters hired by the agency every year.
You probably wouldn't need first responders if you could hire & not fire all the people you have proactively managing your lands. (So many face-palms.)
This article from a backpacking website is better written and reported than most major newspaper stories I read. Good quotes, and even edited. Probably fact checked too! Kudos.
For those who are disappointed in this, don't blame Ukraine or defense spending, blame Republicans. The Forest Service budget is set by the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies subcommittee which is majority Republican. Their press release on the FY25 bill is here:
If you don't believe they're partisan, read through the "key takeaways" section. They are responsible for this budget shortfall. Their games of government shutdown chicken are also the reason the budget hasn't even been finalized yet.
Blame both Democrats and Republicans. There is more than enough money to go around in this nation, but they’re all too busy sending it abroad whether direct spending, frivolous military deployments, or subsidizing our own defense industry.
I'm not following your argument. Even if there were less spending on these other items, there is no indication Republicans would support any more funds for the Forest Service.
> “I moved across the country to work here, for a seasonal job,” she says. “We have people who have worked here for 10 years as seasonals, and made a career out of these positions. They trusted that the jobs wouldn’t go away.”
I suspect the other part of these careers involve seasonal work that covers a different part of the year, such as working at ski resorts.
Often the US hires young Americans to do these jobs. It is huge for helping young people with job training and class mobility. Without these jobs it will be that much harder to find a job with no experience in the outdoor industry.
Although I downvoted you, I admit having a grudging admiration for people like you who are openly and smugly conceited. Honestly, that's much better than those who hide their real sentiment in a cloak of high-emotional IQ yet sociopathic virtue signaling obfuscation.
> Even with these sobering financial details, it’s clear that the agency’s decision to balance the books by cutting seasonal jobs came as a shock to many employees.
Time for this to stop being a shock. The country needs some harsh belt tightening and stories like these will become commonplace if real reform is practiced.
I don't really know what reform you're expecting. It doesn't really make sense that we could afford to hire people to maintain a trail system in the '60s and '70s, and now, with 50+ additional years of economic growth and ostensibly increased productivity, we can't. I suspect it has less to do with needed belt tightening, so much as mandated administrative bloat plus endless tax cuts.
I wonder why a truthful statement like that is being downvoted?
I could eat steak at a lavish restaurant every night but I realize that if I did so my credit card balance would eventually come to the point I would be using the total of my income to pay the interest. Instead I do the sustainable option and buy groceries and cook at home.
Continuing deficit spending at the federal level will eventually bankrupt our government and make this a worse world to live in.
This would be like eating steak at a lavish restaurant every night (defense spending), and someone else (USFS) eats a spoonful of beans, and then you saying 'we need some belt-tightening'.
We don't, you do. The USFS is already working with a tightened belt.
It's not even that. It's more like eating at a lavish restaurant every night, and paying with pieces of paper that you just printed your picture on. Eventually that game might indeed end, but it has much more to do with other factors than basic arithmetic.
Talk about deficit spending is basically nonsense from the vein of fake austerity politics of the past several decades, whose real purpose was to starve most government functionality while distracting from the many trillions of dollars given out as artificially low interest loans, basically shameless handouts to the financial industry and asset holders (see: the everything bubble).
Raise taxes back to what they were back in the 1950s when the top marginal rate was over 90%.
Close off the methods rich people use to legally lower their true tax rate. Buffet famously pointed out his tax rate was lower than his secretary's. Bezos back in 2011 when he was worth $18 billion got a $4,000 tax credit because he reported investment losses.
Why are we paying for Bezos' steak?
Fund the IRS to go after rich people, instead of targeting poor people simply because it's cheaper and easier than going after wealthy ones. ("we estimate that each dollar spent on auditing an individual in the 70–80th percentiles produces a return of $9.06. Each dollar spent auditing an individual in the 90–99th percentiles produces a return of $12.48.", https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31376/w313...)
Create a global wealth tax.
Stop paying for all this ridiculously expensive road transportation system and housing sprawl on the backs of our children's future.
And yes, stop eating steak. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
Look at Federal tax receipts from the 1950's. Rates change but the amount of tax revenue taken in - as a percent of GDP - doesn't.
Maybe you could change who's paying that money but I doubt it. In any case getting a bigger chunk of GDP into the governments hands seems like a fool's errand to me.
You could try to grow GDP but that's hardly better. Anyone who tells you they know how to make that grow faster is selling something.
Your own words show you understand that the tax burden has shifted away from the richest people.
Don't focus so much on GDP, when the increasing Gini coefficient tells you it's unevenly distributed.
It's especially odd given how single-income families were more common in the 1950s, so a lot of adults had no salary.
If we really wanted to raise the GDP, use tax dollars to fund preschools. Unpaid parents (usually mothers) watching the kids for free isn't included in GDP. Paid teachers are. And those mothers can get a job, raising the GDP even more, all paid by a progressive taxation and wealth tax to help lower Gini.
Eating steak every day is a fool's errand. The metaphor being used to justify austerity is even worse. I was explaining a reason why people might have downvoted that comment. That you have a different opinion is besides the point.
Can anyone explain the mission of USFS? Why does the US maintain a bunch of wilderness when it’s buried in debt. Why not use federal assets to generate income instead of burdening taxpayers with taxes & debt payments?
People who don't hike or use nature recreationally tend to view it as completely useless.
They do have a bit of a point. The asset isn't really being maintained. It's being maintained for human use as recreation. Overall you don't need to really maintain wilderness to preserve it. Overall you just leave it untouched.
You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
>You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
That would work until a mining company wanted to extract oxygen from Yellowstone Quartz and met with zero public opposition to making use of "empty land."
This is even more short term thinking and a bit of ignorance. Where do you think all of the ‘stuff’ around you came from? Everything starts as raw materials, most of them organic.
And besides how selfish would it be to preserve nothing for the future generations.
This is exact opposite of preservation, forests don’t preserve themselves since humans arrived! This line of thinking has lead to crazy intense wildfires. Even grasslands require regular maintenance.
Invasive species are the biggest problem. Fuel buildup is another. Ignoring the problem is the third.
Your claims are inconsistent. First you say I’m selfish then I prove to you I’m not by emphasizing my original claim was anything but selfish.
Now your claim is forests don’t preserve themselves since humans arrived?
First off my solution is to reverse the arrival of humans. Second your claims are inconsistent as they’ve changed.
I don’t think you’re maintaining a clear and consistent thought process you’re just attacking me from every possible angle. We should be having a discussion here, don’t get defensive.
It's a political problem. If people can't actually use the wilderness, you will lose public support for keeping the wilderness. It will all end up being sold to the highest bidder and destroyed.
Why does it need to be profitable to exist? Why does it need to generate income? Why can’t we be fine with subsidizing and paying for wilderness and public transportation? Because some well connected business man could charge us money for it and pocket the difference and still barely maintain it and sell it off to be developed into concrete malls?
If this is truly your opinion, I would imagine you would turn your attention to defense spending. I hear this line of thinking often, and almost every time it turns out the person is lying, sometimes even to themselves.
It's not the spending people have a problem with, it's the what.
So defund a small programs to help reach solvency even though it’s not wasteful and wouldn’t have an effect on solvency? Let corporations destroy the natural world in the name of financial gain? Yep more capitalism-only mindset. Still no reason to do this to the national parks.
It’s funny how funding weapons and things like endless TSA security theater is not ever criticized for their contribution to insolvency. The gain has been negligent. No clearly the problem is the education and parks that actually contribute good and real safety and security to the country.
Many parts of the US government have an egalitarian mission. Beyond USFS, there's the parks, flood insurance, education programs, grant making organizations (as people on this forum are very very aware of), land management and more.
You can object to the overall non-profit egalitarian mission (and I do in many cases) but it's not unique to the forest service.
I do wonder why the USFS hasn't been rolled into the Dept. of the Interior alongside e.g. the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. Putting it under the Dept. of Agriculture (as it is now) seems like it'd lead to some perverse incentives, and the overlap in mission and jurisdiction between the USFS and the BLM and NPS seems like it'd produce administrative/managerial redundancies (the cost of which would be better spent on the very jobs being cut right now).
There are really really weird organizational divisions. You have the DEA and the FDA very far apart despite one having the scientific expertise and the other having enforcement expertise. You have police in every branch of the government, and the DOJ for good measure. You have food stamps in the ag department as well.
the DEA doesn't need scientific expertise, they're NARCs who can cross state lines. they're cops -- law enforcement -- and they're there to enforce the law, not advise on it.
the FDA's job is to think about this stuff and provide recommendations and regulations. and a big part of their purview is Food, hence the F. Drugs are in the name too, but that's as much about the latest cancer medication as it as about street heroin.
All National Forests have a forestry plan that involves selling a certain amount of timber cut from the forest every year.
However, forest recreation (which obviously requires the forests to still have trees) also generates a lot of money — both for the local economy around the forest and via things like permits for the government itself.
Basically the goal is to maintain the forests as long term assets, not sell them off in one go.
First and foremost, reduce the scope and spending of the federal government by 90% .
Assuming that is healthy, activate leasing on federal land (USFS & BLM) to generate income. e.g. logging, petroleum, recreational leases, mining , etc.
For basically all future years, an even greater proportion (more than two thirds) of federal government spending will be for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (old and sick and poorer people).
You're confusing the budget (maintenance spending) with the value of the real estate assets. That is, all of the land, e.g. 95% of Nevada, about 70% of the entire western USA
If that land was generating income, we could pay off the entire $35+T debt in no time.
Oh I do know that Orwell was a lont time socialist (I cannot vouch for lifelong as I do not know how he felt coming out of the womb).
He also was very much opposed to authoritarian rule and one of the points of 1984 was to distrust how a government used words to mislead -like in what I quoted
The mission of the USFS is not to "maintain a bunch of wilderness". Its mission, and the reason is is under the Dept. of Agriculture, is to provide forest products in perpetuity to Americans.
close, and kudos for earnestly attempting to answer. Here's the mission from the USFS brochure
The mission of the US Forest Service (USFS) is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.
That's cool, I did not know about their mission statement. But I do know about the Organic Act of 1897, which is still the basis of the existence of the USFS, which states its own purpose, to remove all doubt:
"Public forest reservations are established to protect and improve the forests for the purpose of securing a permanent supply of timber for the people"
I see a lot of things that the Forest Service does listed but I don’t see the purpose of why they do them.
For example, this quote is not a mission, “The U.S. Forest Service is a federal agency that manages 193 million acres of land, an area about the size of Texas.”
It might be part of what they do to accomplish their mission, but it’s not a mission.
Could you quote the part of the article that makes their mission clear?
As a camp host I occasionally do these tasks when these employees are absent as well as my usual duties. For this I theoretically receive a small stipend. I say theoretically because the payroll operation is so understaffed it is five months behind in paying me.
Without the seasonal staff, I don't see any way the USFS can keep the campgrounds open as well as do many other functions.
I don't think many Americans understand how 40 years or so of declining agency budgets have hollowed out the staffing of many government agencies.
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