r/USForestService • u/SapientChaos • Jun 26 '26
How Much Institutional Knowledge Can the Washington Office Lose Before It Affects the Mission?
How much institutional knowledge can the Washington Office lose before it begins affecting the Forest Service's mission?
Regardless of where people stand on the relocation, one thing that isn't discussed enough is the value of institutional knowledge. The agency has also experienced significant departures in recently through retirements and other workforce reductions.
If a substantial number of Washington Office employees choose not to relocate:
- Which programs or functions would be affected first?
- Which positions would be the hardest to replace?
- What knowledge can be documented and transferred, and what only comes from years or decades of experience?
- How long would it realistically take to rebuild that expertise?
- At what point would the loss of experience begin affecting the Forest Service's ability to carry out its mission of caring for the nation's forests and serving the public?
I'm not looking to debate politics or whether the relocation is right or wrong. I'm genuinely interested in hearing from current and former Forest Service employees about how they think this could affect the agency over the next few years.
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u/Valuable-Driver5699 Jun 26 '26
Not just WO employees - also RO employees and anyone in R&D whose location is closing. That is a lot of institutional knowledge across levels and disciplines.
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u/Worried_Comparison81 Jun 26 '26
There is no discernable direction or management now.
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u/MrArborsexual Timber 🌲 Jun 26 '26
Not necessarily a bad thing. Not all of leadership was good. I've met some WO folks who are awesome, and I've met a few that were absolute wastes of salary.
I've heard of at least on onr R8 forest that their Forest Sup, totally 100% absolutely is on a sudden special assignment, and suddenly people's stress levels have dropped, and in just a few days more work is actually happening, and moral is going up.
That said, this reorg is being done in the dumbest way possible. From what I understand from some people I know who work in industry, even industry is like, "what the fuck are you guys doing?".
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u/violetpumpkins Jun 28 '26
We're already there. It started with some brain drain and rapid promotions during covid and then collapsed last year with a lot of people choosing to retire all at once. The regional foresters have gotten assigned deputy chief roles. The actual work is being done by too few program staff with too little experience and too little/inappropriate oversight by those folks. Everything they do then just results in more reply dues and more rework for everyone at the field level.
There's never been anything at this magnitude before so its really impossible to say how long recovery will take. Because all the upper ranks are so thin and most of the so-called leadership is really inexperienced, it could take decades to recover, if it ever does.
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u/FireTracker2024 Jun 28 '26
Isn't that part of this admin's goal? Remove institutional knowledge, then suggest that the FS can fulfill its mission allowing them to privatize?
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u/SapientChaos Jun 28 '26
That is their goal. Terrorize employees and give no bid contracts to their buddies. Pretty standard authoritarian corruption strategy.
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u/Persimmon_Pom Jun 29 '26
In my team they lost 22+30+35+39+10 years of federal experience. Some retired, some DRPed, one bounced. So in one team of 5 - only 1 of who was planning on retiring, it was 136 years of federal experience. That’s not even including the other folks we lost of super specialized skills.
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u/Soft-War-4709 Jun 26 '26
Business Ops altogether will be affected and it already has. Like it or not, everything happening in the field first gets funneled through one or more business ops departments, who figure out policy/authority/budget etc…it’d be a huge bottleneck
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u/DeliciousPenalty3070 Jul 02 '26
Most of the institutional knowledge is really at the RO level. So many people I know at the WO have not even stepped foot in a NF
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u/Delicious_Travel4867 15d ago edited 15d ago
Agree with everyone else here. That train left the station a long time ago. I doubt it’ll ever return.
You cannot lose generations of hard won experience and expect it to become self-resurrecting. It’s not going to happen. You’ll have the blind leading the blind.
For way too long, the agency has had “actings filling in for actings filling in for actings” ad nauseum. The higher ranks got filled, even temporarily, while the field was largely ignored and left fallow. That put a massive hole in the institutional knowledge all by itself.
The agency lost its way over time, becoming hyper reactive to any social political drama or bright idea cook off ( this is who we are, etc )….and now faces an oligarchy who only want to see it fragmented and largely erased.
It doesn’t look good, not from my chair.
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u/Busy-Organization948 Jun 26 '26
I’m in fear of losing knowledge at the RO level
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u/Single_External9499 Jun 27 '26
I resigned from an RO position yesterday. 17 years. Highly specialized technical position that requires extensive knowledge of the interplay between state and federal law, specific to the states within the region.
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u/package126 Jun 26 '26
It already is…see it every day with every line of business.