A Serious Abnegation of Responsibility : Forest Service officials are accused of turning a blind eye to massive logging thievery

The U.S. Forest Service, long a target of criticism, now faces allegations of serious misconduct by its officials. Clearly it’s time for reform.

Created in 1905, when our natural resources seemed unlimited, the Forest Service is responsible for managing the national woodlands and grasslands for recreational use as well as allowing private logging in exchange for fees. That balancing act, never easy, has become more difficult over time. Pressure in recent years from Congress and environmentalists to safeguard dwindling old-growth stands and the endangered species within them has only intensified the competition between the agency’s mandates.

In allegations reported last week, Forest Service officials are said to have ignored widespread thefts from federal lands and to have tried to prevent investigators from uncovering them. The accusations were leveled by a majority of members of a Forest Service task force created in 1991 specifically to investigate and help prosecute timber thefts.

In some cases, companies allegedly downgraded the value of logs cut, underpaying the government; in others, loggers reportedly cut beyond prescribed harvest boundaries, as well as after hours or on weekends, without recording the additional cut logs for payment.

Task force members also detailed what they called systematic attempts by agency officials to sidetrack theft probes, plus efforts by officials to wrongly bring disciplinary action against the task force investigators themselves.

These charges are particularly troubling in light of the inexcusable failure of Congress and the Clinton Administration last year to enact long-overdue reforms in the management of other crucial federal resources. Lobbying by the mining and livestock industries buried even modest compromise proposals to raise the minimal grazing and mineral claim fees and impose mining royalties on federal lands. Fees to own mineral claims have been unchanged for 122 years. The government’s failure to act amounts to endorsing a longstanding give-away of public property--welfare, as it were, for miners and ranchers.

In recent years, congressional oversight panels have tried to bolster the Forest Service’s ability to properly investigate rip-offs by recommending that the service’s law enforcement investigators be made autonomous from agency managers. Considering the new allegations, this is the minimum that should be done. And those who are found to have robbed from the public should suffer the full penalties of the law.