Is the Forest Service a Biased Adjudicator?
The powerful financial incentives engendered by the Salvage Sale Fund and the Knutson-Vandenberg Fund help to explain the Forest Service’s proclivity for post-fire logging. Forest Service managers, like all rational administrators, respond to incentives that promise to enhance fiscal flexibility and advance career prestige.[296] Indeed, the “incentives [driving the Forest Service] are so pervasive that most people simply take them for granted as immutable.”[297] Forest Service managers ignore these pressures at their peril, for to disregard such incentives would be to slight a very important source of funding. Because the agency has wide discretion over how to spend deposits from post-fire timber sales, the decision not to log would necessarily diminish the potential to cull off-budget income. Like private sector employees, employees in bureaucracies naturally desire “organizational stability” and job security.[298] As Randal O’Toole argues, Forest Service employees will take logical s
