The CATO Institute requires little introduction. It is an  Libertarian think-tank with a mission to privatize the federal government.

Randal O'Toole, now a Senior Fellow at CATO and the author of the Forest Service "Reform Options" pasted below, may require some short introduction. O'Toole is a former environmentalist who switched sides. O'Toole was long been known for his efforts to transform outdoor recreation into a pay to play business for the USFS based upon the charging of recreation users fees and, more recently, for his almost maniacal support of sprawl.

The CATO Institute is currently running a campaign based upon a  CATO book titled "Downsizing the Federal Government." Downsizing the Department of Agriculture is part of that campaign and O'Toole has written the section on downsizing the USDA Forest Service.

In O'Toole's "Reform Options" he offers three suggestions presented in hierarchal order.

• The first is "to allow the agency to charge fair market value for recreation and other resources."
  
  
• The second is "to revive federalism by eliminating federal forest subsidies to the states and turning portions of the national forests over to the states."
  
  
• The third and final reform is "full privatization of the national forests."
  

For those familiar with the events of the last decade, it is clear that we are already two thirds of the way to that final solution.

Scott

From an Interview with O'Toole

FC asks: Why does the establishment environmental movement embrace government solutions to environmental challenges?

Randal O'Toole Responds: That is a really hard question to answer, because it is hard to attribute motivations to other people. But I think part of the answer is that the environmental movement has been taken over by the socialists who lost power after the fall of the Soviet Union, because it became difficult to justify being a socialist any more in any realm except for the environmental realm. Polls showed that Americans were opposed to socialism except that they believed in government intervention to protect the environment. So socialists were drawn to the environmental movement and that changed the movement to its own detriment. 

--- begin quoted excerpt ---
 
The Forest Service
by Randal O’Toole
June 13, 2007

    <snip>

Reform Options

Today, the Forest Service controls 193 million acres of land, has a budget of $5 billion, and employs more than 30,000 workers. The Forest Service is in need of serious reforms. The services provided by the agency should be restructured to reduce taxpayer costs and to improve forest management practices.

One option is for Congress to allow the agency to charge fair market value for recreation and other resources. That would probably raise enough revenue to cover all of the agency’s costs. Taxpayers would save about $5 billion annually if the Forest Service was shifted to a self-funding structure.

If Forest Service activities were self-funded, it would force the agency to be more efficient in its operations and more responsive to forest land users. Self-funding would create incentives for the agency to decentralize its operations, allowing managers to respond to local conditions instead of being controlled by top-down plans from Washington.

Another reform step would be to revive federalism by eliminating federal forest subsidies to the states and turning portions of the national forests over to the states. Other activities could be privatized. It might be possible, for example, for some national forests to buy private insurance, as Oregon did until recently.

Some experts have proposed full privatization of the national forests. Alternately, the national forests could be structured as independent trusts that would be owned by the federal government but managed by a board of directors and funded out of forest-related receipts. The trusts would have special obligations to promote conservation while still producing many valuable resources.

For decades, the Forest Service has been plagued by mismanagement of taxpayer funds and subject to perverse and damaging incentives. In the coming years, policymakers should focus on the goal of reforming the Forest Service to reduce taxpayer costs while improving the sound and ecological management of forest lands.

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