Wildfires are again raging as heat and drought
continue across the West. Now that Congress has recessed without
providing any funding for firefighting, the U.S. Forest Service is
expected to keep fighting the fires, and to take the money needed
for that task from other areas in its already shrinking
budget.
Though our national parks employees have
historically been the lowest-paid federal employees, now the
administration proposes to eliminate even them. This
“outsourcing” proposal calls for doing away with the
jobs they do, such as ranger and historian, by having private
contractors do the work and save the government money.
When this plan is implemented, private businesses will be getting
the tax dollars and revenues generated on our public
lands.
It’s already happening in the national
forests. As an example, one “private contractor,”
Recreation Resource Management, headquartered in Sedona, Ariz., got
the Forest Service contract to run campgrounds in its home
territory. It also has expanded, doing the same thing throughout
the Pacific Northwest. But if Recreation Resource Management can
buy nice new white trucks, pay staff, back modest improvements,
give some of the revenue generated to the Forest Service, and still
make a profit, then why can’t the Forest Service do the same
thing, and use the profit to further enhance our public facilities,
instead of it going into the pockets of the private
contractors?
During the Reagan and Bush Sr.
administrations, privatization was the agenda. The secretary of
Defense during part of that era, current Vice President Dick
Cheney, conducted a similar “outsourcing” effort within
the Department of Defense. Halliburton got many of those contracts.
Mr. Cheney and several military people then went to work for
Halliburton after their government stays ended; Mr. Cheney, in fact
was the company’s CEO up until the time he became the
candidate for vice president. Recently, bypassing the competitive
bidding process, Halliburton was awarded significant contracts
using our tax dollars to rebuild Iraq.
It’s no
secret that the shareholders of Enron and WorldCom and Tyco and
Adelphia and others were ripped off by manipulative executives
seeking to build their own personal fortunes. Our government is
doing the same thing to us, the shareholders of the public company
that we collectively own. We should be equally outraged.
“Governments derive their just power from the consent of the
governed.” Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Are we doing the
same?
Michael J. Aune
Lynden,
Washington
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline We’re starving our land managers to pay private companies.
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