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The creation of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) under Bernard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot was the premier example of American state building during the Progressive Era. Prior to passage of the 1883 Pendleton Act and the spread of merit based bureaucracy, American government was a clientelistic system in which public offices were allocated by the political parties on the basis of patronage. The Forest Service, by contrast, was staffed with university-educated agronomists and foresters, chosen on the basis of merit and technical expertise. Its defining struggle, was the successful effort by Pinchot to secure for the USFS authority over the General Land Office in the face of vehement opposition by Joe Cannon, the legendary Speaker of the House of Representatives. The central issue in this formative stage of American state building was bureaucratic autonomy: the idea that professionals in the USFS and not politicians in Congress should be the ones to make decisions on allocations of public lands, and that they should be in charge of recruiting and promoting their own staff. The U.S. Forest Service for many years afterward remained the shining example of a high-quality American bureaucracy. It may be surprising to learn, then, that the Forest Service is today regarded by many observers as a highly dysfunctional bureaucracy performing an outmoded mission with the wrong tools. Although it is still staffed by professional foresters, many of whom are highly dedicated to the agency’s mission, it has lost a great deal of the autonomy it won under Pinchot. . It operates under multiple and often contradictory mandates from Congress and the courts that cannot be simultaneously fulfilled, and in the process ends up costing taxpayers a huge amount of money.
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