Gao Audit Notes Slow Pace Of Forest Service, Blm Rules

When it comes to writing rules for logging, mining and grazing, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management move at a snail’s pace.

That’s the conclusion of an audit by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The Forest Service has taken from six to almost 10 years on three major rules it has in the works and which are still unfinished, the GAO said Tuesday.

In some cases, the agencies have worked years on proposed rule changes in logging and livestock grazing policies only to finally withdraw the proposals without taking any formal action.

The BLM has been working on one key mining rule for almost four years and another regarding coal management for almost nine years, said the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the audit he requested on the slow pace of rule-making is proof Congress must take matters into its own hands and rewrite laws regulating natural resources.

“Anyone waiting for a regulatory fix might as well be waiting to shake hands with Elvis,” Murkowski said Tuesday.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chairman of the committee’s subcommittee on forestry, has spent the past year drafting a proposal to rewrite logging regulations on national forests and BLM lands.

But Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, who oversees the Forest Service, and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, with jurisdiction over the BLM, repeatedly have testified before Congress that the Clinton administration can handle any problems administratively without congressional interference.

“The GAO findings clearly demonstrate that the immediate and pressing problems that the agencies currently face cannot be resolved by administrative action,” Murkowski said.

BLM spokesman Bob Johns said Tuesday it takes time to develop regulations “that are both technically accurate and legally sound.”

“Our goal has never been to pump out regs as fast as we can,” he said.

The auditors looked at rules initiated between October 1988 and April 1997, 168 at the BLM and 93 at the Forest Service. But they focused their attention on those that qualified as major or significant, a total of seven at BLM and 10 at the Forest Service.

After 9 years of work, the BLM withdrew a proposed rule to tighten restrictions on log exports for timber companies that buy wood from federal lands, the audit said.

The Forest Service still has not completed work on one rule it started in June 1989 regarding cancellation of timber sale contracts and another begun in October 1987 to prohibit certain gatherings on national forests.

The audit notes that in some cases Congress is to blame for the delays, cutting agency staffs and in one instance attaching an amendment to a spending bill prohibiting the Forest Service from writing a new rule regarding log exports.

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