Washington, D.C. – The following is a prepared statement by Franz Matzner, Senior Policy Analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General’s determination that the Forest Service has failed to accurately account for its road maintenance backlog:

This report confirms what taxpayers have known for years—that the Forest Service doesn’t know how to balance its checkbook. For decades, the Forest Service has ignored repeated calls to improve its oversight and accountability, and taxpayers are consistently left holding the fiscal bag for bad decisions.

The most basic responsibility of any agency is to provide a clear picture of what it does with taxpayer’s money. But as the Inspector General’s report makes perfectly clear, the Forest Service has no idea what is happening in its own backyard. The Forest Service lacks the basic knowledge to keep up with the 450,000 miles of roads it already has. Yet the Forest Service insists on spending tens of millions of dollars each year to build brand new roads. It’s precisely this kind of poor planning that lies at the heart of the Forest Service’s $10 billion maintenance backlog and the hundreds of millions of dollars it loses selling below-cost timber every year.

Once again, the Forest Service has shown it can’t explain how it spends its $5 billion annual budget. It is time for the Forest Service to seriously reconsider how it uses taxpayer dollars and pull us out of this downward spiral of waste.

The IG concludes that after eight years, the Forest Service has failed to fully implement 5 of 11 prior recommendations for dealing with its maintenance backlog. Most striking is the IG’s conclusion that the Forest Service doesn’t even have a strategy for addressing the existing backlog. The Forest Service also fails to adequately keep records of where its maintenance needs are or which represent the highest priority.

Contact: Keith Ashdown
202.546.8500 x110