Spatially Explicit Assessment of the USDA Forest Service as a Representative Bureaucracy

Abstract

Diverse workforce representation helps organizations achieve their goals and is important for government agencies that seek to gain public trust. Prior research has examined patterns of representation in the USDA Forest Service and found an overall lack of representation despite advances at leadership levels. Federal agencies are required to report total workforce demographics; however, representation relative to local communities is rarely known. Using data from the US Census Bureau, we examined demographic profiles of populations within a 1-hour drive time around Forest Service workplaces relative to workforce demographics at each workplace. The Forest Service had a greater proportion of white employees than the US population as a whole, and racial/ethnicity diversity was lower than surrounding communities at 99.7% of Forest Service workplaces. Region-level summaries reinforce this pattern, suggesting the Forest Service is not a representative bureaucracy in any region or at any geographic scale. Given the Forest Service’s size, role in natural resources management, and geographic distribution of its workforce, disparities between demographic composition of the agency’s workforce and surrounding communities are striking. These results set a standard for spatially explicit assessments of workforce diversity as it relates to representative bureaucracy in geographically dispersed organizations like the Forest Service.

Citation

Locke, Dexter H; Sachdeva, Sonya S; Westphal, Lynne M; Kenefic, Laura S; Dockry, Michael J; Fisher, Cherie LeBlanc. 2023. Spatially Explicit Assessment of the USDA Forest Service as a Representative Bureaucracy. Forest Science. 69: 443-451. https://doi.org/10.1093/forsci/fxad018.