Press Releases
Rep. Maloy: Federal Agencies Need to do Less with Less
Washington, D.C.,
February 11, 2025
Rep. Maloy: I want to thank all the witnesses for being here. I know this is a big sacrifice, and it really is helpful for us. I have follow up questions for Mr. Canterbury, Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Neiman, but you can probably relax, because I have my old boss up here, and I only have five minutes to ask him questions, so I probably won't get to any of you. I may have to ask follow up questions. So, for my colleagues, you know, Eric Clark is a smart guy because he hired me right out of law school before he knew if I had passed the bar. But also, when I first interviewed, he hired somebody else, not me. He hired me the second time. So this is a really long revenge plan. I'm working on here. Now I've got him where I can ask him questions. Mr. Clark, you talked about consistency in your testimony, and some of these are projects you and I worked on together where we're working with an agency, and they make one decision, but it takes them years to make a decision. Then they roll back that decision, and it takes them years to roll back the decision. Then they change it again. And it takes some years, and you have to keep studying it. And I've sat here and listened to a lot of talk about funding being frozen and, and how that's going to impact agencies. I just wonder if you can give us a guess. How much money do you think it could have saved taxpayers in Washington County if the agencies targeted, like our friend Mr. Canterbury suggested, targeted resources on getting projects done instead of dragging their feet for years while taxpayers are paying for man hours and also analysis?
Eric Clarke: Thanks, Congresswoman. I just have to warn everybody. You never know what someone you’re going to hire is going to do to you after the fact. Easily, our county taxpayers are easily losing 2 to $5 million a year as we're trying to work through these broken processes on projects that we know need to happen that everybody agrees will eventually happen, but we just can't get them there.
Rep. Maloy: Yeah. And is it fair to say that on some of the projects we've worked on together, there may be one personality in an agency that, for ideological reasons, just disagrees with what the county is trying to do, and one person at an agency can drag their feet and slow a project down for years?
Erick Clarke: Yes.
Rep. Maloy: Okay, so I've been in a lot of hearings. I've been doing policy for a long time, and I always hear from agencies, ‘We're expected to do more with less. They want us to do more with less. We can't fill our positions. We don't have enough people.’ I'd like to see agencies do less with less. And thank you, Mr. Neiman, for reminding us that the Forest Service has a mission, and it's a very targeted mission. But what I see is them doing a lot of things that are not that mission, but they can't fill the positions that are focused on watersheds and production. And so, Eric, would you unpack for us a little bit, either with the Northern Corridor or with the habitat conservation plan, how many people at those agencies you have to work with to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea and is eventually going to happen?
Eric Clarke: Yeah. Thank you for that question. So those of us that are boots on the ground in these situations, we work every day with our federal partners. And they want to be our federal partners, right? These are people that are living in our communities, that are doing work that they love, that are trying to help stuff get better. And so, when we put together a land use application, we go into them and we say, hey, we need a new road. How are we going to make this a win-win, or we need a new water project, how do we do that? We're interacting with the whole team and we're doing it regularly, consistently. And we're having some back and forth and working through our disagreements and that could be a great process. It should be a great process. That's how land management should be, where the local people are coming in and talking to the federal people, and we're working through those. But then what happens is we'll get a local person to write something up on their desk, and then it goes to a desk in Salt Lake, and then it goes to a desk in Denver, and then it goes to a desk in Washington, D.C., and before it trickles back to Denver, to Salt Lake, to our desk, we've lost a year and a half and it all changes in that time. And so then the boots on the ground, great federal employees that are just wanting to get stuff done, are pulling their hair out because they're tired of us calling them and saying, why isn’t anything happening? And then it gets back to them. And it's different than the good thing that they put together and proposed to be done.
Rep. Maloy: Thank you. That's the important thing I wanted to get out of this hearing, and I'm almost out of time, so I just want to put a fine point on this, because we've had a lot of talk on both sides about federal funding. And do we need more? Do we need less? And I agree with our friend next to you that it needs to be targeted. It needs to be focused on the agency's mission. And we’re Congress, we control the purse strings. So right now, we've got an administration that's trying to show where money is being spent well, where it's not being spent well, and just remind everyone to ignore the hysteria and focus on the balance of power. We have an oversight obligation and we're doing it here. Thank you all for being part of it. And with that, I am out of time. I yield back.
Watch the full hearing here. |