Pros
Nothing I can think of.
Cons
Hostile Work Environment: The agency is extremely cliquey; it pays poorly and employees are under chronic stress due to ongoing poor management and budget turmoil. This stress leads to unhappy people who back-stab and who fail to solve their own problems. The culture encourages tattling on each other for minor issues. Forest Supervisors aren't that great, but they are "untouchable". There's no solid, safe place to lodge complaints without being ostracized. Poor hiring practices: The only new hires for the agency are Latino's and vets. This is discrimination against other more qualified applicants. There is also a trend to only hire people with advanced degrees. This is in direct violation of legal hiring practices which state that people with 4-year degrees qualify for hiring. People holding 4-year degrees are rarely considered because of biases from the hiring managers themselves, who have Master's or PhDs. Wildfires: The agency supports bad behavior on wildfires. Tax-payer dollars are abused on wildfires but there's no external oversight to review abuses. The cliquey-ness is very apparent on wildfires employees almost have to be on a "team" to be allowed to go to wildfire camp in overhead positions. The agency pays large amounts of taxpayer money to send employees on fire training assignments so they can help in firecamps, but these same employees can not finish their training because they can not get overhead assignments within the 2-year period after training. That is because the wildfire teams are basically closed to new people. There are gate-keepers who allow only certain people to be sent out on fires. The only new people who are allowed to come into these closed systems are vetted by good-old-boy friends. Incident Commanders can be incompetent and make bad decisions, but like the internal workings of cops or the military --they are protected at all cost. Anyone who brings up a complaint is black-balled. Unjustified paperwork is made up and suddenly appears against whistle-blowers. People in control are unethical. This agency needs to be investigated at the Congressional level for corruption and incompetence. All GS-14's and above ought to be transferred to other agencies and new managers moved in. Maybe some fresh blood could help this agency since the people in control are products and propagators of the problem.
