The Sorcerer's Apprentices

One secret of the Bush administration's survival has been its ability to concentrate power in the hands of a very few, very experienced, and cynical inner circle -- Cheney, Rove, Andrew Card -- all of whom understood that although they needed to appease their reactionary ideological and financial base, it shouldn't look like the base was running the show. So to make sure that the federal bureaucracy stayed under lock and key, they hired true-believer prison wardens to handle the details of policy execution. Five years later, these eager beavers have generated a series of minor train wrecks. There was, for example, George Deutsch, the callow political appointee at NASA who was forced to resign when, after he clumsily tried to muzzle NASA scientists, he was found to have padded his own resume. Although there's no shame in taking a hit for censorship in this Administration (or in padding your resume), as the soft landing pad at Exxon-Mobil arranged for censor-in-chief Philip Cooney shows, Deutsch blew it when he blurted out that "What is going on at NASA and throughout the federal government is a culture war" That's a violation of every rule in the Frank Luntz playbook -- never admit what is going on, no matter how obvious it is.

The latest, as yet anonymous, junior-grade train wreck is over at the Forest Service. Here the Administration has proposed, conventionally enough, to offset its enormous deficits by selling off federal assets -- in this case between 200 and 300 thousand acres of our National Forests.

The Administration alleges that it could reap $800 million from these sales. Now it's absurd to offer that as a meaningful deficit offset -- but shame has never been a strong suit for these folks so, by their standards, so far, so good.

But there is a certain sophomoric glee that leads junior Bush political appointees to gild these Frank Luntz lilies with sophomoric "gotchas." (For example, at one point the Administration proposed to sustain federal research dollars for solar energy if, and only if, the federal government got revenues from drilling the Arctic.) You can imagine the gleeful high fives in the Old Executive Office Building as someone relatively new to the game devised the idea that these revenues from the National Forest fire sale could be devoted first to paying for, and then phasing out federal support for rural schools! It's a three-fer!

Rural counties can't tax federal lands. So, for years they got a share of timber-sale receipts. In 2000 the Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck pointed out that it was insane to fund rural schools based on the destruction of the value of the federal land in each county -- as if property taxes were levied only when houses burned down. So the government committed that it would pay counties for the value of the federal property they were precluded from taxing, not on the basis of how fast that value was being depreciated.

The program, since 2000, has cost about $1.5 billion -- about $300 million a year. So now the Bush administration wants to pay for this by selling off federal land. This pleases the deficit hawks -- less red ink. It pleases the Wise Use extremists -- fewer federal lands. It even pleases the County Commissioners affected -- more private land to tax. But someone -- my guess is someone less Machiavellian and sophisticated than Mark Rey, the Forest Service boss who announced the program -- couldn't resist overreaching and thereby ruining the whole ploy.

The Administration declared that, once it had sold these lands, it would phase out the rural school payment program completely. Now the arithmetic is remarkable. Uncle Sam sells $800 million worth of property. And rural counties somehow extract from these new private lands $300 million a year in property tax revenues! Talk about a tax revolt.

Again, they have offered worse ideas. But which are the counties dependent on federal school funds -- the ones that will lose from this absurdity?

They are, almost without exception, the remaining Bush strongholds. It's almost comical to compare the lists with a recent polling results of the states in which Bush remains popular.

Idaho, for example, is Bush's second redoubt, lagging only Utah -- 55 percent of the public still likes him. Idaho currently gets $24 million in school payments. And the Administration proposes to sell off about 12,000 acres in the state. For that 12,000 acres to generate $24 million, the counties would have to levy $2,000 an acre in property taxes. Good luck, assessors. Alabama the #3 Bush stronghold, with approval at 53 percent, currently receives $2 million from the schools program -- far fewer public lands. But only 3,200 acres are for sale. The lift is not as steep as it in Idaho -- but it would still take $700 an acre in tax revenues to balance the books.

Meanwhile, the broader public is speaking out loudly that they don't like the idea of selling of the National Forests at all. In North Carolina alone, virtually every newspaper has already weighed in against the proposal. In Asheville, the Republican and forestry bastion of the state, the headline reads "Federal proposal to sell public land appears fiscally and morally irresponsible".

In Roanoke, Virginia, another Bush stronghold, the message is "Give Bush an acre, and he'll take a forest. The public should tell the president to stop trying to nibble away at the nation's forests under the guise of small payments to schools."

But so far few of the commentators have done the arithmetic -- so the advocates of rural schools haven't been heard from yet, because they haven't tumbled to the reality that what the Administration is actually talking about is cutting off the federal funding for rural schools -- while still leaving the counties with large acreage of national forests that they cannot tax.

The net effect is that a bad idea that, in its original form, might at least have had support from Bush's rural Western base, has been converted into a shameless scam that will alienate those supporters once they do the math. Meanwhile, Congress is getting ready to reauthorize the rural school-funding program. H.R. 517 passed the House Resources Committee last year, and companion legislation (S. 267) is currently in the Senate.

The idea of selling off public lands to fund schools and then cutting them loose at the end of five years is simply not going to happen. The only question is how much collateral damage will be done in the process -- one risk is that Congress will refuse to privatize the National Forests, and the Administration will refuse to fund rural schools -- a tragic and unnecessary outcome, but one that might appeal to the sorcerer's apprentices over in the New Executive Office Building.