What a delight to see that Henry George's spirit hangs around ...
Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks ?
BY TYLER DURDEN. FRIDAY, DEC 02, 2022
Authored by Matt Stoller via BIG,
Two of the classic works of late 19th century American political
literature, representing precisely opposite views of how commerce in an
industrialized democracy ought to work, are Henry George’s Progress and
Poverty, and the speeches of George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.
George was one of the great political economists of his day, and he ran
and lost for mayor of New York City on an anti-monopoly and land reform ticket.
George was interested in why we experienced tremendous inequality in the midst
of great wealth, and traced it to the exploitation of land.
George was an international superstar, influencing both Teddy Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson, as well as environmentalists and the modern libertarian
movement. (There’s an iconic statue of the greatest mayor in Cleveland history,
Tom Johnson, with Johnson holding a copy of Progress and Poverty.) The modern
academic profession of economics arose in part as a reaction to the popular
success of George’s work. The game Monopoly comes directly from George, and in
many ways, the national parks, as well as everything from spectrum allocation
to offshore oil drilling, must wrestle with Georgeist thinking.
But by land, he meant far more than just the plots upon which we live.
“The term land,” George wrote, “necessarily includes, not merely the surface of
the earth as distinguished from the water and the air, but the whole material
universe outside of man himself, for it is only by having access to land, from
which his very body is drawn, that man can come in contact with or use nature.”
Unlike Marx, who saw the exploitation of capital over labor, George thought
that the root of social disorder was a result of the power of the landowner
over both capital and labor.
By land, he meant all value drawn purely from nature or from collective
human existence. He would, for instance, consider ‘network effects’ a form of
land, and likely seek regulation or national control of search engines. George
had his first run-in with monopoly in San Francisco, where a telegraph
monopolist destroyed his newspaper by denying him wire service. But his key
work, in 1879, was written before the rise of the giant trusts, just as
railroads, which were really land kingdoms, were becoming dominant.
A much more cynical set of works are the speeches of Plunkitt. Plunkitt
was a political boss in New York City, a proud machine politician in office at
the same time in the same political arena as George. Both men were interested
in modern industry and wealth, and in both cases, the key fulcrum around which
power flowed was not capital, but land. But while George sought a better world,
Plunkitt just wanted to get rich, and saw in the purchase of land one of the
key ways to do that.
Plunkitt’s key moral guidepost was the practical wielding of political
power to enrich oneself. He posited something called “Honest Graft,” which he
distinguished from crime in a formulation that every important corporate
lobbyist, knowingly or not, has since used. To Plunkitt, stealing would be
taking something that doesn’t belong to you. But if you happened to know that
the city would need a piece of land, and you got there first, well, that was
simply smart. As Plunkitt put it:
"I could get nothin' at a bargain but a big piece of swamp, but I
took it fast enough and held on to it. What turned out was just what I counted
on. They couldn't make the park complete without Plunkitt's swamp, and they had
to pay a good price for it. Anything dishonest in that?"
George was part of the land reform anti-monopoly school of
Anglo-American thought, from Frederick Douglass to Thaddeus Stevens. Plunkitt
was a machine politician, and proud of it. The battle between these two
elements of America, the desire to conserve the public weal versus the desire
to cynically plunder it, is still fierce today. It will probably never end.
And that brings me to the political conflict over our national parks,
and the strange situation whereby a large government contractor, Booz Allen,
somehow found itself in a position to rent us back our own land.
Red Rock Canyon in Nevada.
Every day, visitors to Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Northern
Arizona hike into an area named Coyote Buttes North to see one of the “most
visually striking geologic sandstone formations in the world,” which is known
as The Wave. On an ancient layer of sandstone, millions of years of water and
wind erosion crafted 3,000-foot cliffs, weird red canyons that look like you
are on the planet Mars, and giant formations that look like crashing waves made
of rock. There are old carvings known as ‘petroglyphs’ on cliff walls, and even
“dinosaur tracks embedded in the sediment.”
The Wave is unlike anywhere else on Earth. It is also part of a U.S.
national park, and thus technically, it’s open to anyone. Yet, to preserve its
natural beauty, the Bureau of Land Management lets just 64 people daily visit
the area. Snagging one of these slots is an accomplishment, a ticket into The
Wave is known as “The Hardest Permit to Get in the USA” by Outside and
Backpacker Magazines.
To apply requires going to Recreation.gov, the site set up to manage
national parks, public cultural landmarks, and public lands, and paying $9 for
a “Lottery Application Fee.” If you win, you get a permit, and pay a recreation
fee of $7. The success rate for the lottery is between 4-10%, and some people
spend upwards of $500 before securing an actual permit.
But while the recreation fee of $7 goes to maintaining the park - which
is what Henry George would appreciate - the money for the “Lottery Application
Fee” is pure Plunkitt. That money goes to the giant D.C. consulting firm, Booz
Allen and Company. In fact, since 2017, more and more of America’s public lands
- over 4,200 facilities and 113,000 individual sites across the country at last
count - have been added to the Recreation.gov database and website run by Booz
Allen, which in turn captures various fees that Americans pay to visit their
national heritage.
You can do a lot at Recreation.gov. You can sign up for a pass to cut
down a Christmas tree on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, get
permits to fly-fishing, rifle hunting or target practice at thousands of sites,
or even secure a tour at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. There are
dozens of lotteries to enter for different parks and lands that are hard to
access. And all of them come with service fees attached, fees that go directly
to Booz Allen, which built Recreation.gov. The deeper you go, the more
interesting the gatekeeping. As one angry writer found out after waiting on hold
and being transferred multiple times, the answer is that Booz Allen “actually
sets the Recreation.gov fees for themselves.”
Lately, hundreds of sites have begun requiring the use of the site. A
typical example is Red Rock Canyon, which added "timed entry permit"
in the past two years. Such parks, before adding these new processes, usually
do a "trial" period followed by a public comment period, and then the
fees are approved by a Resource Advisory Council, objects of derision composed
of people appointed by the government bureaus. As one person involved in the
process told me, these councils are sort of ridiculous. “Agencies fill it with
people beholden to them,” he said. “so the council playing committee rubber
stamps whatever they send their way, often even if it makes no sense.”
The entry permit almost always become permanent. This includes heavily
visited lands like Acadia National Park (4 million annual visitors), Arches
National Park (1.5 million), Glacier National Park (3 million), Rocky Mountain
National Park (4.4 million), and Yosemite (3.3 million). There’s nothing wrong
with charging a fee for the use of a national park, as long as that fee is
necessary for the upkeep and is used to maintain the public resource.
That was in fact the point of the law passed in 2004 - the Federal Lands
Recreation Enhancement Act - to give permanent authority to government agencies
to charge fees for the use of public lands. But what Booz Allen is doing is
different. The incentives are creating the same dynamics for public lands that
we see with junk fees across the economy. Just as airlines are charging for
carry-on bags and hotels are forcing people to pay ‘resort fees,’ some national
parks are now requiring reservations with fees attached. And as scalpers
automatically grabbed Taylor Swift tickets from Ticketmaster using high-speed
automated programs, there are now bots booking campsites.
None of this is criminal, though the fee structure may not be lawful,
but it is very George Washington Plunkitt. “I Seen My Opportunities,” he said,
“and I Took ’Em.”
Honest Graft
The entry point for Booz Allen can be traced back to the Obama
administration, and a giant failed IT project. In 2010, Congress passed the
Affordable Care Act, pledging that by 2014, the government would have a website
up in which uninsured Americans could buy health insurance with various
subsidies. In perhaps one of the most embarrassing moments of the Obama
administration, Healthcare.gov failed to launch the day the new health law came
into force, and millions couldn’t sign up to take advantage of it.
It’s hard to overstate the shame of that moment. The government had
spent $400 million over four years - more time than it took the U.S. to enter
and win World War II - and yet, the dozens of contractors couldn’t set up a
website to take sign-ups. The whole thing was an embarrassing disaster, a
festival of incompetence and greed. (Despite the failure, the main IT
contractor’s CEO became a billionaire. Honest graft indeed.)
President Obama hired Google’s Mike Dickerson to come in and fix the
Healthcare.gov website, which Dickerson and his team did. This wasn’t some
miracle, it’s not like websites were new technology. The government itself
created the internet and most of the underpinnings of digital technology, and
it had many functional and important systems. But the Google name at that point
was magic, and so the U.S. Digital Service, designed to help the government use
technology, was born. After Dickerson, the new head was Google’s Matt Cutts,
and then health care monopolist Optum’s Mina Hsiang. The U.S. Digital Service,
far from being particularly competent, is a branding exercise. It is full of
people from Amazon and Google, and tends to push the government to outsource
its technology to third party contractors.
Following the U.S. Digital Service’s playbook is what led the government
to bid out and allow the creation of Recreation.gov, with its weird and corrupt
fee structure. In 2017, Booz Allen got a 10-year $182 million contract to
consolidate all booking for public lands and waters, with 13 separate agencies
participating, from the Bureau of Land Management to the National Oceanic &
Atmospheric Administration to the National Park Service to the Smithsonian
Institution to the Tennessee Valley Authority to the US Forest Service.
The funding structure of the site is exactly what George Washington
Plunkitt would design. Though there’s a ten year contract with significant
financial outlays, Booz Allen says the project was built “at no cost to the
federal government.” In the contractor’s words, “the unique contractual
agreement is a transaction-based fee model that lets the government and Booz
Allen share in risk, reward, results, and impact.” In other words, Booz Allen
gets to keep the fees charged to users who want access to national parks. Part
of the deal was that Booz Allen would get the right to negotiate fees to third
party sites that want access to data on Federal lands.
It’s a bit hard to tell how much Booz Allen was paid to set up the site.
Documents suggest the firm received a lot of money to do so, but it’s also
possible that total amount was the anticipated financial return. I wrote to
Recreation.gov team leader Julie McPherson at Booz Allen to find out what they
were paid to build the site, and I haven’t heard back. Regardless, there’s a
lot of money involved. For instance, as one camper noted, in just one lottery
to hike Mount Whitney, more than 16,000 people applied, and only a third got
in. Yet everyone paid the $6 registration fee, which means the gross income for
that single location is over $100,000. There’s nothing criminal about this
scheme, but it is a form of Honest Graft, or of handing a Ticketmaster-like
firm control of our national parks.
Judgment Day
In 2020, an avid hiker named Thomas Kotab sued the Bureau of Land
Management over the $2 “processing fee it charges to access the mandatory
online reservation system to visit the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area.” He
claimed, among other things, that the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act
mandated that this fee was unlawful, because it had not gone through the
notice-and-comment period required by the act. Kotab, an electrical engineer by
training, is one of those ass-kickers in America, who just goes after a grift
because, well, it’s just wrong.
A few years later, a judge named Jennifer A. Dorsey, appointed by Obama
in 2013, agreed with him. She looked at the statute and found that Congress
authorized the charging of recreation fees for the purpose of taking care and
using Federal lands, not administrative fees that compensated third parties. As
such, Booz Allen’s ability to set its own prices was inconsistent with the law
mandating the public’s right to comment on what we are charged for using our
own land.
The BLM sought to appeal, but then dropped it in July. Rather than a
bitter procedural argument about classifying fees, the government and Booz
Allen have decided they’ll just go through the annoying process of having the
public comment on Booz Allen’s compensation, and then ignore us using their
phony advisory council process. Here, for instance, is the Mojave-Southern
Great Basin Resource Advisory Council Meeting in August simply proposing to
substitute new standard amenity fees “equal to the associated Recreation.gov
reservation service fee.”
One notable part of this saga is that technically, the BLM and Booz
Allen owe refunds to everyone who went through Red Rock Canyon’s timed entry
system from 2020-2022, but they’ll probably ignore that and steal the money.
That verges into actual graft from the ‘honest’ type, but I suspect Plunkitt
did that as well from time to time.
And yet, it’s not over. The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act
authorization runs out in October of 2023, which means that Congress has to
renew it. Hopefully, an interested member of Congress who loves Federal lands
could actually tighten the definitions here, and find a way to stop Booz Allen
and these 13 government agencies from engaging in this minor theft via junk
fees. It wouldn’t be hard, and it would be fun to force a bunch of government
agencies to actually do their job and either take over the site themselves or
pay Booz Allen a fee for its service. (Another path would be Joe Biden, through
his anti-junk fee initiative, simply asserting through the White House
Competition Council to the 13 different agencies that they end Booz Allen’s
practice of charging these kinds of fees.)
It’s easy enough to see scams everywhere, and here is certainly one of
them. But let’s not lose sight of the broader point. Henry George, at least in
this fight, has won. Yes, Booz Allen gets to steal some pennies, but we have a
remarkable system of public lands and waters that are broadly available for all
of us to use on a relatively equal basis. And we can still see the power of George-ism
in the advocacy of hikers and in the intense view that members of Congress had
when they passed the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act in 2004, which
strictly regulated fees that Americans would have to pay to access our Federal
lands. Indeed, the anger and revulsion I felt at the fees Booz Allen puts
forward comes from George, even if I didn’t necessarily trace it there at
first.
We are in a moment of institutional corruption, but these moments are
transitory as institutions change. George Washington Plunkitt, and his
political descendants at Booz Allen, might have gotten rich, but Henry George
imparted instincts to Americans that are far more permanent.
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