The GovNavigators Show

Jason Robertson on Wildfire, Workforce Gaps, and the Future of Federal Land Management

• Season 4 • Episode 153

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This week on the GovNavigators Show, Adam and Robert sit down with GovNavigators Network member Jason Robertson, former regional CFO and senior leader at the U.S. Forest Service, for a conversation on what happens when government systems face real disruption.

Jason shares insights from his two decades in federal service, including managing wildfire funding, overseeing recreation and land use across multiple states, and navigating the complex financial realities of public land management. He breaks down how wildfire policy, procurement, and interagency coordination are evolving, and why looming fire risks and structural changes are colliding in real time.

Now in the private sector, Jason offers a candid view into the massive workforce and knowledge gaps emerging across agencies, and the opportunities those gaps create for new models of support, consulting, and innovation. From shifting procurement pathways to rethinking how agencies deliver on their missions, we explore how disruption is reshaping the federal landscape.

Show Notes:

What's on the GovNavigators' Radar:

SPEAKER_00

Welcome everyone to the Gov Navigator Show, a government-focused program that won't make you seasick. We're the Gov Navigators. I'm Robert Check. And I'm Adam Hughes. We hope to enlighten and enliven your week with news and insightful entertaining guests, all on the topic of government management.

SPEAKER_02

Enjoy today's episode of Gov Navigators, brought to you by the creative geniuses behind the award-winning podcast Fedhead. Adam, welcome back.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. Great to be back.

SPEAKER_02

Now I don't have to talk to the broom.

SPEAKER_00

You know, I we were at an event last night and I I I heard some feedback on the podcast. The high marks for you.

SPEAKER_02

Oh really?

SPEAKER_00

Very high marks. But but they did say that there was like there was a little bit of there was a heat that was missing. There was something that wasn't quite right. And so they were very excited that that I was back.

SPEAKER_02

You're making me uncomfortable. I'm glad you're back.

SPEAKER_00

Don't say that. That's the wrong voice.

SPEAKER_02

So so what you missed was the budget got released.

SPEAKER_00

I heard about that. Yeah. Yeah, but I'm um we're not done with the last budget. We can't move on. First of all, it's late, it's crazy late. Second of all, it wasn't even a really a full budget. Third of all, we're not done with 26. We gotta with DHS still shut down, technically.

SPEAKER_02

But you can't say, first of all, you can't say that we can't talk about another budget because then we'd never talk about the next budget. So we just sort of have to like keep pretending we're moving in the right direction.

SPEAKER_00

You you know that you know that old SNL skit where they're like General Easimo Francisco Franco is still dead, they do the same update. That was Chicken Chase in the news segment, yes. Yeah, the weekend update. I feel like that's what DHS is.

SPEAKER_02

Ladies and gentlemen, General Francisco Franco is still dead. This news just in. But also, I don't know how all DHS employees are currently being paid.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you know what? I we we don't have time, but I would love to do a deeper dive on that because it was, you know, the the president thinks that all he has to do is sign his name and he has magical powers, but apparently it's working. He can just pass an executive order and be like, yeah, let's just pay him. Who cares about the constitution and federal law?

unknown

Whatever.

SPEAKER_00

Somebody will figure that. Yeah, but so I don't know where the money's coming from, but it's coming from somewhere.

SPEAKER_02

But let's recap what you missed, not to mention a week of productive work at Governor. Obviously. A $2.2 trillion budget request. Non-discretionary spending was cut by 10%, $73 billion, defense increased by 44% to $1.5 trillion. It's like laughable. I I really I dye. Keeping my lost event hours, yeah. It's worth noting that not a lot of the cuts in 2026 actually made it into law. Correct. So we should not run around worrying about the 30% cut to the State Department, the 26 cut percent cut to labor, the 19% cut to agriculture, SBA, NSF, and EPA, 50% cut. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Or various terminations that have been proposed. But but as I think our listeners know because they're highly educated, but the the president's budget is a statement of priorities. It's it's very unlikely to be enacted. But you you can see what the president and his administration wants to prioritize looking at this budget for sure.

SPEAKER_02

One of the things to note is that the IT budget increased by about $10 billion. Huge, huge increase. But where's it all going, Oscar?

SPEAKER_00

We're gonna have to wait and see.

SPEAKER_02

We're gonna have to. So, yeah, Natalie Alms and I were trading text about this. She's looking into it, she's the one who wrote the story about it. But we did have a client ask us to inventory the CJs, the congressional justifications. That was an exciting moment for Gov Navigator.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, just having anyone both understand what a CJ is and then ask us to get into it. I mean, that's it might be the pinnacle of our of our journey on this company so far.

SPEAKER_02

Monetizing irrelevance. That's the new motto for Government Navigator. What else is what else did I miss? Fraud did not get solved while you were.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Maybe next week.

SPEAKER_02

In fact, it looks like government impersonation complaints, the FBI reports, nearly doubled. So this is when someone calls you from the Treasury Department to say you haven't paid your taxes. And if they if you don't pay them immediately in the form of gift cards to this fella, you'll be immediately arrested. Send your intern out and get some gift cards. But I think there's there's gotta be a way for us to be able to validate or verify that the person you're talking to is a legitimate person and not a fraudster. We're doing a lot to make sure that that the corporate entities to which we're paying are are correct. Yep. Or that the individuals that the government is paying are correct, or that corporations are paying. But what about individuals? Is there some way we can give them a source to verify that this is a legitimate person? I don't think about that.

SPEAKER_00

I don't think there I don't think I can if you want me to spend a little time next week. I don't think there is, but there an important note. I'm I can't say this definitively 100%, but the federal government does not call people. So if someone calls you and says, I'm from the federal government, hang up. They're not from the federal government. Right. They send mail and then say, you know, seven weeks later, they're like, Oh, I guess I missed that. But the the if you get a phone call and they say I'm from the anywhere in the federal government, they are a scammer. I think I just solved it. I've I can coalesced one week of work down to about 12 and a half seconds. Pretty good, very efficient.

SPEAKER_02

It's your life's goal. There was an article about the perennial issues that plague the federal government's consolidated financial statements. Ooh.

SPEAKER_00

In case you're having trouble sleeping at night.

SPEAKER_02

Financial management problems at the Department of Defense, accounting for intergovernmental activity, that is, payments between agencies, and then the whole process of consolidating the statements themselves.

SPEAKER_00

So it's funny, a friend of GovNavigator sent me a little tip from the president's budget, by the way, that the uh the CFO's office at DOD, the comproller, received a drastic increase in their budget for IT solutions. Something like 12 times increase in the budget from last year to this year in the proposed budget. So we'll see how that shakes out. Yeah. They could probably use it. Yeah, they they're gonna need to spend some more money to try to solve this, use AI and other emerging tools. I don't know if they need to go from like 25 million to 250 million, but you know, what do I know about DOD financial statements? Very little.

SPEAKER_02

Looks like I know where some of that money is coming from. Yeah, exactly. GSA sold 900 unneeded federal properties. Hey, this is great.

SPEAKER_00

Generating 1.4 billion dollars in revenue. Nice work. Great work, GSA. I feel like nobody says great work, GSA, enough. So we're gonna you heard it here first. Great work, GSA.

SPEAKER_02

The but the deferred maintenance backlog has gone from 171 billion to 370 billion. Thanks. And it looks like according to GSA, there's no federal agency that is utilizing their physical plant 60% of the time. Better yet, there's not six they're not meeting their goal of 60% utilization.

SPEAKER_00

Utilization, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Right. I mean, do you remember when the the the folks at Grant Thornton came around and audited our use? I do remember Adam and I shared a very large office at the time, and I'm like, you've got to come into the office every day while we're doing this audit.

SPEAKER_00

Just in case the just in case the guy with the clipboard comes around. It's just like when you get that's how schools get their money. You gotta show up on the day when they say this is how many students we have.

SPEAKER_02

So they they took our office away anyway. Yeah. They did. For us. All right, onward.

SPEAKER_00

Robert, one of the great things about owning your own company, as you know, you and I talk about this frequently, is you can work with your friends. Yeah. It's one of the best parts. And we're lucky enough today, one of my friends.

SPEAKER_02

I'm still your friend? Is that we're still friends?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, you're on that list too.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So but joy joining us today is one of my friends, Jason Robertson, part of the Gov Navigators Network. Jason, welcome to the Gov Navigator Show.

SPEAKER_01

Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate this.

SPEAKER_00

And I guess you and your friend. That's great. Yeah, right. I mean, this is now I got at least two friends. Two different friends. Maybe more. You people don't know if I have more friends. I might. Okay, Jason, let's start. Tell us a little bit about your background. You've recently left government. Tell us about what you did while you're in government, and then we'll get into some more details. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_01

So I was with the Forest Service and was the chief financial officer for the Rocky Mountain region here for a little while. And then I was the director of recreation, lands and minerals. That was across Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, South Dakota, Nebraska, several states here in the West. And I also worked with the Bureau of Land Management before that. And I worked for the National Ocean, National Oceanic Atmospheric Institute. I've been with the government for about 20 years and left in March, took the early bio, started my own company, a company called Swift Water Consulting. And I felt that was a really appropriate name because it really helped identify what I want to do, which is navigate those new changing waters, the dynamics between where we were as a very stable, functional foundation of the federal government, and this new area where we have rapid change and new paths we have to chart. And I feel like I could really be a part of that. And that's what I've been working on, and it's been really exciting.

SPEAKER_02

Jason, just talk about the Forest Service. What attracted you to that and distinguish that from the Park Service? I think our we've got a sophisticated viewership of dozens of people. All right. But still, it can be confusing. So talk about that organization, its mission, where it fits in the grand scheme of things. Sure.

SPEAKER_01

The Forest Service manages a lot of public lands across the nation. And these are typically forests, it makes sense in the name. They're managed for multiple use, typically for agriculture, timber harvesting, recreation, grazing, those kinds of activities. It also allows for oil and gas leasing, coal development, minerals development, and all kinds of other commercial ventures. And the same thing applies to the Bureau of Land Management. It's applied a little differently. The Bureau of Land Management is in the Department of Interior, and it basically manages all of the lands that were left over after the land grabs that occurred back in the 1800s and early 1900s. These are the lands that were too steep, too wet, too dry, too flat, too hard to develop commercially or to hard to do harvest on to actually have agricultural products there. The Forest Service, again, specializes in timber production and increasingly focuses on wildfire management. And there's been a lot of that conversation in the news recently between the Department of Interior and BLM, possibly merging. I'm sorry, Department of Interior and USDA at the Department of Agriculture, possibly merging wildfire programs into one new agency in the Department of Interior. That agency has been stood up. It's a U.S. Wildland Fire Service, USFWS, and it's not yet funded. So currently the funding in Interior is funded under the new program, they consolidated funding from BLM and Park Service and then for firefighting. And then USDA still has its own funding for wildland fire. And that has not yet been integrated.

SPEAKER_00

Is that was that done by all executive action, or would did Congress actually put something in the appropriate bills to I mean, because it makes sense that we would why would you have two separate units? The coordination must be more far more difficult. Like put them all in one place does make a lot of sense. But or was it was that something that the Trump administration or Biden administration had just started on its own, or was Congress involved?

SPEAKER_01

Congress has not yet integrated them. So the new appropriations bill that just passed included separate funding for each agency for the Department of Interior and USDA. It is possible that they will be integrated. There are still hearings on this, there's still conversation about it, but the decisions have not been made yet.

SPEAKER_02

That there's a limited number, limited amount of money. You're pulling it from myriad sources, but also tracking it when it gets spent in the middle of a disaster is a challenge. Can you talk about your role in making sure firefighters had plenty of money to get that job done, but also that it was tracked appropriately?

SPEAKER_01

So my role was largely on figuring out how to fund other programs after the fire program was funded because the fire funding took so much money up front. And also when there was a disaster, when there was a fire, then we would pivot and send a lot of resources to the fire itself. As a result, that would take funding typically from other programs like recreation. And we would have to find so part of my job was to find solutions and other ways to address those shortfalls. The fire funding nationwide is about six and a half billion dollars. And that's about 60% of it is for preparation for fire, and then about a third is on the response to fire and pivoting and making the purchases, making the contracts, bringing people on to fight fire, that kind of thing. It's been real interesting to watch this because the agencies are now also pivoting to the new financial structure where procurement is gonna be different. And the way the procurement is gonna work now is most of the purchases have to go through GSA. That looks different. You have a platform where the services that are offered are more compartmentalized and more modular. And so that's gonna be real interesting to watch in the next year as that develops. That was something that I was focused on as I was leaving the agency. And it'll be interesting to see now where that goes. The and where the contractors who have historically gone to each agency and made purchases or offered services for purchase. Instead, now they are having to go through the one service through GSA or through this new organization and the US FWS WFS, WFS, the Wildland Fire Service. And it'll be interesting to see how they succeed. I think that's really an area where there's opportunity for growth because it hasn't been navigated yet. We don't know where how services will be offered. We don't know when they'll be offered. We don't know how the the grants and the contracts that have typically been offered by the fire agencies, how they'll be offered now. And so I think that's an area where, again, there's gonna be an opportunity for growth.

SPEAKER_02

An opportunity for growth, are you talking euphemistically about challenges that these organizations will face given the uncertainty in in what will be what has been chaotic but fairly predictable in the past? Yes.

SPEAKER_01

So my background is in environmental science and biology. And there's a concept there of disturbance theory. The idea that when you have great change, it's also a great opportunity for um evolution. And that's where we are now with the all these changes at the agencies, the change that we're seeing also with the fire program that I was mentioning, it ties in directly to opportunity. As there is a great disturbance, as there's a flood, as there's a fire, as something happens in the ecosystem, your the habitat's gonna change dramatically. That's gonna create new opportunities for population, for growth. It's also gonna mean that other, that some organisms can't survive. And so we're in this really interesting place where I'm really focusing on that opportunity. Where can we, where can I grow into? Where can my work with clients grow into, and where do we go in the future?

SPEAKER_00

So what and I don't know as much about this area of policy, but isn't it that some of these fires are not you're not trying to put out every fire, right? This is in instances where there's fires on public land that are threatening the housing developments or agriculture or things like that, or is it more comprehensive than that?

SPEAKER_01

As we're talking about wildland fire, it's the part of it is the fuels, what is on the ground and what needs to be taken care of there to reduce risk to communities. So that's the wildland urban interface.

SPEAKER_00

The And that's like ongoing maintenance, right? Of forests. Ongoing maintenance. It's to reduce risk of fire.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Exactly. And then there is infrastructure, things like building codes for reducing the risk to build to communities again. But then there's the response to fire, and there's also climate, not certainly climate change, but just things like drought, or having a really wet year where you get a whole lot of growth of grasses and things, and then you get a really dry year where those grasses then dry out and create fuels that increase risk. That's where we are now in the West. We have this problem where we had a really wet year last year, and all kinds of grasses and other things grew up. And now we're having a really bad drought over this winter. And I've heard some really some really worrisome forecast for fire this coming summer, even into the, well, starting the spring going into the summer. At the same time that this new organization is being created and there's focus on that. I know the agencies are also still focused on preparing for that higher fire risk in the summer. If you want to talk about skiing for a minute, that was one of my areas of responsibility when I was with the Forest Service was managing the permits for most of the ski areas here in the West in Colorado.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, this is the kind of this is the kind of nugget that Gub Navigators podcast was made for. Who knew there was a guy in the federal government who managed the permitting for ski resorts? Yeah. And we've got them all. So I mean, lucky I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01

I had a whole team of the whole team of those folks, but I saw the connections there too. And that's been really interesting talking to the folks that are that have the permits, the companies that run these ski resorts on federal land. And they're struggling, and as are their employees now. Employees that, you know, normally we'd be working five, six days a week are being cut back to one or two days a week and trying to find other jobs. There have been a number of reports recently in the media about that. It's a really different industry from from last year.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and that variability year to year has got to be, I mean, not just for the government management of it, but for their businesses running it. That's making me feel a little less terrified in running my own business. So some people seem to have a little bit more difficult than I do. Jason, talk a little bit about moving out of government. You worked in government for a long time. You've done lots of pretty interesting, neat things, and you've left recently. How's that transition been? And give us some of your reflections on working from the outside, still in the public sector space.

SPEAKER_01

It's been a really interesting year. So I'm coming up on now 10 months of having left the government and starting my own company and trying to navigate that space. It's been interesting trying to find clients. I've been successful, partially because of the reputation I had and people came to meet, but also just putting my hanging my shingle up and really beating, you know, beating the bushes trying to find new work. Where I've been really successful this year is in identifying way straight new strategies for working with the government. So working with the Forest Service, working with Park Service, working across the Department of Interior and the USDA. So many people have left that there are just big knowledge gaps. And there's also there are also gaps in being able to perform. And where I've been successful is I identify those areas where the agencies lack internal staff and then helping to fill that gap and then also trying to execute the priorities that the agencies have. That market isn't going to change. We're going to be there for quite a while, especially with those two agencies where they where like the Forest Service has lost, well, the USDA has lost 20,000 employees. That was deliberate, and they're making adaptations. And again, that's creating this new market outside of the agency to not necessarily replace those services, but to find new ways of delivering service, new ways of actually achieving the priorities those agencies have. So that's been a really big part of what I've what I've focused on. It's also been interesting to be approached by a number of foundations and nonprofits. And they're also trying to navigate the space and understand what's going on, what the changes mean to them, to their business models. And so a lot of what I've been doing this year is working with them, helping them identify possible ways to evolve and grow, ways to keep doing the basic services they want to do, but not necessarily in the context they did it before. So example. Would be changing from the diversity, equity, inclusion language and talking more about building skills up among for you and giving them training opportunities and helping them adapt and get get chances to learn new skills on the ground that they can then take and turn into job opportunities in the future. Well, it sounds like you got your plate full. I like being busy.

SPEAKER_02

There's a lot more opportunity out there. I mean you said that this change creates opportunity. Are you seeing the big opportunities you see expanding on what you just talked about?

SPEAKER_01

The big one is as as HSCs have lost that knowledge of how they're how they do business. They've lost their core, the history of what they did before in a lot of cases. So as we've seen as we've seen that disruption occur in leadership, there's an opportunity now to come in and create templates to create the prop the blueprint for actually getting to a decision now.

SPEAKER_00

I'm not sure if it's making sense. Well, I mean, I think too, Jason, what I was thinking was that agencies are not great with knowledge management to begin with. They don't there, there's not a lot, in my experience, there's not a lot of agencies that are really good at capturing here's a here's how this process works, here's who you go to if you have a question. A lot of that is sort of, you know, it's literally in the minds of the employees and through their training, but it's not like somebody else can come in and be like, oh, I know how to do this, I'll just step in here and go do that. Right. And having folks, I think, available from the outside who still know that and know how, you know, here's the way in which it used to work. I think that based on some of the things we've been talking about with others too, I think the Trump administration is going to need to have some of that as they go forward. It not just in the areas you're talking about, I think across agencies that are that have had this sort of knowledge dream.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, absolutely. I think we're seeing that there are these, well, we know that there are big gaps. Yeah, and those are referring to as knowledge, but there are big gaps in in data collection, big gaps in decision-making experience, big gaps in understanding what the legal foundations are now, also big gaps in understanding what's different now with the executive orders and the regulatory environment from where we have been. And that's where being able to explain those changes, being able to explain to think about how they might be applied differently by different agencies, by different companies, the ability to create new ways of doing business that speak to the Trump administration, to their priorities of streamlining, reducing red tape, changing governance, changing the regulatory environment. I think that's again, that's where the opportunity is now for foreign individuals to step into. And that's where, again, where I've been successful, but also where I think, you know, something like Gov Navigators has this opportunity is to look across across agencies as you were mentioning, to look across different specialties and really tie those together and figure out like if there's a change of procurement, how does that not only affect something like IT, but also affect something like the on-the-ground application of uh agriculture practices or uh in the case of wildfire, the wildfire response. And that integration, that synergy, I think that's where in a time of change, as we've seen in that area of disturbance that we were talking about earlier, that's where you have a societal um ability to protect the core mission, to achieve the core mission, and to find a new place to evolve into.

SPEAKER_02

What an interesting, winding conversation, Jason. You educated us and also give us a little hope that this disruption will result in some at least interesting developments, if not necessarily positive. I think there's a lot of positive out there.

SPEAKER_01

That's great. I think that there is, I think there is some opportunity here. And and I don't want to be Pollyanna, but the changes that I saw initially as Mr. She came in, as we were losing our people, as we were losing access to resources, that was all real. There is some good that's coming from this, and I think that some of the streamlining, there's again, there's a real opportunity there to explore that and grow into it.

SPEAKER_00

The optimism is needed and welcome. So, Jason, thanks so much for spending some time with us this afternoon. All right, thank you. That was fantastic. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_02

Hope everybody enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_00

What do we got going on this week?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I'm moderating a panel at AGA's DC chapter annual spring training. Two-day events. Wow. Yeah, it'll be great.

SPEAKER_00

Is there gonna be like some are you gonna do long toss in the outfield, like games of pepper?

SPEAKER_02

I don't think that's the kind of spring training they're talking about. But I got the metaphor. Yes, thank you for getting it. That's that's progress. In fact, oh go ahead. I had lunch with Dave Librick the other day, former treasury official, and he's like and with Jordan with Jordan Burris from Socure. Also, and and he said to me, Robert, I know sports aren't your thing. Do you mind if Jordan and I just have a quick conversation?

SPEAKER_00

Did he turn his chair a little bit too? It's sort of like so funny. That's amazing. Okay, also we've got the uh C air space event, the Navy C airspace event at National Harbor. That's the 19th through the 22nd. That's always a huge event, really well done if you're headed there.

SPEAKER_02

You missed INSA's spring symposium is April 14th.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

April 14th. And then we, the Gov Navigators, are headed up to in a couple of weeks, NASIO's mid-year conference in Philadelphia. The city of brotherly love. And coincidentally, I have a brother in Philadelphia. Look at that. Amazing. Tracy Diamartini, we're going to count on you to show us around town while we're up there. Have a great week, everybody. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Gov Navigator Show, brought to you by GovNavigators. We sure hope you enjoyed it and learned something in the process. And didn't get C sick. Right, of course. If you want to know more about us and what we're up to, please follow us on social media or visit govnavigators.com. Ahoy.