Leadership Quote by Don Young

It’s the kind of line that tries to make government sound like a busted vending machine: you put in tax dollars, you’re supposed to get a product, and if the product doesn’t drop, you kick the whole thing over. Don Young frames the Forest Service as a single-purpose outfit - “in the business of harvesting trees” - then convicts it of failing its own mission. The move is rhetorically efficient: redefine a complex agency as a one-line job description, then argue it deserves liquidation for underperformance.

The subtext is older and more ideological. Young isn’t merely mad about paperwork or inefficiency; he’s advancing a worldview where public land is justified primarily by extraction. Conservation, wildfire mitigation, habitat protection, recreation, tribal consultation, and watershed stewardship all get erased so the audience can hear a clean, economically legible promise: more cutting, fewer constraints. By turning “not harvesting trees” into a moral failure, he aligns environmental regulation with idleness and casts preservation as a betrayal of working people and local economies.

The context matters: Young, an Alaska congressman, spent decades championing resource development and fighting federal oversight in the West and North. His quote lands in the long-running timber wars and the post-1990s reality where litigation, endangered species protections, and public opposition reduced logging on federal lands. “Dissolve the Forest Service” isn’t a serious administrative plan so much as a pressure tactic - a threat designed to delegitimize the referee so the game can be played on industry terms.