Forest Service Awarded $48 Million in Contracts It Can't Document

A USDA Office of Inspector General inspection⧉ of Forest Service contracts funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act found that 13 of 18 sampled contracts were awarded without one or more of the pre-award documents federal contracting rules require -- approved acquisition plans, market research, solicitation reviews, or public announcements of the award.▸ The missing paperwork puts $48,255,403 in contract spending in a category auditors call unsupported costs: money the government cannot show was competitively priced, reasonably justified, or awarded in its own best interest, even though nothing suggests the work itself wasn't done.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act⧉, signed November 15, 2021, gave the Forest Service roughly $5.5 billion to reduce wildland fire risk, restore ecosystems, and rebuild natural-resources infrastructure across the roughly 900 million acres of forest and grassland it manages.▸ Between the law's signing and March 31, 2025, the agency pushed $277.8 million of that money out through 1,890 contracts -- everything from firm-fixed-price jobs to blanket purchase agreement calls, awarded through Forest Service offices in four procurement zones nationwide. OIG's inspection covered only the pre-award side of that pipeline: not whether the work got done, but whether the paper trail behind each award met the Federal Acquisition Regulation's own bar for how a contract file should read before money moves.

Auditors pulled a judgmental sample of 18 IIJA-funded contracts worth more than $118.9 million, drawn from a universe of 1,303 contracts worth more than $543 million -- selected to cover the highest-dollar award in each fiscal year, the top 16 contracting offices that handle 90% of all IIJA funding, every award type the agency uses, and all four Forest Service procurement zones.▸ Thirteen of those 18 contracts came back missing at least one required document. Across them, OIG counted 17 separate gaps: four missing acquisition plans, five missing records of market research, seven missing or unapproved solicitation reviews, and one missing public announcement of the award. Solicitation review⧉ -- the step that checks a contract reflects the agency's actual needs and carries the legal clauses it's supposed to -- was the single most common gap.

Add up the value of all 13 flagged contracts and the number is $53,029,461, the figure OIG lists in Exhibit B⧉ of the report.▸ The $48.2 million figure in the audit's headline finding is smaller because auditors carved out one contract, worth $4,774,058, whose only defect was a missing public announcement of the award -- a procedural lapse OIG judged didn't touch the substance of whether the contract itself was sound. The remaining $48,255,403 includes $19.6 million in direct IIJA obligations, with the rest of each contract's value coming from other funding the Forest Service blended in alongside the infrastructure-law money -- money that, by definition, was awarded through the same undocumented process.

OIG is not asking the Forest Service to claw back any of the $48.2 million.▸ The report is explicit⧉ about why: the contracts have already been executed, and most had already reached their completion dates by the time auditors finished fieldwork in February 2026. That leaves the finding as a records problem rather than a fraud finding -- but auditors pushed back hard on the idea that it's a minor one, writing that the missing acquisition plans, market research, and solicitation reviews are 'critical documents needed for making the determination that contract awards were reasonable, appropriate, and in the best interest of the Government,' and that without them the Forest Service simply cannot demonstrate its own acquisition process was sound.

The Forest Service's Chief, Thomas M. Schulz Jr., wrote back⧉ agreeing with both OIG recommendations -- to evaluate the 13 flagged files and document what conclusions the agency reaches, and to build oversight controls so future contract files stay complete.▸ But the agency drew a line at the dollar figure, telling OIG the one or two missing documents per contract 'were not significant in terms of their impact on the underlying cost support or the determination that the contract awards were reasonable, appropriate, and in the best interest of the Government.' OIG's closing rebuttal didn't accept that: the same acquisition plans and market research the agency called insignificant are, in the FAR's own terms, the documents that establish whether an award was reasonable in the first place. The Forest Service's own timeline for closing the gap runs to February 18, 2027 -- nearly a year past the report's publication, for paperwork covering contracts that, in most cases, had already finished the work they paid for.