44 OUR NATIONAL FORESTS 



possible to postpone for one or more years without 

 detriment to the work of his Forest as a whole. 

 For in most cases the amount of necessary work to 

 be done on each Ranger district is far in excess of 

 the amount which the Forest Supervisor could ap- 

 prove owing to the inadequacy of the Forest Serv- 

 ice funds. So, for the Forest Supervisor, it is 

 merely a question of how low he can keep his esti- 

 mates for money for the ensuing year until such a 

 time when Congress will appropriate more money 

 so that all the important and necessary work can 

 be done. In most cases therefore the major part 

 of all the expenditures recommended by the Forest 

 Ranger is warranted, but the Forest Supervisor 

 knows that he must cut all the estimates down con- 

 siderably in order to bring the total Forest estimate 

 reasonably near the amount he is likely to get, bas- 

 ing his judgment upon what he got the year before. 

 Approval of Plans hy the District Forester. 

 The District Forester then gets the National Forest 

 estimate from every one of his 25 or 30 Forest 

 Supervisors and he in turn must decide what proj - 

 acts on each Forest are immediately necessary and 

 which ones can be postponed. The same process 

 is repeated in the Washington office when all the 



