How about when it does sell timber, selling it for loss?
That one is pretty sore for me
The whole "loss" thing is mostly accounting, and all the ridiculous administration overhead that they add to the process - thus making it "cost" more than what the timber was worth to begin with.
Often timber is removed for some other purpose than "profit" such as fire danger reduction or disease control. Back in the 1980s in Colorado, the USFS was bulldozing areas of trees down and into piles and burning them, because they claimed that was cheaper than the administration costs of a timber sale
Back in the 1990s I did some research, and for many decades before that the USFS derived it's "revenue" from about 85% timber permits, 10% grazing and mining permits, and 5% recreation fees.
BUT - that money doesn't go to the USFS, it goes into the US general treasury and then the USFS gets an appropriation, which historically for that same time period amounted to only about 10% of total USFS receipts. Much of that appropriation was spent on recreational facilities, meaning that logging/grazing/mining were subsidizing the recreational industry.
So while there may have been "losses" on individual timber sales, the USFS as a whole made a great deal of money percentage wise for the us.gov - the profit margins were in excess of 900%
Since then, I'm guessing that the USFS has not brought in so much timber sale revenue because there have been so few timber sales compared to previous decades.
