As the article mentions, the USFS is underfunded and understaffed. As a result, (and as is also the case with USFWS and NMFS), permit related matters are often "triaged" with items having a low percieved environmental impact (or politically risky, or risk an expensive lawsuit) put off so that limited resources can be spent on more pressing matters.
That doesn't mean corruption and regulatory capture aren't issues, but they aren't a complete (or even major) part of the problem.
I guess also it doesn't bother me too much if drinking water is being extracted from a national forest as these forests are required by statute to be managed for multiple uses including resource extraction. Relatively speaking, siphoning off water for drinking seems like it is likely to be a relatively low impact activity, even when it's a bigevilcorporation like Nestle who is doing the extraction.
As gets mentioned basically every time this comes up, Nestle's total water consumption in California last year was approximately equal to the amount of water used by two golf courses. California has around 1200, with over 100 in desert regions.
Of course, as the California Golf Course Superintendents Association is quick to point out, parks and golf courses combined use up only 1% of potable water in California. They like to point the fingers at almond growers, which consume about a gallon per nut. Almond growers note that an ounce of lentils takes 71 gallons, and an ounce of beef 106 gallons. Farmers in general blame housing. And so on.
(Note: Take all the numbers with a grain of salt; they're self-serving press releases, if not outright lies. Even so, it's pretty clear Nestle's not to blame for California's water problems; whether their usage is the 0.008% of total California water use the company claims or, hell, ten times that, it's not a big deal.)
The funny part here is that the real problem is the complicated and non-free-market based rules of the games when it comes to water consumption. Cleaning up the rules and making them fair is the responsibility of the government and I think Sacramento completely to blame here. Of course, the current situation gives the California government the ability to trade political support for water rights. But this is not something anyone talks about.
If nestle's water consumption is producing bottled water, and you assume people don't dump bottled water down the drain that often, then all of that consumption is going into human bodies, isn't it?
Water use is a local issue. It's small comfort to plants and animals where Nestle is pumping, that golf courses hundreds of miles away are using more water. If Nestle overtaxes the resource and harms the local ecology, the harm there is done regardless of how small that particular watershed is in relation to the entire state of California.
I'm struck by how often Congress mandates this or that legal procedure which is self-evidently expensive to administer, and then fails to provide the requisite funding.
Get used to it. I used to do federal contracting. The biggest contract I was on was to do a bunch of work for one of the smaller three letter agencies.
The total amount of work encompassed many areas, and as such was a long, expensive project (to my standards, but not necessarily for government work) -- I think the project was slated to take approximately five years and cost approximately $50 million.
Despite incessant changes, we were closing in on finishing the project on time and on budget, but in year 4, the project was scrapped (after having spent the majority of the money) because nobody had planned on how to fund it in year 6, and the organization decided that instead of spending the remaining money going through the motions, they'd just pocket what was left over and apply it to their operating budget, which was (naturally) under-funded.
We built a smallish data center, procured water-proof routers, cameras, built websites and data processing workflows, all on the assumption that at the end of year 5, they'd actually USE the things we built and bought for them. Turns out, that was naive.
Under federal law, permits remain valid until the renewal application is decided. The USFS lacks resources to review applications in a timely manner, so it priorities the ones that are actually important (which, honestly, Nestle's is not).
So they can't simply say "hold off until we check this out", because that's illegal; the permit is valid until they process the renewal. Nor could they simply deny out of hand every application they don't have resources to review; that would also be illegal.
The real answer would be to overhaul the entire system, streamline it, and see that it has proper funding (probably via some hefty application fees). But that's not going to happen any time soon.
(See also: Every other god damn branch of government. Although the patent office is experiencing an especially similar issue.)
They can't "simply prohibit it." National Forests by law are managed for multiple uses including resource extraction. The USFS faces a very large downside because reviewing a permit like this would trigger an environmental impact statement, likely result in lawsuits, and tie up limited staff resources that then can't be used to review 50 (completely arbitrary number) other less controversial permits.
A large lawsuit that chews up time and money for delaying a business critical permit that Nestle would unnecessarily stack a large sum per day of lost income for the water rights.
Remembering its a review of the permit to decide whether they can continue, not a cessation of operations. The only reason that Nestle haven't taken the regulator to court at the moment is that the review process failed open allowing business to continue. If they voluntarily close it and take forever to complete the review, Nestle has grounds for compensation on the waiting time.
The USFS is getting not sued out of the current arrangement and continued barebones operations, thats about it. :/
That doesn't mean corruption and regulatory capture aren't issues, but they aren't a complete (or even major) part of the problem.
I guess also it doesn't bother me too much if drinking water is being extracted from a national forest as these forests are required by statute to be managed for multiple uses including resource extraction. Relatively speaking, siphoning off water for drinking seems like it is likely to be a relatively low impact activity, even when it's a bigevilcorporation like Nestle who is doing the extraction.