Katie Musser

Katie Musser serves as a key procurement professional within the Stewardship Contracting Branch of the U.S. Forest Service, where she facilitates landscape-scale stewardship contracts designed to advance ecological restoration and wildfire risk reduction. Her role centers on executing complex, performance-based acquisitions that integrate timber harvesting with watershed protection, habitat improvement, and infrastructure maintenance. Musser specializes in long-term, multi-year contracts that align with the Forest Service’s strategic goals of ecosystem resilience and collaborative resource management, ensuring compliance with federal stewardship contracting authorities under Title III of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. She maintains consistent working relationships with a core group of experienced contractors including BRINK BROTHERS INC., PEAK ENGINEERING LLC, MILLER TIMBER SERVICES, INC., AZ HAMMER DOWN, LLC, and DENNIS KIRBY. These partners are selected for their proven expertise in silvicultural operations, mechanical thinning, fuel reduction, and forest road maintenance. Musser’s procurement approach emphasizes performance outcomes, technical capability, and operational reliability, fostering long-term partnerships built on accountability and shared stewardship objectives. Musser’s contracting activity is entirely non-set-aside, reflecting a procurement strategy prioritizing technical proficiency and operational scale over socioeconomic classifications. While small business participation is not formally incentivized through set-asides, her portfolio consistently includes firms of varying sizes based on their capacity to deliver complex, landscape-level outcomes under stringent environmental and safety standards. Her procurement focus is exclusively under NAICS 115310 (Support Activities for Forestry), encompassing services such as prescribed burning, brush clearing, snag removal, and forest health treatments. Musser’s domain expertise lies in ecological restoration contracting, where she ensures compliance with NEPA, Endangered Species Act, and National Forest Management Act requirements, making her a critical link between forest science and operational implementation.