Matthew Cawlfield

Matthew Cawlfield serves as a key procurement professional within the Stewardship Contracting Branch of the U.S. Forest Service, where he facilitates landscape-scale ecological restoration through strategic contracting. His role centers on administering stewardship contracts that integrate timber harvesting with watershed protection, fuel reduction, and infrastructure maintenance to advance forest resilience and wildfire risk mitigation. He manages a portfolio of complex, performance-based acquisitions under the authority of the Stewardship Contracting Authority, ensuring alignment with National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements and collaborative resource management goals. His acquisitions are primarily service-oriented, designed to incentivize long-term ecological outcomes over commodity-driven outputs. Cawlfield maintains consistent working relationships with a core group of specialized 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 demonstrated expertise in ecological restoration, forest thinning, trail construction, and fuel management operations. His procurement approach favors contractors with proven on-the-ground experience in federal forest environments, fostering long-term, trust-based partnerships that prioritize technical competence and adaptive management over low-bid criteria. His contracting activity shows no use of socioeconomic set-asides, with 100% of awards issued under full and open competition. This reflects a strategic focus on technical capability and operational readiness rather than socioeconomic preferences, aligning with the branch’s mission to rapidly deploy qualified contractors for time-sensitive restoration work across vast, remote landscapes. Cawlfield’s procurement activity is exclusively concentrated in NAICS 115310—Support Activities for Forestry—encompassing services such as forest thinning, prescribed burning, road decommissioning, and non-timber ecological restoration. His expertise lies in structuring performance-based contracts that link payment to measurable ecological outcomes, ensuring that contracting directly advances the Forest Service’s stewardship objectives.