The U.S. Forest Service continues to throw money and timber away, but don't expect the Republican-led Congress to call a halt to this long-running story of government waste. The GOP is brain-dead when it comes to sparing live trees.

Last week , Louisiana-Pacific Corp. placed the winning bid of $155,190 for 1.8 million board feet of timber in the Gallatin National Forest, just south of Bozeman, Mont. The harvest will take place in the Hyalite drainage, one of the most popular recreation areas in the northern Rockies. Among other qualities, Hyalite boasts the first handicapped- accessible trail in a national forest, one that winds through the forest and up to a mountain waterfall.

The sale is sure to make this area less accessible. It also took seven years and untold millions of dollars to complete - all to get the taxpayers the grand sum of just over $150,000. (The U.S. Forest Service has no idea of the sale's total cost.)

This is a classic Forest Service fiasco. In 1995, the agency lost $455 million in the logging of national forests. In 1993-94, the service lost a total of $800 million selling off timber granted it by Congress. It hasn't learned that commercial trees grow best where it is low, wet and warm. The Rockies are generally high, dry and cold.

If the Forest Service were a company, its shareholders would replace its management or it would fold. Government has no mechanism that works like this, so we must rely upon Congress to cull the sorry agencies and programs.

But despite their purported ideology of limited government, Republicans fail in this task.

Consider the Salvage Logging Rider. The Forest Service faced increasing restrictions on cutting healthy, green trees. But Congress passed a law last year that gave new life to an old practice, encouraging the Forest Service to ''get out the cut'' through dubious ''salvage'' sales.

Salvage logging, by definition, should include only dead or diseased trees. But that's not how it works in practice. A 1992 Forest Service memo explained, ''Even if a sale is totally green, as long as one board comes off that would qualify as salvage on the Salvage Sale Fund Plan, it should be called salvage.''

Prominent natural-resource policymakers such as Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, and Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, spearhead the defense of this status quo. They and their ''wise use'' constituents parade under the banner of free enterprise while demanding subsidies for outmoded, environmentally harmful resource exploitation on public lands.

GOP leaders are either ignorant of the subsidized damage or too cowardly to stand up against these flamboyant, green-baiting politicians. Republicans consistently neglect real environmental reform and cave in to special interests promoting extractive industries and subsidies.

Not surprisingly, well-off, well-educated voters have grown moreand more disenchanted with Republicans'environmental policies.

When Republicans foster prosperity, they also create environmentalists, because a greener outlook tends to follow a rise in education and income.

Groups like Trout Unlimited show these links between environmentalism, education and prosperity. TU members' income averages $105,000, and 40% of them have master's, doctoral, or professional degrees. Their membership is ''conservative on almost every issue apart from the environment,'' according to TU's communications director, Peter Rafle.

Instead of appealing to this important and growing constituency, Republicans support ethanol subsidies and salvage logging. With endangered species, the Republicans merely argue for reducing or eliminating standards when they could be talking about using property rights and incentives as tools to protect habitat.

No prominent Republican has made the case how an environmentalism based on property rights and incentives, along with sensible regulations, would be more effective, efficient and environmentally sensitive than bureaucratic control.

The national forests are mismanaged. Republicans ought to be pushing reforms that reflect the party's stated principles. Instead, they support the corporate and bureaucratic welfare that lies at the heart of the agency's problems. They have only themselves to blame if they lose their natural constituency, the well-off and well-educated.