Trump
Administration to End Protections for 58 Million Acres of National Forests
Agriculture
Secretary Brooke Rollins said the Clinton-era rule barring road construction
and logging was outdated and “absurd.”
Lisa
Friedman
By Lisa
Friedman
June 23,
2025
The Trump
administration said on Monday that it would open up 58 million acres of back
country in national forests to road construction and development, removing
protections that had been in place for a quarter century.
Agriculture
Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to repeal the 2001 “roadless rule”
that had preserved the wild nature of nearly a third of the land in national
forests in the United States. Ms. Rollins said the regulation was outdated.
“Once again,
President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our
natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive roadless rule,” Ms.
Rollins said in a statement. She said the repeal “opens a new era of
consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests.”
Environmental
groups said the plan could destroy some of America’s untouched landscapes and
promised to challenge it in court.
The
unspoiled land in question includes Tongass National Forest in Alaska, North
America’s largest temperate rainforest; Reddish Knob in the Shenandoah
Mountains, one of the highest points in Virginia; and millions of acres of the
Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho.
“Most
Americans value these pristine backcountry areas for their sense of wildness,
for the clean water they provide, for the fishing and hunting and wildlife
habitat,” said Chris Wood, the chief executive of Trout Unlimited, an
environmental group.
When
President Bill Clinton used executive authority to protect the forests weeks
before leaving office in 2001, it was hailed by conservationists as the most
significant step since President Theodore Roosevelt laid the foundation for the
national forest system. It blocked logging, road building and mining and
drilling on 58 million acres of the remaining undeveloped national forest
lands.
Mr. Wood,
who served as a senior policy adviser to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service
when the rule was developed, recalled that it had wide public support.
“I don’t
think the timber industry wants to get into these areas,” he said. “They’re
wildly controversial, and they’re too expensive to access. I believe when they
take this to rule making, they will realize how wildly unpopular getting rid of
that rule is and how little gain there is to be had from it.”
Randy
Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an
environmental group, said eliminating protections would invite wildfires and
put drinking water at risk.
“The Trump
administration’s disdain for nature knows no bounds,” Ms. Spivak said. “The
roadless rule is one of our country’s most important conservation achievements,
and we’ll fight like hell to keep these protections in place.”
The
announcement comes as the Trump administration is moving to significantly
increase logging in the United States. President Trump has called on cabinet
secretaries to bypass endangered species laws and other environmental
protections in order to boost the domestic supply of timber.
Ray White of
Harold White Lumber and Millworks in Kentucky said he was glad to see an end to
restrictions on the land and an opportunity to gain access to new timber.
“We’re very pleased to see a little common sense being brought back,” Mr. White
said. “It certainly does give the opportunity now to get to a large part of
these forests.”
On Capitol
Hill, Republican lawmakers are currently writing a plan to sell off federal
lands as part of their domestic policy and tax package. The effort has drawn an
intense backlash from Democrats, environmental activists and some Republicans.
Republican
lawmakers from Western states praised the plan to eliminate the roadless rule.
Representative
Nick Begich, Republican of Alaska, called the Trump administration decision
“yet another a major victory" for the state and said the regulation had
“blocked access to critical resources, and halted economic opportunity,
particularly in Alaska, where 92 percent of the Tongass National Forest was
off-limits.”
Tongass
National Forest has for decades been the center of the fight over the roadless
rule. Its cedar, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees, many of them more than 800
years old, provide essential habitats for 400 species of wildlife, including
bald eagles, salmon and the world’s greatest concentration of black bears.
The towering
trees also play an essential role in fighting climate change. They store more
than 10 percent of the carbon accumulated by all national forests in the United
States, according to the government.
In 2020, the
first Trump administration stripped roadless protections specifically in the
Tongass National Forest and opened about nine million acres to logging. In
2023, the Biden administration restored the restrictions.
A correction
was made on June 23, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the
amount of national forest land protected by President Bill Clinton’s executive
action in 2001. It was 58 million acres, not 58 acres.
Lisa
Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing
climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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