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TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO END PROTECTIONS FOR 58 MILLION ACRES OF
NATIONAL FORESTS  
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Lisa Friedman
June 23, 2025
The New York Times
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_ Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the Clinton-era rule
barring road construction and logging was outdated and “absurd.” _


Tongass National Forest in Alaska is one of the locations that would
be opened to road construction and development.Credit..., Christopher
Miller for The New York Times

 

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Rollins said the regulation was outdated.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.”

[Brooke Rollins gestures with both hands while speaking outside a
building.]

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans to repeal the
2001 “roadless rule” that had preserved the wild nature of nearly
a third of national forests in the United States.Credit...Eric Lee/The
New York Times

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
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in the Tongass National Forest and opened about nine million acres to
logging. In 2023, the Biden administration restored the restrictions.

The U.S. Forest Service, a division of the Agriculture Department,
said in a statement that it would issue a formal notice of the
rollback in the coming weeks.

_Lisa Friedman is a reporter covering climate policy and politics at
The New York Times._

* National Forest
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* Environmental Catastrophe
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* Trump Administration
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