The Trump administration will move ahead with plans to end more than 25 years of sweeping protections for tens of millions of federally managed acres across the U.S., including the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
Brooke Rollins, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on Aug. 18 filed a rule to rescind “in its entirety” the national 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits road construction, logging and mining on about 30% of lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, mostly in forested areas of the West.
A draft environmental impact statement was posted Aug. 19. The public will have until Sept. 21 to comment before changes are finalized.
The Roadless Rule prohibitions are intended to protect wildlife, watersheds and old-growth forests from human development and human-caused wildfires. But in her announcement, Rollins said she was rescinding the rules on nearly 45 million acres under the banner of wildfire prevention.
“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” she said.
Rollins’ assertions, however, are not borne out by research, including from Oregon State University Professor Chris Dunn, a forest ecologist and wildfire expert. Dunn and his colleagues found that most wildfires in Western national forests between 1984 and 2018 started near roads, showing an increased likelihood of wildfires where roads exist because the No. 1 cause of wildfires is people.
The U.S. Forest Service’s own research also shows the majority of human-caused ignitions occur on roadsides, and 20 years of monitoring data does not support assertions that repealing road prohibitions will improve forest health, researchers found.
Rollins first proposed rolling back the rule in August 2025, saying at the time the move would support President Donald Trump’s executive orders to increase logging and energy development on federal lands.
The Alaska Wilderness League and other groups have raised concerns about what the change could mean for the Tongass, the nation’s largest national forest and a lightning rod for litigation. State political leaders there have supported an exemption to the Roadless Rule that they argue impedes economic opportunities.
During the latter part of Trump’s first term, the federal government lifted restrictions on logging and road-building in the Tongass, something the Biden administration later reversed.
Emma Powell, the Alaska Wilderness League’s government affairs manager, described the Tongass as a global treasure that serves as a home for salmon runs and abundant wildlife. She added that cultures and livelihoods are connected to the forest.
“From fisheries to tourism and outdoor recreation, these landscapes also support thousands of jobs and generate billions in economic activity each year,” Powell said.
The Department of Agriculture’s notice of intent last year to roll back the Roadless Rule brought in more than 600,000 comments, most of which expressed opposition to any changes that would erode the prohibitions on development. Federal officials have not held a single public meeting since then.
In the two years leading up to final passage of the 2001 rule, Forest Service officials held 600 public meetings across Western states and received more than 1.6 million public comments.
Roughly 96% of the Forest Service’s inventoried roadless areas are in 12 western states.
No state would be more affected by the rule termination than Alaska, which has almost a third of the 45 million acres affected by the pending change.
Idaho and Colorado would not be impacted by the rule changes because the two states negotiated their own agreements with the federal government more than a decade ago to permit projects that would “reduce hazardous fuels” near wildfire prone communities and to allow some local and state decisions about development on the federal acres.
U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who previously worked for one of the country’s largest lumber producers in Idaho, said in a statement last year that the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers for years and served as a barrier to commercial logging.
“More than 40% of inventoried roadless areas, primarily in the West, have high or very high wildfire hazard potential. And only 5% of those areas have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014,” he said.
Statements following Rollins’ Aug. 18 announcement made clear conservation and logging groups have seen the past 25 years of the Roadless Rule quite differently.
Abigail Dillen, president of the nonprofit environmental legal group Earthjustice, said in a statement that the group will likely sue to stop the rule changes from moving forward.
“For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has kept our wildest forests intact. The benefits have been incalculable for people, for water, for wildlife, and for the climate,” she said. “Earthjustice has successfully defended the Roadless Rule for a quarter century, and we are not going to stop now.”
Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing the timber industry, said in a statement that the Roadless Rule is among “failed policies” meant to protect forests.
This story was originally produced by Oregon Capital Chronicle, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network that includes the Alaska Beacon. The Associated Press contributed reporting for this story.
