The Trump administration moved forward with a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road building and logging. The plan would remove protections that have been in place for 25 years.
The proposal comes from the U.S. Forest Service. It would repeal the 2001 “roadless rule,” which was put in place under the Clinton administration to keep forest land in its natural, wild state.
According to The New York Times, President Trump has been pushing the agency to allow more logging and to thin out forests as a way to lower the risk of wildfires.
Repeal would affect protected land across the country, including Alaska’s Tongass forest
The repeal would be a win for Republican-led states and industry groups. They have said for years that the roadless rule has slowed down economic growth. More than a dozen lawsuits have tried and failed to overturn the rule.
During Trump’s first term, protections were removed from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. The Biden administration later restored those protections in 2023.
This time, the Forest Service plans to remove protections from nine million acres of undeveloped land within the Tongass. Millions more acres of untouched wilderness across the rest of the country would also lose protection.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose department includes the Forest Service, defended the move in a statement: “For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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.”
Environmental groups said the plan would damage untouched land, including habitats used by migratory animals and water sources that supply drinking water to cities. Several advocacy groups are expected to sue in an attempt to stop the repeal.
Drew McConville, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, said the move threatens water and wildlife. “By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state,” he said.
Roadless areas make up about 30 percent of all national forest land, covering nearly 60 million acres. These areas are described as home to more than half of the country’s threatened wildlife, including grizzly bears, wolves, elk, salmon and wolverines. Forest land in the U.S. also absorbs large amounts of carbon each year, which helps slow climate change.
The proposal would affect the management of 44.7 million acres nationwide. Idaho and Colorado have their own rules that already replace the federal rule, so those two states would not be affected by the change.
Damien Schiff, a senior attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal group that has fought the roadless rule in the Tongass, said the federal protections have hurt mining, timber production and other economic activity. He said restrictions around the Tongass have made it hard for nearby communities to connect to electric grids. “It has had a depressing impact on the use of the national forest for productive activity generally,” Schiff said.
The Trump administration and many Republicans argue that building roads would make it easier for firefighters to reach forest fires. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, said the rule has limited the state’s ability to manage wildfire risk. “For 25 years, the heavy thumb of Washington, D.C., has hindered Montana’s ability to properly manage wildfire risk and road development on nearly 60 percent of Forest Service land across the Treasure State,” he said.
Ecologists generally agree that forest management needs to improve, but experts are divided on whether building more roads in untouched forests is the right approach. Some warned that roads could actually raise the risk of wildfires because they bring more people into these areas. Research shows that close to 85 percent of wildfires are started by human activity, such as discarded cigarettes, unattended fires, or sparks from equipment.
Roads can also allow invasive species, including grasses that burn easily, to spread. Separately, delays to a different kind of forest management funding have already drawn attention this year, after paused wildfire prevention funding in Minnesota was linked to fires later burning through areas that had been slated for thinning work.
Alexandra D. Syphard, a senior research ecologist at the Conservation Biology Institute, a nonprofit based in Oregon, said building roads in undisturbed land could backfire. “Introducing roads and human activities in areas that are otherwise undisturbed will increase wildfires where the risk is currently low,” she said. “The unintentional impact of this could actually be creating a worse situation.”
Camille Stevens-Rumann, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and a fire ecology professor at Colorado State University, said new roads would not necessarily help fight the most destructive wildfires, since those fires tend to start near roads that already exist. She said fires in remote areas are often caused by lightning and tend to burn fewer acres.
Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico pointed to other tools used to fight fires in hard-to-reach areas. “We have smoke jumpers for one, that’s how you get into those remote areas,” he said. He also noted that prescribed burns and other forest treatments already happen across millions of acres, and those areas are closed to motorized vehicles afterward.
Some Democrats from Western states said they believe the wildfire argument is being used to cover up the administration’s real goal of increasing logging. Trump has made timber production a major priority, calling last year for a 25 percent increase in logging on national forests. He also directed agencies to skip endangered species protections and other environmental rules to make that possible.
Rollins later issued a memo declaring an “emergency situation” in national forests. That memo set up a process allowing the Forest Service to speed up logging by shortening public input and legal review. The roadless rule repeal comes months after the administration also invested heavily in reviving the coal industry as part of a wider push to expand resource development on federal land.
The proposal is expected to be published in the Federal Register later this week. After that, the Forest Service will accept public comments before making the rule final.
Published: Aug 19, 2026 11:00 am