Take a deep breath everyone, the Roadless Rule is back in the news. Because non-profits need to capture the attention of an easily-distracted public that has a lot more important things to worry about in order to raise money, because publications that sell fear and lies need to scare you, and because it has a sexy name, that means there’s a lot of inflammatory headlines out there right now. Don’t worry, I’m here to cut through the bullshit so you’ll have one less thing keeping you up at night.
What The Roadless Rule Is
Back in the halcyon days of the year 2000, Bill Clinton’s United States Forest Service found itself with a problem. It was facing an $8.4 billion maintenance backlog across the 373,000 miles of roads it was responsible for on a total agency budget of only $3.4 billion. But nationwide there were 58 million acres of land that might be suitable for logging and hadn’t yet been opened up for such.
Because USFS pays to build logging roads and because the agency was facing a budget crisis, it was easier just to put a hard no on building more than it was to pull money from other priorities. And, fortunately for then-Chief Mike Dombeck, there was a relatively easy solution on the table.
Beginning in the 1970s, USFS had begun inventorying its as-yet undeveloped acres as part of the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation.
The solution? Simply adopting an agency-wide rule that stated USFS would no longer build new roads in designated “Roadless” areas.
What The Roadless Rule Is Not
I want to make sure everyone understands this: The Roadless Rule does not ban road construction in national forests. It only bans USFS from paying to build roads for the purpose of supporting logging projects, obviously in the areas “protected” by the rule.
There are all manner of roads, infrastructure, power lines, power plants, dams, and other such things in inventoried roadless areas. The rule does not prohibit roads from being built by USFS for the purpose of firefighting, fuel management, or recreational access.
Note that I put “protected” in quotations above. The rule was never intended to protect habitat or wildlife or even to prevent logging. But, it has come to offer those protections and be thought of as a protection-oriented policy. And because that protection has been so effective, we’ve been able to lean on it, and skip strengthening existing conservation and preservation legislation like the Endangered Species Act or Clean Water Act, both of which are now also under threat even though those are actual laws.
Also note that the rule was never intended to limit recreational access. This comes down to the common misunderstanding that also popped up when a similar amount of disinformation was put out about the Forest Service being “dismantled.”
The primary purpose of USFS is to permit and support industrial extraction. That we also get to use logging roads to go camping is an unintended benefit of that, it’s not indicative of an agency that prioritizes public recreation. All that evidence you need for that is that USFS does not build roads for the purpose of recreation, it builds them for the purpose of supporting logging.
This also begs a fun question: How can USFS have been “dismantled” if it’s also “bulldozing” 44 million acres? Surely that much bulldozing would take at least some level of agency staffing.
Rules Aren’t Laws
No, a federal agency can’t just snap its fingers and establish a new policy by proclamation. There’s all manner of hoops it has to jump through first, designed to ensure those policies are legal, sound, being done in the interest of both taxpayers and other stakeholders, and in compliance with any relevant legislation written by Congress.
The most important of those processes is mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (which, as an aside, the Trump administration is trying to undo). Clinton’s USFS put together an extensive environmental review, held hundreds of public meetings, and solicited 1.6 million public comments.
As Our Public Lands and Waters points out, 90 percent of those were in favor of the rule. The Roadless Rule has proven almost universally popular since its inception.
But, given that an agency complies with that process and associated legalities, one can totally just change any rule, eliminate an old one, or write a new one. And as we’re seeing here, that makes agency rule making subject to the ups and downs of electoral politics. Just as the current fascists in charge of the federal government can undo the Roadless Rule, a hypothetical future AOC-Buttigieg administration can re-implement it in any form they think won’t interfere with getting re-elected for a second term.
Why We’re Hearing About The Roadless Rule Yet Again
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced her intention to entirely dismantle the Roadless Rule in June, 2025, to much hullabaloo from non-profits trying to raise money, publications selling fear and lies, and all the various influencers and nincompoops who just repeat anything they hear if they think it’ll get clicks.
Since that time, the Trump administration hasn’t exactly been winning in court. The Department of the Interior, for example, just lost a legal challenge to its plan to build a road through Alaska’s Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.
So what USDA did was go and assemble a real environmental review and generally try and pay some lip service to the NEPA process in an effort to try and make this rescission stand up to inevitable legal challenge. Here’s a link to the 333-page Draft Environmental Impact Statement and its two appendixes, one of which is 538 pages long. It appears as if someone in the Trump administration actually took the time to do their homework for once. Shame they then chose to predicate the whole thing on the easily-disproven lie that this is all for fire risk mitigation.
The Rescission will now enter an abbreviated 30-day public comment period. Expect the final rule to be implemented shortly after that. If you’d like to leave a comment, here’s a link. It’ll obviously be ignored, but the volume and breadth of your comments could be useful in the inevitable lawsuits that will likely delay implementation of the final rule at least into the next Congress, if not the next administration.
Note that while nationwide 58 million acres are protected by the Roadless Rule, both Idaho and Colorado have carveouts that protect them from this new rule making, hence the 44.7 million acre total you’re now hearing about losing its protections.
Why Republicans Are Doing This
As I explained at much length before, this is Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s pound of flesh for voting for last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Ol’ Lisa is in the pocket of a timber company that really wants to use taxpayer funds to subsidize destroying the world’s largest temperate rainforest so they can ship its lumber to China.
Money, Competence, and Mother Nature
Way back in the year 2000, USFS went through all the trouble of writing and implementing the Roadless Rule because it couldn’t possibly be expected to build another mile of road on that year’s paltry $84 million road construction budget. Throughout the ‘90s, USFS road construction totaled $79 million to $96 million annually.
Adjusted for inflation, $84 million in Bill Bucks would be $166 million Donald Dollars. A mile of USFS road can cost anything from $10,000 on the low end for flat ground, on up to $600,000+ in steep, unstable terrain.
So how much money is USFS devoting to road construction? $50 million over the next four years.
One of the important things we need to remember about the Roadless Rule is that it protects areas that remained free of logging roads, long after industrial logging had peaked on public lands and the American timber industry shifted to cheaper, more predictable, more sustainable tree farms. Today, less than 10 percent of America’s total timber harvest is sourced from public lands. The reason why roadless areas weren’t logged is because they were too steep, too inaccessible, or didn’t contain valuable enough timber to justify the effort.
USFS manages 193 million total acres, which are crossed today by 386,000 miles of road. Even assuming a best case scenario in which a mile of new road costs only $10,000 (a drastic underestimation of building in roadless areas), we’re talking about USFS having the budget to add 1.3 percent to its total road mileage, across 23 percent of the total area it manages. And there’s still no way they could achieve even that amount of road construction between now and that hypothetical future AOC-Buttigieg administration, in which this will all be undone.
On top of that, current USFS management is doing everything in its power to prevent its employees from being able to accomplish anything. Not only were somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 of the 34,000 full-time USFS staff lost to DOGE, early retirements, and buyouts last year, but its current chief Tom Schultz has decided to embark on a large-scale agency reorganization. Those typically take three to four years to implement, and mean that the staff that should otherwise be writing logging permits, conducting surveys, and planning roads are going to instead be spending their time packing moving trucks, figuring out where their kids are going to go to school, wondering who they should be reporting to now, and ordering new office supplies. Schultz has zero experience at the Forest Service, so expect this to go even worse than normal.
Ultimately, while some harm will inevitably result from this easily-undone agency rulemaking, that harm will be dramatically limited by the fact that all of this is about a rule, not a law, and one that a bunch of incompetent appointees will be trying to implement while a newly-flipped Congress is hauling their asses to the Capitol to testify about what it is they think they’re doing.
Let this be yet another reminder that if we can all agree on one takeaway from our little experiment in fascism, let it be this: We can no longer rely on norms and good intentions to protect us from our worst impulses. If we want to protect the things we care about, we need to enshrine those protections in law.
But just in case you do need something to be scared of in order to justify your subscription: China’s probably going to take advantage of all the chaos this administration is causing to invade Taiwan sometime in the near future, and that should contribute even further to wrecking the world economy.
Top photo: USFS
A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.
"We can no longer rely on norms and good intentions to protect us from our worst impulses. If we want to protect the things we care about, we need to enshrine those protections in law." - Absolutely the most important thing we all need to remember, when and if we get ever get a Congress again that is interested in passing laws. But thank you for all the information and, hopefully, talking many people off the ledge.
By the way, your last paragraph was a PERFECT ending to this :)
While I agree with much of what you present here, I have to take exception to the statement that the primary purpose of the USFS is to permit and support industrial extraction. This may depend on which USFS bubble you live around, but as a 30-year career hydrologist with the USFS in California, this was not my experience. I also disagree with your interpretation that the roadless rule does not prevent new road building for the purposes you stated. The current exceptions that do allow new road building are very limited, and the reality is there are examples where the rule has hindered options for the treatment of forest fuels hazard where roadless areas extend into WUI's. Although some forests/districts have successfully treated fuels in roadless areas using the exceptions, others felt they did not have that option. I suspect that is because of site-specific differences related to roads that were grandfathered in. What nobody is talking about so far is an alternative that proposes modification to the exceptions in the current roadless rule, to allow more temporary or level 1 road building specifically for wildland fuels reduction, with straightforward language regarding current best management practices to ensure those roads do not adversely impact waterbodies and are not accessible for unmanaged motorized recreation. But as you correctly pointed out, under any scenario, funding is the biggest factor in limiting new road building, including water quality mitigation and maintenance. Which is why the roadless rule was established to begin with. The USFS road maintenance backlog is REAL.