The United States Department of Agriculture on Monday announced that it will rescind a decades-old rule that protects 58.5 million acres of national forestland from road construction and timber harvesting.
The USDA, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, said it will eliminate the 2001 “Roadless Rule” which established lasting protection for specific wilderness areas within the nation’s national forests. Research has found that building roads can fragment habitats, disrupt ecosystems, and increase erosion and sediment pollution in drinking water, among other potentially harmful outcomes.
In a statement, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins described the rule — which applies to about 30% of national forestland — as outdated and overly restrictive.
“Once again, President Trump is removing absurd obstacles to common-sense management of our natural resources by rescinding the overly restrictive ‘Roadless Rule,’” Rollins said in a statement. “This move opens a new era of consistency and sustainability for our nation’s forests. It is abundantly clear that properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.”
More than 40 states are home to areas protected by the rule. In California, that encompasses about 4.4 million acres across 21 national forests, including the Angeles, Tahoe, Inyo, Shasta-Trinity and Los Padres national forests, according to the USDA’s website.
Environmental groups were quick to denounce the USDA’s decision.
“Secretary Rollins is taking a blowtorch to a landmark rule that shields almost 60 million acres of national forests from the serious impacts roads can have not only on wildlife and their habitats but also on the nation’s drinking water sources,” read a statement from Vera Smith, director of the national forests and public lands program at the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife.
Josh Hicks, conservation campaigns director at the nonprofit Wilderness Society, said the policy has been “remarkably successful at protecting the nation’s forests from mining, logging and roadbuilding for nearly 25 years.”
“Any attempt to revoke it is an attack on the air and water we breathe and drink, abundant recreational opportunities which millions of people enjoy each year, havens for wildlife and critical buffers for communities threatened by increasingly severe wildfire seasons,” Hicks said.
National forests are a significant source of drinking water in the United States, and areas designated as “roadless” help protect the headwaters of hundreds of watersheds that supply millions of people, according to the Forest Service’s 2001 impact report on the rule.
As for wildfires, Rollins said rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule will enable the federal government to better manage forests for fire risk and timber production. Of the 58.5 million acres covered under the rule, 28 million acres are in areas at high or very high risk of wildfire, she said.
Several opponents disagreed with the notion that eliminating the rule will reduce fire risk.
“It’s ridiculous for Secretary Rollins to spin this as a move that will reduce wildfire risk or improve recreation,” read a statement from Rachael Hamby, policy director with the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation advocacy group. “Commercial logging exacerbates climate change, increasing the intensity of wildfires. This is nothing more than a massive giveaway to timber companies at the expense of every American and the forests that belong to all of us.”
The administration “appears to be dead set on liquidating our public lands as quickly as possible,” said Drew McConville, senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit. “Under the guise of wildfire prevention, this action would shamelessly offer up some of our most treasured national forests for drilling, mining, and timber. It should be clear by now to President Trump that the American people do not want their forests and parks sold out to the highest bidder.”
The decision aligns with recent executive orders from President Trump aimed at expanding mining, logging and drilling on public lands, including a controversial Senate proposal to sell off millions of acres of public land as part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Trump in April also issued a directive to open up more than 112.5 million acres of national forestland to industrial logging — an order that touches all 18 of California’s national forests.
The president has said these actions will remove costly barriers to American business and innovation, help increase domestic timber supplies, and strengthen energy independence, among other benefits.
In many states — but in California in particular — the subject of managing forests for wildfire risk reduction has been a matter of political debate, with Trump during his first term famously telling California it needs to “rake its forest floors” to prevent worsening blazes.
Experts say decades of suppressing fires in California has enabled a buildup of vegetation that is fueling larger and more frequent conflagrations. However, many of those same experts have warned that clearing brush is not the same as large-scale logging or clear cutting — which can eliminate fire-suppressing shade and moisture and lead to new growth of more combustible non-native plants and grasses.
Chris Wood, who helped develop the 2001 Roadless Rule when he worked at the Forest Service and now serves as chief executive of the conservation group Trout Unlimited, said the policy is “one of the most significant and popular conservation achievements in the history of the United States.”
“Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, once described conservation as ‘the application of common sense to common problems for the common good,’” Wood said. “Let’s hope common sense prevails and the administration reconsiders its proposal.”
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