Earthjustice Responds as Trump Administration Takes Aim at Longstanding Rule Protecting National Forestlands

Speaking at the Western Governors Association annual meeting, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins today announced a rollback of the Roadless Rule, a policy that has protected many of the most pristine backcountry areas of our National Forest System against costly and harmful road building and logging since 2001. The rollback of this long-standing, hard-won environmental safeguard follows an Executive Order from President Trump in March, and a Secretarial Memo issued by Rollins in April, laying the groundwork for a major increase in industrial logging across federal forests.

For nearly a quarter of a century, the Roadless Rule has helped to safeguard lands that afford abundant opportunities for outdoor recreation, including hiking, hunting and fishing. These lands also provide essential habitat for wildlife such as California condors, grizzly bears and wolves of the Yellowstone area, native salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest, migratory songbirds of the Appalachian hardwoods, and myriad other species that rely on roadless areas to survive.

Roadless forests protect clean drinking water that ultimately flows into the faucets of millions of Americans. Mature and old-growth trees in these areas serve as buffers against climate change by providing shade with cooler temperatures, and by absorbing and sequestering carbon dioxide.

The rule was created after more than 600 public hearings were held around the nation, and the public provided more than 1.6 million comments in favor of adopting it — more comments than any other rule in the nation’s history.

The following is a statement from Drew Caputo, Vice President of Litigation for Lands, Wildlife and Oceans at Earthjustice:

“The roadless rule has protected 58 million acres of our wildest national forest lands from clearcutting for more than a generation. The Trump administration now wants to throw these forest protections overboard so the timber industry can make huge money from unrestrained logging. These are lands that belong to all Americans, not the timber industry. We will stand for America’s national forests and the wildlife that depend on them. If the Trump administration actually revokes the roadless rule, we’ll see them in court.”

While the Trump administration has suggested that wildfire risk is an underlying reason for these sweeping policy changes, rolling back the Roadless Rule actually threatens to cause more fires. That’s because fire ignitions are far more likely in roaded landscapes. A recent analysis from The Wilderness Society (TWS), which looked at wildfire data from 1992 to 2024 and is in the peer-review process, found that wildfires are nearly four times more likely to start in forest areas that have roads, in comparison with roadless areas. TWS concluded that “building roads into roadless areas is likely to result in more fires.”

Today’s announcement is about giving more trees to industry, not protecting our national forests.