Repealing ‘Roadless Rule,’ Trump rolls back protections for 58M acres of forests & wildlands

The Trump administration rolled back a Clinton-era rule protecting more than 58 million acres of federal forest and wildlands from road construction and timber harvesting on Monday.

During a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association in New Mexico, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced she was rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule, part of a larger effort by President Donald Trump to mitigate wildfires by expand logging and thinning in forests.

Officials said the rule was “outdated” and argued the rule kept the
U.S. Forest Service—which operates under the U.S. Department of Agriculture—
from sustaining the “health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and
grasslands.”

Environmentalists called the long-standing rule a “hard-won environmental safeguard” which has protected pristine regions of the nation’s backcountry, including thousands of species and the watersheds American cities rely on for clean drinking water. The move will open sweeping areas of public lands up to logging and other exploitation, they said.

“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 on Monday. “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.”

The Roadless Rule is part of a larger move to remove regulations they called
“over-complicated, burdensome barriers that hamper American business
and innovation,” USDA officials said. “This also hurts jobs and economic development across rural
America.”

During his second term, Trump has already allowed emergency logging across half of the land managed by the Forest Service, accelerating the process to clear logging while attempting to gut restrictions that could create a “undue burden” on timber production. Trump has also slashed the agency’s workforce and research efforts, and moved to consolidate wildland firefighting into a single agency under the Interior Department.

Within hours of Rollins’ announcement, the Western Environmental Law Center—an environmental advocacy group based in Oregon, with offices in New Mexico, Colorado and Montana—vowed to fight the change, saying the move would “unleash Hell” on undisturbed public lands. 

National forests cover around 193 million acres across 150 national forests and grasslands in 40 states, and around 58.2 million acres are covered by the rule, concentrated in a few states, according to the Congressional Research Service.

In Arizona, more than 11 million acres are covered as national forestlands, including nearly 1.2 million acres protected under the roadless areas spread across the state. This includes the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, Coconino National Forest, Kaibab National Forest, Prescott National Forest, Tonto National Forest, and the Coronado National Forest—which covers a dozen separate sections of protected land in Southern Arizona, including areas near Tucson.

Around one-quarter of the Coronado National Forest is considered Inventoried Roadless Areas, covering around 421,000 acres, according to USFS. This includes large sections of the Santa Catalina mountains, a chunk of the east side of the Rincon Mountain Wilderness, and a portion of the Chiricahuas Wilderness, as well as the Pajaritos

The “Roadless Rule” was put into place during the last days of the Bill Clinton administration, however the incoming George W. Bush administration sought to hold up the policy, and asked state governors to seek special exemptions. It also survived several legal challenges, including attempts to undermine the rule from officials in Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska. The Colorado Mining Association tried and failed to convince the Supreme Court to intervene in 2012.

‘A prescription for more wildfires’

“In an extreme overreach that will destroy treasured national forests, the Trump administration today announced plans to rescind the Roadless Rule, a popular, science-based provision limiting commercial logging and associated road construction in undisturbed landscapes,” said the Western Environmental Law Center on Monday. “This will allow heavy machinery to wreak havoc on some 58.5 million acres of national forest lands thus far spared from the horrors of industrial extraction.”

“In the same breath, Secretary of Agriculture Rollins calls one of the best ideas from this century for protecting intact forests ‘absurd’ and labels the deployment of a legion of chainsaws and heavy equipment ‘sustainable,'” said Sarah McMillan, Wildlands and Wildlife Program director at the Western Environmental Law Center. 

“The success and popularity of the Roadless Rule is off the charts. The proposed, unconscionable public land sales in the reconciliation bill combined with this rescission betray a singular goal of America’s current rulers: Reap as much private profit as humanly possible in four years no matter the generational cost to the American people and the natural world,” McMillian said. “This would be a tragedy, and the Western Environmental Law Center will fight it.”

“The Trump administration’s disdain for nature knows no bounds,” said Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity. “Stripping protections from these last unfragmented national forests risks our drinking water, plants, animals and some of America’s most beautiful wild places. It’s a prescription for more wildfires so logging companies can make a buck.” 

“The Roadless Rule is one of our country’s most important conservation achievements and we’ll fight like hell to keep these protections in place,” Spivak said.

USDA officials argued rescinded the rule and allowing “responsible timber production” throughout the national forests would help mitigate wildfires. In the statement announcing Rollins’ decision, USDA officials argued Utah was unable to manage about 60 percent of forest service land in the state because of these prohibitions.

Of
the 58.5 million acres covered by the rule, around 28 million acres are
considered high or very high risk of wildfire, USDA officials said. Eending the rule would give local officials “more flexibility to take swift
action to reduce wildfire risk and help protect surrounding communities
and infrastructure.”

However, Drew Caputo, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice rejected this argument.

“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,” said Caputo. “That’s because fire ignitions are far more likely in
roaded landscapes.”

A study by the Wilderness Society examined wildfire data from 1992 to 2024 and found wildfires are “nearly four times more
likely to start in forest areas that have roads, in comparison with
roadless areas,” Caputo wrote. He said the Wilderness Society 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,” he added.

Earthjustice
noted that forests unmarked by roads are also integral to ensuring
clean drinking water for millions of Americans, and 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.”

Since 2001, 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,” said Earthjustice in a published statement.