Forest Service files proposal to rescind the roadless rule on more than 44 million acres

The U.S. Forest Service has filed a proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule in its entirety, Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins announced on August 18 in a USDA press release. The department said the rule currently applies to more than 44 million acres of the 193-million-acre National Forest System.

The proposed rule and a draft environmental impact statement were placed on public inspection at the Federal Register on August 19 as document number 2026-16965, with a scheduled publication date of August 20. The document sets a comment period of 30 days after publication. USDA said in its release that comments must be received by midnight on September 21.

The rule text gives a different acreage than the press release. Promulgated on January 12, 2001, at 66 FR 3244, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule provided protection for 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas, the document states, and state-specific rules later developed for Idaho and Colorado remain in effect. The document also records that the 2001 rule “has been the subject of extensive and complex litigation” and “has been enjoined and reinstated on multiple occasions,” citing the Ninth Circuit’s 2009 decision in California ex rel. Lockyer v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, which left the original 2001 text in force.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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,” Rollins said in the release. “Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands.”

Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden said in the same release that the proposal was “commonsense policy sought since the first Trump administration.” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said more than 40 percent of inventoried roadless areas, primarily in the West, have high or very high wildfire hazard potential, that only 5 percent of those areas have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014, and that more than a quarter of the lands, 11.3 million acres, are already near existing roads.

USDA said the rescission removes the national designation of roadless areas but does not mandate timber cutting or road construction, and that decisions would move to local national forest managers within existing laws, regulations and policy. The department cited four executive orders: 14192 on deregulation, 14225 on timber production, 14154 on energy, and 14153 on Alaska resources.

The proposed rule quantifies what rescission would open up. It says permanent road additions in the near term would be anticipated on lands where current management plans allow them but the 2001 rule prohibits them, about 18.2 million acres, or 45.5 percent of the potentially affected environment, and that temporary roads are more likely within half a mile of existing roads, about 11.3 million acres. Rescission would expand active forest management on about 4.8 million acres, 16 percent of forested areas in the affected roadless areas. If timber were harvested across all of those acres, which the document calls unlikely because of budgets, operability limits and market conditions, it estimates a 5 to 10 percent increase in total annual sawtimber harvest from the National Forest System, $5.2 million to $11.4 million a year in revenue to the Treasury and the Forest Service, and $4.6 million to $10.6 million a year for the timber industry. The document says management opportunities “would be modest and localized.”

More than 95 percent of inventoried roadless areas sit in 10 western states, according to USDA: Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The proposal does not apply to national forests in Colorado and Idaho, which are covered by separate state-specific roadless regulations. Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon each issued statements supporting the filing in the USDA release.

Eight conservation groups responded the same day in a joint statement coordinated by Earthjustice, which said the 2001 rule protects 45 million acres and that the public will have 30 days to comment on the draft environmental impact statement.

“For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has kept our wildest forests intact,” said Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen. “Now, the Trump administration wants to gut the rule and open up 45 million acres of roadless forest to clear-cutting and other harmful development enabled by roading. Earthjustice has successfully defended the Roadless Rule for a quarter century, and we are not going to stop now.”

Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns at The Wilderness Society, said in the statement that opening backcountry forests to more roads and development, “and therefore more ignitions, is also not a wildfire solution, and never will be.” Gabrielle Berthel, a forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said roadless forests “supply clean drinking water for tens of millions of Americans, are home to irreplaceable wildlife, and store enormous amounts of carbon.”

Emma Powell, government affairs manager at Alaska Wilderness League, said the Tongass and Chugach National Forests “support thousands of jobs and generate billions in economic activity each year.” Vera Smith, director of the national forests and public lands program at Defenders of Wildlife, called the rule “hands-down one of the Forest Service’s best ideas.”

The groups disputed the wildfire rationale. Their statement said the administration “has falsely claimed this is a solution to the wildfire crisis,” noted that the Forest Service attributes nine out of ten wildfires to people, and cited a study published in the journal Fire Ecology in 2026 by Gregory H. Aplet and colleagues. That peer-reviewed analysis covered wildfire records from 1992 to 2024 across the eight contiguous-U.S. Forest Service regions. It found ignition density was 7.99 fires per 1,000 hectares in land within 50 meters of a road, compared with 1.97 in inventoried roadless areas and 1.75 in designated wilderness.

Earthjustice said that since Rollins announced in June 2025 that the Forest Service would rescind the rule, more than 625,000 comments opposing the rollback were submitted to the agency, and that people’s hearings were organized nationwide after the Forest Service declined to hold a public hearing.

The 2001 rule remains in effect. Comments on the proposed rescission and the draft environmental impact statement are due at midnight on September 21, and the Federal Register has the proposal scheduled for publication on August 20.