By SARAH MONTALBANO
On June 23, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule. The Clinton-era rule had restricted timber harvesting and road construction on 58 million acres of U.S. Forest Service (USFS) lands, about a third of U.S. forest lands. Closing off access to public, working USFS lands has stifled responsible forest management and halted economic opportunity for local communities.
In Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the Roadless Rule restricted access to 9.2 million acres of the forest, which spans 16.7 million acres total. The first Trump administration briefly made a small portion of the Tongass eligible for timber harvesting and road construction in 2020. The result? Only 186,000 more acres of timber harvest would have been eligible, and only 50 more miles of new roads could be constructed over the next 100 years. President Biden announced a review of the Roadless Rule within hours of his inauguration and subsequently reinstated the 2001 limits.
Sustainable forest management entails the selective cutting of some trees to thin the forest and decrease the fuel load, reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires. For forests within the inventoried roadless areas, the restrictions limited the ability of the USFS to undertake prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and other timber harvesting activities, as well as impeded access for firefighters.
Secretary Rollins said that the rescission of the rule removes “absurd obstacles to common sense management of our natural resources” and 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 press release also estimates that of the acreage impacted by the Roadless Rule, 28 million acres are in areas at high or very high risk of wildfire.
The Roadless Rule has also harmed local communities. The USDA’s press release states that “Utah alone estimates the roadless rule alone creates a 25% decrease in economic development in the forestry sector.” More than 70,000 people live within the boundaries of the Tongass. Southeast Alaskans who depend on the timber industry near the Tongass have seen employment decline to fewer than 400 jobs in 2020, a tenth of the jobs available in 1990.
Chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, Bruce Westerman (R., AR), said that the decision “acknowledges that we cannot lock up our forests and throw away the key.” Utah Governor Spencer Cox said of the rule, “A good forest is like a garden. You actually have to tend it and take care of it. If we do this the right way, we can prevent fires and improve production.”
Kudos to the administration for tending to the gardens that are the working lands of the U.S. Forest Service.
Sarah Montalbano is an energy policy fellow at Center of the American Experiment and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum Center for Energy and Conservation. This column was originally published at IWF on July 1, 2025.
Thats what I call commos sense legislation. Hoonah had logging operations years back and it created hundreds of miles of roads into the wilderness. It was/is a benefit as it opens inaccessible land to recreation and hunting opportunities and well as increased revenues for the villages.
Here we are, 24 years later and now the repeal is going to happen. Do any of you know how diligently and energetically the Roadless Rule became the worst of the worst for every state in the USA? In Alaska it killed jobs and resources for the building industry but with this going to be a future for our economy and better resource development, I’m looking forward to the end of the roadless rule.
This is good news and responsible land/resource management.
The problem is the next administration can change it again. Industry requires stability and predictability for long term planning and investment.
When the GOP controls congress and the senate with a GOP president, they never fail to just sit on their hands and avoid passing legislation to address, repeal dozens and hundreds of regulations and laws ever increasing over decades.
Why MRAK would put this article out now is very hard to understand. This piece was published more than two months ago and is old old news. Why the new owner of MRAK would do this must be to just fill the site with content regardless of whether it is current news or even interesting to the readers of MRAk.
The owner of this site has been filling the site with very boring content and surely must be losing readership. Everyone is missing Suzanne’s content! We miss the ability to support or find fault with her assessment of current issues involving current politics and current politicians. I don’t know where the new guy is getting this old news but it is not working for the readers.
Clueless ice cream eater. There are extensive forests in Wilmington, Delaware and throughout the region where the clueless one lives. He left a state that actually has forests but he could not tell a tree from a metal lamppost. His handlers from the far reaches of the deep state think a tree is always a Christmas tree if they are not Scrooge. They build their vast mansions thinking the lumber comes from Never Never Land. And when forests fires start it is always caused by the fiction of climate change and not because of a lightening strike or a big fat cigar smoked by some petty bureaucrat. If they actually build a bookshelf for him make sure we waste no lumber on the five comic books he owns.
It is the opposite.
The Tongass and South East Alaska will be better for it.
Yeah, I think this author must have never been to rainforest before. It’s not necessary to thin or reduce the “fuel“ load to help manage forest fires. They don’t have forest fires in rainforest!
Also, the roadless rule already creates an exemption to build roads in the unlikelihood of a fire there.
This author, is clearly an echo chamber for the current administration’s political logic for overturning the roadless rule.
I know, cannabis is legal here in Alaska, but people need to lay off the pipe a little bit and wake up.
Alaskans in Southeast love the roadless rule, just ask the commercial fishermen, small business owners, etc. who keep showing up to protect it. It’s more beneficial keeping it in place.