The Trump administration will move ahead with plans to end more than 25 years of sweeping protections for tens of millions of wild, federally managed acres across the U.S.

Brooke Rollins, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on Tuesday filed a rule to rescind “in its entirety” the national 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits road construction, logging and mining on about 30% of lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, mostly in forested areas of the West. Rollins had last year filed a notice of intent that the agency was considering “rolling back” some protections under the rule.

A draft environmental impact statement will be posted Wednesday, and the public will have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time/8:59 p.m. Pacific time on Sept. 21 to comment before changes are finalized.

The Roadless Rule prohibitions are intended to protect wildlife, watersheds and old-growth forests from human development and human-caused wildfires. But in her announcement, Rollins said she was rescinding the rules on nearly 45 million acres under the banner of wildfire prevention, saying the protections instead have led to “overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease” turning “healthy landscapes into tinderboxes.”

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our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,” she said.

Rollins’ assertions are not borne out by research, including from Oregon State University Professor Chris Dunn, a forest ecologist and wildfire expert. Dunn and his colleagues found that most wildfires in Western national forests between 1984 and 2018 started near roads, showing an increased likelihood of wildfires where roads exist because the No. 1 cause of wildfires is people.

The U.S. Forest Service’s own research also shows the majority of human-caused ignitions occur on roadsides, and 20 years of monitoring data does not support assertions that repealing road prohibitions will improve forest health, researchers found.

No public meetings

Rollins first proposed rolling back the rule in August 2025, saying at the time the move would support President Donald Trump’s executive orders meant to increase logging and energy development on federal lands.

That notice of intent set off a 21-day public comment period that brought in more than 600,000 comments, most of which expressed opposition to any changes that would erode the Roadless Rules prohibitions on development. Federal officials have not held a single public meeting since then.

In the two years leading up to final passage of the 2001 rule, Forest Service officials held 600 public meetings across Western states and received more than 1.6 million public comments.

Roughly 96% of the Forest Service’s inventoried roadless areas are located in 12 western states, including 2 million acres in Oregon within places like Iron Mountain in the Willamette National Forest, Joseph Canyon in Wallowa County, Tumalo Mountain in central Oregon and Lookout Mountain in the Ochoco National Forest.

Last year, U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 6th Congressional District based in the Willamette Valley, introduced the Roadless Area Conservation Act to enshrine the rule in federal law, but it does not yet have enough support to pass. In the House, 88 of her Democratic colleagues have signed on as co-sponsors, including Oregon Reps. Suzanne Bonamici, Janelle Bynum and Maxine Dexter, as have 25 U.S. senators. The state’s two other representatives, Democrat Val Hoyle and Republican Cliff Bentz, have not signed on as sponsors.

No state would be more affected by the rule termination than Alaska, which has almost a third of the 45 million acres affected by the pending change.

Alaska is home to the Tongass National Forest, a West Virginia-sized stretch of islands and waterways in the Southeast Alaska panhandle that make up the largest surviving temperate rainforest in the world.

Idaho and Colorado would not be impacted by the rule changes because the two states negotiated their own agreements with the federal government more than a decade ago to permit projects that would “reduce hazardous fuels” near wildfire prone communities and to allow some local and state decisions about development on the federal acres.

Different takes on the past 25 years

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who previously worked for one of the country’s largest lumber producers in Idaho, said in a statement last year that the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers for years and served as a barrier to commercial logging.

“More than 40% of inventoried roadless areas, primarily in the West, have high or very high wildfire hazard potential. And only 5% of those areas have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014,” he said.

Rollins’ announcement included praise from the Republican governors of Montana, Utah and Wyoming, who said rescinding the federal protections would give their states flexibility to manage land locally. Democratic governors and other elected officials in states including Oregon, Washington and New Mexico have criticized the administration’s efforts and blame a century of largely unrestricted logging on federal lands, climate change and recent losses to Forest Service staff for worsening fires and declining forest conditions in the West.

Statements following Rollins’ announcement made clear conservation and logging groups have seen the last 25 years of the Roadless Rule quite differently.

Abigail Dillen, president of the nonprofit environmental legal group Earthjustice, said in a statement that the group will likely sue to stop the rule changes from moving forward.

“For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has kept our wildest forests intact. The benefits have been incalculable for people, for water, for wildlife, and for the climate,” she said. “Earthjustice has successfully defended the Roadless Rule for a quarter century, and we are not going to stop now.”

Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing the timber industry, said in a statement that the Roadless Rule is among “failed policies” meant to protect forests.

“The Forest Service is right to take a hard look at a policy that was written for forest conditions that looked very different 25 years ago,” he said. “Our national forests are experiencing severe wildfire, drought, insects and disease on a scale that few anticipated when the Roadless Rule was adopted.”

A group of current and former U.S. Department of Agriculture employees are calling on the Trump administration to halt the mandated relocation of more than 2,500 employees from its Washington, D.C., headquarters to five regional offices across the country. 

In an online briefing hosted by federal union leaders Thursday, speakers said the reorganization process USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has led will amount to widespread layoffs, as many workers will choose not to relocate across the country. 

Rollins’ effort, launched one year ago Friday, would move department staff away from the nation’s capital. The department should have no more than 2,000 employees in the region, according to a July 2025 memo Rollins signed. 

Kevin Shea, former acting secretary of the USDA under President Joe Biden, said the relocation could impact the department’s ability to carry out its core services such as fighting pests and diseases, protecting forest land and ensuring food safety. 

“All of this requires an adequate and qualified workforce,” he said. “These new proposed actions, added to the damage already done, all but ensures that we’ll not have one.”

Department layoffs

Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, the USDA has lost more than 20,000 employees,  according to Office of Personnel Management data. Most left through early retirement or buyouts offered by the U.S. Doge Service, union officials said. 

But speakers Thursday warned that thousands more will choose to leave instead of relocating across the country to a regional USDA office. Those offices, as outlined in Rollins’ July 2025 memo, include Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah. 

In that memo, she wrote that the relocation will ensure that the USDA is “closer to the people it serves while achieving savings to the American taxpayer.” 

But most USDA staff already work outside the nation’s capital. The department had about 4,600 employees in Washington when Rollins announced the reorganization efforts last year. A majority of the staff reductions have come from across the country. 

‘A forced choice’

Genny Kotyk, a Forest Service employee and president of the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, said the impacts of federal cuts are already being felt. 

She said that the employee reductions and reorganizations of the Forest Service, which is the largest U.S. firefighting agency, are affecting the response to the damaging wildfire season currently impacting Canada and some Midwestern and northern states. 

In 2025, the Forest Service saw more than 6,500 employees leave through a combination of layoffs, buyouts and early retirements, according to OPM. 

“We’re looking to lose, potentially, another 6,500 employees that are going to be forced to either change their job duties, have a longer commute, or move completely across the country, or resign, or retire,” she said. “Forty percent of those employees have some kind of fire qualification, and because they’re higher level staff, they typically also have a more seasoned career and have higher level fire qualifications.”

Kotyk said that her union polled nearly 3,000 of its bargaining unit employees about the reorganization, and only 7% said they’d be willing to relocate. 

Chearice Vaughn, who works for a USDA office that oversees grants and loans for rural development projects, said she and 45 members of her team received a notice to relocate from Washington to Dallas, Texas. She said of those who received relocation notices, 86% were people of color. 

“It’s a forced choice: uproot your entire life, or leave federal service,” Vaughn, also president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3870, said. 

Still, she said, it’s not about “45 names on a spreadsheet in Washington.”

“It’s about whether the next little town waiting on clean water gets it in time,” she said. “It’s about whether the next small business owner in a town with no other lender gets a chance at all. We built these things once. We’re asking to be allowed to keep building them.”

Legal challenge

Although USDA is continuing with its relocations and department-wide reorganization, some employees are seeking to block the change. 

Several national labor unions, as part of their efforts over the past year to block the Trump administration’s reshaping of the federal government, filed a request for an injunction in federal court in San Francisco seeking to block USDA from ordering the relocations. 

The case is ongoing. 

USDA spokespeople did not return a message seeking comment Friday.