The Trump Administration Is Trying to Revoke the ‘Roadless Rule.’ The Public Won’t Have Much Time to Weigh In

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving the public just three weeks to weigh in on a key step of its attempt to scrap the Roadless Rule, which protects almost 59 million acres of forest land from road construction and timber harvesting.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) published a notice Friday seeking comment on its intention to develop an environmental impact statement for the proposed rescission of the 2001 rule. The comment period will run until Sept. 19.

The public had a full month to comment when the rule was created. The USFS received more than 1.6 million comments on the rule, the most it has ever received. 

Experts caution that the truncated comment period limits the opportunity for public comment, a key part of rulemaking and a hallmark of the original rule. 

Sam Evans, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the three-week comment period—only 14 business days from official publication—is an “unusual choice,” given the norm of 30-day comment periods. This also differs, he said, from when the Bush administration proposed repealing the rule in 2005. At that time, the administration offered a two-month comment period, which it extended an additional two months following a public request to do so. 

Evans said that a “lengthy and intensive public process,” including over 600 hearings across the country and a flood of supportive comments, was crucial in the development of a strong rule more than two decades ago. 

“Nothing like that can happen with the staff capacity and the timeline that the [USFS] is talking about here,” he said. “I think that just goes to show that the Forest Service here is not interested in developing public buy-in or reflecting the interests of the communities that it is supposedly serving.”

“Regulations do not specify the length of public comments. For the notice of intent to development an environmental impact statement, the 21 days was determined to be efficient to notify the public and seek comment. The comment period for the draft environmental impact statement and the proposed rule will be longer,” the USDA press office wrote in response to Inside Climate News’ questions about the shorter comment period.  

“The rationale for repealing the Roadless Rule, I find very puzzling and a bit of a ruse for perhaps some other agenda,” said Mike Dombeck, who served as the chief of the agency from 1997 to 2001 and helped develop the rule. “The Forest Service has been a conservation leader over the decades. We need to make sure we continue to strengthen that image and that capability, because we need it more now than ever.”

Implemented at the end of the Clinton administration, the rule prohibits road construction, road reconstruction and timber harvesting on a wide swath of USFS land, effectively protecting a variety of places in states from Alaska to Vermont as remote wilderness areas. 

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced at a Western Governors’ Association conference in June that USFS, which falls under her agency, planned to rescind it. Like many other conservation professionals, Dombeck said that Rollins’ argument—that repealing the rule would open up forests for timber production—doesn’t have a logical basis. 

“As I recall from my involvement in developing the Roadless Rule, only about 8 percent of [forest in] the roadless areas is productive timber base to begin with,” he said. “The assumption that there’s a lot of wood [with economic value in] roadless areas is just simply not true.” 

Rulemaking is meant to be a slow, deliberate process, and so too is deregulation. But the Trump administration seems to have a faster outcome in mind, Evans said. 

“We’ve heard rumors that the Forest Service … expects to finalize the rule next year,” said Evans, leader of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s National Forests and Parks Program. “Obviously, we don’t think that there is a solid case for repeal of the Roadless Rule. We think that the rule has had tremendous benefits.”

Grassroots organizations across the country got the word out to the public about the initial rule during its development, helping strengthen it. Some groups are now echoing earlier efforts of grassroots organizations in their attempts to fight a repeal. 

“Our real interest now is making sure that folks understand what the policy measures are that ensure that public lands actually remain the way that people think of them,” said Alex Craven, a senior campaign representative at the Sierra Club focusing on forest conservation. 

The announcement comes as Rollins is proposing a plan to reorganize the Forest Service, including closing nine regional offices over the next year. In the proposal, dated July 24, the agriculture secretary argued that the reorganization would improve “effectiveness and accountability.”

However, experts are cautioning that this could greatly weaken the Forest Service as a whole. The National Association of Forest Service Retirees, for example, submitted comments arguing that the proposal lacks detail and could compromise regional functions. The group urged the USFS to reassess the plan. 

“It certainly seems like a disorganized approach to reducing the workforce. If it accomplished anything, it created a lot of chaos, both within the agency and among the partners that depend upon the Forest Service,” Dombeck said. 

Craven said that most of the USFS regional offices have been located west of the Rocky Mountains. With the reorganization, “it’s looking like maybe it will be flipped,” he said, despite the fact that wildfire risk is higher in Western states. 

Closing regional offices could mean losing staff with knowledge of wildfire mitigation and what to do when invasive bug species arrive in their respective regions, weakening the agency’s ability to respond to disasters.

“Losing the capacity and the research stations is kind of horrifying to me,” Evans said. 

The reorganization could also lose the agency irreplaceable institutional knowledge and make it difficult to meet statutory requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), such as producing environmental impact statements. 

“Those are really important steps, and with the reorganization, with the drain in capacity that the agency has right now, it’s very hard for you to imagine them doing a good job of that,” Evans said. “Let’s say that they push this through with a truncated NEPA analysis or a really skeletal consultation process. They’re going to be stuck with the loose ends of that forever. … Every project that they do in the future is going to be vulnerable.”

Even with the proposed NEPA changes that the Trump administration announced in July, Evans said that the USFS will still have to follow statutory requirements, which have remained the same. The “ultimate responsibility” of the USFS to consider environmental impacts, he said, still stands.