WASHINGTON — With the future of global trade upended by President Donald Trump’s announcement of reciprocal tariffs, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced a new policy Friday that will allow logging in national forests. In a memo, Rollins said the move follows an executive order Trump signed last month to immediately expand U.S. timber production.
“Healthy forests require work, and right now, we’re facing a national forest emergency,” Rollins said in a statement. “We have an abundance of timber at high risk of wildfires in our National Forests.”
Trump’s executive order in March directed the agriculture secretary, along with the interior secretary, to “issue new or updated guidance regarding tools to facilitate increased timber production and sound forest management, reduce time to deliver timber and decrease timber supply uncertainty.”
As part of the plan, the agriculture secretary needed to set a target for the annual amount of timber that could be offered for sale over Trump’s second term from federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.
On Friday, Rollins said U.S. timber production will expand by 25%. The U.S. has been importing more lumber than it produces since 2016, although it has been increasing production annually with new and expanded mills, according to the U.S. Lumber Coalition.
While the United States, China, Russia and Canada are the largest producers of wood globally, Canada is the biggest exporter of softwood timber.
Rollins’ memo hews closely to the Fix Our Forests Act that failed in last year’s Congress and was passed by the House this year. It has yet to be taken up by the Senate. The bill’s stated purpose is to speed up environmental reviews, reduce the intensity of catastrophic wildfires and build fire-safety defenses for communities in high-risk areas.
The Sierra Club, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, Environment America and dozens of other environmental groups oppose the act, saying it undermines environmental protections, puts forests more at risk for logging and prevents citizens from holding federal agencies accountable.
Last year, then-President Joe Biden said he strongly opposed the bill because it would speed up forest thinning on national lands.
On Friday, the Sierra Club called Rollins’ secretarial order a giveaway to the logging industry.
In a statement Friday, Rollins said the U.S. Forest Service will take immediate action to increase timber production on almost 113 million acres of National Forestry System land, simplify permitting and remove National Environmental Policy Act processes.
