Trump Administration Strips Roadless Protections From America's Largest National Forest Six Days Before Election, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The World's Biggest Intact Temperate Rainforest Was Still Difficult To Build Logging Roads Through

WASHINGTON. Acting with the deliberate urgency of an administration aware that only six days remained before a presidential election, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday that it had finalized a rule exempting the Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the United States and the world's largest intact temperate rainforest, from the federal protections that had kept roughly nine million of its acres free of roads for the previous two decades.

The exemption strips the 2001 Roadless Rule from the Tongass in its entirety, reopening approximately 9.37 million acres of southeast Alaska, including some 188,000 acres of old-growth forest, to potential road construction, commercial logging, and mineral development. Officials characterized the rule as the removal of a long-standing obstacle to the region's economic potential, that obstacle being, in the administration's assessment, the forest.

"For nineteen years, this land has been permitted to simply sit there, storing carbon, sheltering wild salmon, and generating essentially no timber-road contracts," said one Forest Service official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the policy speaks for itself. "What we have done is correct that. Going forward, a citizen who wishes to drive a logging truck into the heart of a thousand-year-old rainforest will encounter far fewer of the regulatory barriers that previously required him to want to."

Sources within the administration confirmed that the President had personally directed the Agriculture Department to pursue the exemption following a 2019 conversation with Alaska's governor, during which the future of the continent's largest carbon sink was settled to mutual satisfaction. Officials noted that the Tongass timber program has operated at a financial loss for decades, meaning that American taxpayers will now subsidize the construction of the roads required to remove the trees, a structure the administration praised as a rare federal initiative that costs the public money in order to make the climate worse.

Nine Indigenous nations with ancestral ties to the Tongass had formally requested that the forest's protections remain in place, as had commercial fishermen and tourism operators whose industries depend on the rainforest staying a rainforest. Administration officials thanked the tribes for their input and confirmed that it had been received, logged, and exempted.

At press time, officials clarified that the vast quantities of carbon stored in the Tongass would remain safely contained within the forest's trees right up until the precise moment those trees were cut down.