Trump Allies Advance Plan To Repeal Road Protections On 60 Million Acres Of National Forest, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Parts Of America Remained Inconvenient To Bulldoze

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The federal government moved one step closer this week to correcting a quarter-century oversight in which roughly 60 million acres of national forest had been allowed to remain free of new roads, as a repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule advanced out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and headed toward the full Senate.

The repeal reached the floor by way of the Wildfire Prevention Act, to which Utah Senator Mike Lee attached language rescinding the rule before the committee approved the measure by a vote of 11 to 9. The 2001 Roadless Rule, which has been rolled back and reinstated repeatedly depending on which party holds the White House, currently bars new road construction across tens of millions of acres of national forest, including more than 9 million acres of Alaska's Tongass, the largest temperate rainforest in the country. Officials emphasized that the rule's chief defect was that it worked.

Running on a parallel track, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is pursuing its own administrative rescission of the rule, a process expected to be finalized this year despite the inconvenient detail that more than 99 percent of the public comments submitted on it asked that the rule be kept. Sources familiar with the effort described the overwhelming public opposition as a logistical hurdle rather than a verdict, and noted that the forests themselves had submitted no comments at all.

Supporters of the repeal stressed that the goal was not to clear-cut old-growth forest but to open access for worthy projects such as hydropower. "In Alaska, the Roadless Rule has been a real challenge for us for decades," said Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted for repeal. "Most Alaskans maintain that the Roadless Rule should never have applied to Alaska. We didn't ask for it. We consistently opposed it." Conservation groups noted that the existing rule already permits utility and hydropower infrastructure, pointing to the Whitman Lake and Blue Lake hydroelectric projects, both of which were built in roadless areas while the rule was fully in force.

The vote arrived as the administration pressed a broader campaign to relieve the nation's public lands of their protections, having already repealed the Bureau of Land Management's Public Lands Rule across 245 million acres, moved to gut the Forest Service by closing regional offices and research stations, weakened Clean Water Act safeguards, and auctioned nearly 700,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas. Taken together, officials said, the effort would ensure that no acre of American wilderness would remain permanently safe from the possibility of a road.

At press time, the Forest Service had begun the delicate task of informing 60 million acres of forest that their decades of going unreached by bulldozers had been a clerical error, now happily on its way to being fixed.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who banks the repeal as another deregulatory win and advances a long-running campaign to reverse roadless protections that have outlasted his first term.
§Senator Mike Lee, who authored the repeal language and attached it to a wildfire bill, converting a popular safety measure into a vehicle for opening the backcountry.
§Senator Lisa Murkowski and the Alaska congressional delegation, who secure a decades-sought end to a rule the state never wanted applied to it.
§The timber and logging industry, particularly operators eyeing old-growth stands in the Tongass, who gain the road access that makes remote harvest economical.
§Mining, drilling, and grazing interests, for whom new roads convert previously unreachable acreage into developable inventory.
§Hydropower and energy developers, offered as the public rationale and positioned to benefit regardless of whether the rule was ever the obstacle.
§USDA leadership, repurposed from administering the rule to dismantling it through a parallel administrative rescission.
§Road-building and heavy-equipment contractors, who acquire 60 million acres of fresh potential worksites.
§The administration's deregulation agenda and future commercial interests, who inherit the useful precedent that protection of public land is temporary and reversible with each change of administration.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment