You Have Just 3 Weeks to Object to the Roadless Rule Rollback, Which Will Affect 45 Million Wild Acres Across the U.S.

The U.S. Forest Service today posted notice of its intention to roll back significant protections on some 45 million acres of mid-elevation forestland, and will accept public comments through Sept. 19 to gauge Americans’ appetite for the change.

Specifically, the Trump administration plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, proposed by the Clinton administration and enacted under the George Bush administration, that generally prohibits new road construction on millions of acres of U.S. Forest Service land. The rule was adopted after hundreds of public meetings and 1.6 million public comments, 95 percent of which supported the roadless protections as a tool to conserve wildlife habitat, improve watershed health, and importantly, reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires on America’s public timberlands.

This last consideration has become a point of contention in the Trump administration’s proposal. In announcing plans to rescind the Roadless Rule, Forest Service Chief Tom Schulz stressed that the Forest Service’s inability to develop new roads has contributed to wildfire risk.

“For nearly 25 years, the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action – prohibiting road construction, which has limited wildfire suppression and active forest management,” Schultz said in a statement. “The forests we know today are not the same as the forests of 2001. They are dangerously overstocked and increasingly threatened by drought, mortality, insect-borne disease, and wildfire.”

But numerous studies have linked roads with the origin point of wildfires. A National Institutes of Health study indicates that 78 percent of human-caused fires on National Forest lands start within a half-mile of a road.

Trout Unlimited, which this week published an interactive map of the 45 million acres of public forestland that could be open to road development, noted that active forest management, including reduction of hazardous fuels to reduce fire risk, has taken place on two million acres of inventoried roadless areas.

“This includes 14 percent of all hazardous fuels treatments on National Forest lands in 12 Western states,” says TU’s Public Land Policy Director Corey Fisher. “In Montana alone, there have been 188,000 acres of hazardous fuels treatments conducted in Roadless Areas. This represents 20 percent of all hazardous fuels treatments during this time frame.”

But in its Federal Register filing, the Trump administration noted that between 1984 and 2024, 13 percent of designated roadless areas experienced high or moderate severity wildfire.

“The occurrence of moderate- to high-severity fire in inventoried roadless areas has increased in recent decades, especially since 2000. Currently, 40 percent of lands within inventoried roadless areas have a high or very high wildfire hazard potential, ranging from 5 percent in the Eastern Region to 60 percent in California.”

The 45 million acres that would be affected by the Roadless Rule rescission include some 9.3 million in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Forest Service land in both Idaho (9.3 million acres) and Colorado (4.2 million acres) is exempt from the rescission because those states developed their own roadless rules separate from the Bush administration rules.

Roads a Political Signal

If both advocates of roadless areas and those who want a return to more industrialized timberlands use the risk of fire starts to justify their positions on road development, the polarization of roads extends to broader expectations of our national forests.

Enviornmentalists stress the ecological benefits of intact habitats not fractured by roads. The roadless designation serves their broader aim to increase, or at least maintain, the number of acres that fall between federally designated wilderness and fully multi-purpose working lands.

Meanwhile, road advocates recognize the value of roads to open forests to industrial logging, which they hope will rejuvenate rural Western communities and achieve one of the overlooked requirements of the 2026 federal budget and the Trump administration: To increase logging by some 25 percent on public lands and require the Forest Service to enter into 20-year contracts with timber harvesters.

In the middle are hunters and anglers who recognize that the mid-elevation Forest Service lands teetering in the balance are productive big-game habitats and support fishy streams. They also have just enough existing roads to provide access without carving up National Forests into timbered subdivisions.

“From a hunting and angling perspective the Roadless Rule [rollback] is problematic because the mid-elevation forestlands that are targeted for the rescission are the very ones where most of us hunt and fish,” says the leader of a conservation group who asked not to be named because he feared criticizing the administration could result in lack of political access to decision-makers. “One of the factors that have made these lands so productive for wildlife is that there aren’t roads all over the place. Study after study indicates that fragmented habitat reduces security for big game like elk, mule deer, moose, and bighorn sheep.”

Trout Unlimited this week published a report linking the impacts of roads on mountain streams.

“The Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership database indicates that 1 of every 4 assessed road-stream crossings on U.S. Forest Service lands in the Western states are rated as Severe, Significant, or Moderate fish passage barriers,” according to the TU report. Meanwhile, the Forest Service has an $8 billion maintenance backlog on its existing infrastructure, including the estimated 386,000 miles of road in the national forest network.

While U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says the department that oversees the Forest Service welcomes public comments on the rollback of the Roadless Rule, the proposal enjoys wide Republican support, including from members of the new Congressional Public Land Coalition that was formed this summer to fight Republican attempts to sell wide swaths of public land in order to balance the federal budget.

“The rescission of the outdated Roadless Rule is a victory for Montana, public lands, and forest management everywhere,” said Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke (R) in a Republican Party press release supporting the rescission. “As I’ve long maintained, one of the biggest obstacles to proper forest management and wildfire prevention has been unnecessary and overbearing regulations like this one. If you can’t build a road, you can’t fight fires, you can’t cut trees, and you can’t properly take care of our national heritage held in our public lands.”

But conservation leaders note that, just as lawmakers are promoting the idea of local control and decision-making, the Forest Service is consolidating its regional offices and moving nearly all personnel to regional hubs. In Montana, for instance, the Region 1 office that administered much of the Northern Rockies’ National Forestland, will be relocated to Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, conservation leaders stress that the 2001 Roadless Rule didn’t restrict roads — only the construction of new ones.

In its interactive map, Trout Unlimited notes that lands covered by the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule “are typically open to hunting, fishing, OHV riding, firewood cutting, grazing, hazardous fuels reduction, camping, and mining – just to name a few uses.”

Now that the rescission proposal has been published in the Federal Register, a 21-day clock starts for public comments.

“Public comments will be considered during the development of the draft environmental impact statement” and additional opportunities to comment will occur as the rulemaking process continues, the Trump administration noted in its Federal Register publication.

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The Department of Agriculture has indicated the draft EIS is expected by March 2026. The final rule and record of decision are expected to be released in late 2026. You can find the entire draft proposal and periodic updates here.

A number of conservation groups have provided portals to both collect and distribute comments to the appropriate administration recipients.

• Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, which notes the Roadless Rule rescission would “open these vast public lands to new roadbuilding and commercial timber harvest,” last week posted an action alert with comment details here.
• Meanwhile, Wild Montana aims to collect and deliver over 2,000 comments. The group’s comment portal is here.