The Trump administration’s drive to harvest more timber from national forests will lead to a “thriving wood products economy” that doesn’t rely on imports, a top Forest Service official told the agency’s top brass in a memo last week.
But the timber goal acting Associate Chief Chris French pinpointed — a 25 percent increase from current levels offered for sale — would fall short of the first Trump administration’s ambitions and barely make a dent in U.S. timber supplies, data shows.
The chasm between the new administration’s rhetoric — cut more trees on national forests to reduce the country’s reliance on wood imports and rejuvenate the economy — and the math behind French’s memo reflect the hurdles to returning to the timber industry’s prosperous times around national forests.
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French told regional foresters and deputy chiefs in the April 3 memo obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News that the agency aims for the 25 percent increase in the next four to five years by using legal exclusions from environmental reviews wherever possible and setting timber appraisal rates across wide geographical areas, among other measures.
“Today, we enter a new era marked by pressing issues like a growing demand for domestic lumber and wildfire resilience,” French said. His memo doesn’t mention responding to the changing climate, which helps create hotter, drier conditions that encourage wildfire.
French’s memo details how the agency will implement Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ announcement last week declaring an “emergency” on 112.7 million acres of the 193-million-acre system to expedite harvesting, in the name of reducing wildfire risk and protecting public water supplies.
Her announcement, in turn, followed President Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year calling for increased timber production.
A 25 percent jump from fiscal 2024 levels would translate to around 3.6 billion board-feet of timber. That’s less than the first Trump team’s target of 3.88 billion board feet for fiscal 2021 and roughly equal to the 3.68 billion board-feet goal the prior year, reflecting the last two years of Trump budget requests.
If achieved, however, it would mark a turnaround in actual sales.
The Forest Service said it sold 2.88 billion board-feet of timber in fiscal 2024, down from 3 billion board-feet in 2023. The biggest sales years recently were during the first Trump administration, at 3.23 billion board-feet in 2019 and 3.22 billion board-feet in 2020, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report on the timber program.
Flaws and hurdles
Timber industry representatives and others familiar with the Forest Service’s timber program point to several flaws in the administration’s timber-boom narrative, although the industry welcomes the Forest Service’s moves to step up production.
“There are some encouraging elements in the Secretary’s order, including direction to prioritize removal of dead and dying trees, but barriers to doing that remain in place,” said Nick Smith, a spokesperson for the American Forest Resource Council, representing timber companies that work in national forests and elsewhere.
“The question is whether these efforts can overcome the fundamental barriers of litigation and obstruction, and the cost and time it takes to meet federal regulatory requirements,” Smith said. “Many of the necessary reforms need to come from Congress.”
A customer pushes a cart through the lumber section of Home Depot on March 3 in Pasadena, California. | Mario Tama/AFP via Getty Images
For one challenge, people familiar with the timber program said, many of the areas at high fire risk have wood that’s of low economic value, such as small-diameter trees not attractive to homebuilders or other construction industries.
“’Worthless wood’ is synonymous with ‘hazardous fuels,’” said Andy Stahl, a former timber industry lobbyist and executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.
French’s memo hints at the trouble, Stahl said, by promising “direct financial support programs to industry” including grants for transporting timber taken off national forests — Biden-era programs that suggest the work isn’t profitable and needs taxpayer subsidies.
Stahl said he’s not sure the administration seriously wants to dramatically increase harvests on federal land, given the competition that could pose to big timber companies that produce the vast majority of the nation’s wood from privately held land. Even a 25 percent increase from national forests would be little more than a rounding error in the national wood supply, he said.
For another reality check, so many mills near national forests have closed in recent decades that even higher-quality logs would have to be transported longer distances, at increased costs.
While some recently closed mills could reopen — welcome news in areas that have lost them — “no businessman is going to invest millions of dollars in a new mill or in retrofitting an old mill,” said Susan Jane Brown, an environmental lawyer and principal at Silvix Resources in Oregon. “That will be another bottleneck.”
One Forest Service manager who works with the timber program told E&E News that such economic realities and government funding are more often barriers to timber production than environmental regulations, at least outside of Montana, Oregon and parts of California.
“Markets, forest road maintenance costs, forest staffing and available funding are most often the barrier to more timber volume going down the road,” this manager said, requesting anonymity to offer a frank assessment of the Forest Service’s situation.
Another unknown: how the wood products market would be affected if the U.S. slips into a recession, as economists increasingly say is likely with the administration’s tariff-fueled trade war. Big publicly traded timber companies like International Paper and Weyerhaeuser have seen double-digit percentage drops in their stock prices since last week’s tumbles on Wall Street and are trading near 52-week lows.
Impact of staff reductions
Finally, the Forest Service is promising to make the ramp up happen with several thousand fewer agency employees, once firings, early retirements and deferred resignations take hold.
And while the agency has tried to preserve jobs directly related to timber, it’s not clear how the staff reductions will affect those employees or people who do indirectly related work, as the Forest Service looks to relocate employees and cut operations in Washington and regional regional offices.
For many employees who remain, training in more active forest management techniques is coming soon, French said in the memo. All forest supervisors, regional forester teams and “appropriate” Washington office staff will attend a national active forest management meeting in the next four months, he said.
French also directed regional foresters to establish two years’ worth of “shelf stock” of timber coming from forest projects, to help in setting goals for out-years.
He called for simplified permitting for projects, using emergency authorities in the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.
French also said the Forest Service would spend up to $50 million in “good neighbor authority” — or grants to states — to fund road and bridge maintenance that supports timber operations.
“This work will emphasize the minimum standards necessary for safety and removal of wood products,” French said, including the italics.
As ambitious as the administration’s language sounds, it largely reinforces what many forest supervisors already do, the Forest Service manager who requested anonymity said. That includes working with nonfederal partners to maintain forests through contracting.
“Nothing in it bothers me except the ability to meet the expectations post-RIF,” said this manager, referring to the reduction in force that employees fear could hit a few thousand people in the coming weeks.
For all the caveats, the administration’s moves represent a refreshing change to timber advocates looking for a friendlier approach from Washington and a more-active forest management style.
In their view, national forests are in a wildfire crisis not just because of climate change but because the government has allowed them to grow too thick, especially in the West.
“Our federal forests have been mismanaged for decades,” said the AFRC’s president, Travis Joseph, when Trump signed his timber executive order. “Americans have paid the price in almost every way. Lost jobs, lost manufacturing and infrastructure.”
Contact this reporter on Signal at hellmarcman.49