Cutting red tape and streamlining project work have been marching orders for the U.S. Forest Service throughout the first year of the second Trump administration. Last week, a federal court ruling on a Greater Yellowstone landscape project showed how far those directives can backfire.
The South Plateau Landscape Area Treatment Project in the Custer Gallatin National Forest featured an array of activity in a 16,500-acre triangle bordering Yellowstone National Park, including clearcutting timber, restoring aspen groves, prescribed burning and thinning. Initially proposed in 2020, it received a decision notice in 2023. Opponents referred to it by its acronym, SPLAT, and promptly sued to block it.
In his December 11 opinion, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy wrote that South Plateau failed to meet requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act and Endangered Species Act. But he added the “primary challenge concerns the project’s conditions-based management approach.” Molloy generally agreed with the plaintiffs’ concern. “This approach,” he said, “conflates a promise of future statutory compliance with actual compliance.”
The case, Center for Biological Diversity et.al. vs. U.S. Forest Service and Sun Mountain Lumber, also uncovered a remarkable discrepancy in grizzly bear recovery rules. The judge told Custer Gallatin National Forest officials they had used a decades-old grizzly bear secure-habitat standard that suffered from “absence of any scientific evidence.”
“What makes this case unique is the enduring dilemma of grizzly bears and roads,” Malloy said.
South Plateau was an example of the Forest Service’s “condition-based management” approach to projects. Under that method, the agency approves a large area for treatment but leaves specific locations, acreages and road needs for later: “In some instances, there may be enough known information and analysis to fulfill … NEPA without collecting and analyzing all the fine-scale information up front,” the Forest Service has stated in a “Frequently Asked Questions” release.
That in turn was expected to help complete forest work faster. An analysis by Bozeman-based Property and Environmental Research Center, or PERC, found that Forest Service NEPA reviews often took three to five years before work can start. Those delays were justification for several Trump administration rule changes aimed at speeding up or eliminating federal regulatory review.
The U.S. Supreme Court reinforced those policy moves with several 2025 decisions that weakened federal administrative laws. Molloy referenced the high court’s recent downgrading of NEPA and its ruling that the law “does not require the agency to weigh environmental consequences in any particular way. Rather, an agency may weigh environmental consequences as the agency reasonably sees fit under its governing statute and any relevant substantive environmental laws … The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not paralyze it.”
The Forest Service was quick to respond. In July, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz touted a new NEPA format that reduced regulations by 66 percent. But as the South Plateau decision explained, that approach highlights the Forest Service conundrum of trying to get complex actions done quickly in an even more complex natural ecosystem.
“What makes this case unique is the enduring dilemma of grizzly bears and roads.”
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy
In his ruling, Molloy pointed out that condition-based management was historically limited to projects with significant uncertainty, such as mining exploration. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently OK’d a 21,149-acre Forest Service project in Washington using the same method because it provided “unit-by-unit” maps showing how its fuels-reduction actions would take place. In contrast, Molloy wrote, a Montana project challenged by Alliance for the Wild Rockies lost in court because the Forest Service was “too vague” and didn’t provide detailed maps.
The South Plateau project anticipated a need for 56.8 miles of temporary roads, but didn’t specify where they would be or how they might change grizzly bear-secure habitat. While past court cases have given the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wide latitude to say if there’s enough secure habitat for an ESA-protected species, that wasn’t the question here. Instead, he pointed to FWS’ own rules showing roads threatened grizzly survival: “The worst-case scenario here is not that the project may have 56.8 total miles of temporary roads, but that those temporary roads may be located in such a way as to eviscerate secure habitat,” Malloy wrote. “The failure to consider that possibility is arbitrary and capricious.”
Molloy found similar failings with how the project followed the National Forest Management Act. “The Forest Service avowing that future activities will comply with NFMA falls far short of showing that those activities do so,” he wrote. “The problems posed by a condition-based management approach to NFMA compliance are only emphasized by the fact that the record indicates that future activities may violate the standards identified by plaintiffs.”
The judge also drubbed the agency for its plans to clearcut in areas used by endangered Canada lynx, writing that “NFMA compliance demands more than the agency’s ‘word’ that it will comply.”
Just past the half-way mark in the 46-page ruling, Molloy turned to the Endangered Species Act. There, he focused on a failing that could have deep implications for grizzly bear management.
Custer Gallatin planners included a grizzly bear secure habitat “patch size” of 10 acres in determining whether new roads might hurt the bears. That is the definition used in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bear recovery documents since 2003.
But Molloy agreed with plaintiffs that “there is no scientific support for defining ‘secure habitat’ as patches of land as small as 10 acres.” Without that documented support, Molloy ruled, FWS had failed to use the required best available science in its analysis.
That error has ramifications far beyond the South Plateau, according to retired FWS Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator Chris Servheen.
“I think this really unravels the whole habitat standard for the Greater Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Conservation Strategy,” Servheen told Mountain Journal after reviewing Molloy’s ruling. “It’s a big screwup. You have two systems with completely different numbers.”
Under the ESA, grizzly bear recovery is governed by six specific ecosystem plans. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem surrounding Yellowstone Park sustains about 1,000 bears. The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem between the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and Glacier National Park in northwest Montana has about 1,100 grizzlies. Those two ecosystems have the largest concentrations of grizzlies in the Lower 48 states, and are under strong pressure to be delisted from ESA protection.
A crucial part of any ESA recovery plan is how much secure habitat the protected species needs. Grizzly bears need lots of space that is a considerable distance away from roads.
“I think this really unravels the whole habitat standard for the Greater Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Conservation Strategy.”
Chris servheen, former Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator , US fish and wildlife service
The Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem’s recovery plan calls for secure habitat patches at minimum 2,500 acres large — roughly 1 square mile — and at least 500 meters from a road. Molloy noted those standards were backed up by specific research, which meets the “best available science” requirement. Greater Yellowstone’s 10-acre patch, however, was answering a different kind of question.
Servheen led grizzly recovery efforts for 35 years. He recalled when he and his colleagues were examining Greater Yellowstone landscapes, much of the area was already riddled with roads. But they contained numerous tiny patches that could provide good shelter for grizzlies, elk and other wildlife.
Individually, those places didn’t qualify as secure habitat. But if they didn’t get some kind of recognition, Servheen said, then large swaths of roaded-but-valuable grizzly country might be left unprotected in the recovery plan. That was more of a policy matter than a biological determination.
“When we were putting those conservation plans together, the most contentious issue was closing roads to improve secure habitat,” he said. “Those were places we thought were secure forever. But nobody ever thought you could have a grizzly living on 10 acres for a month and a half. That’s not what was intended.”
A Custer Gallatin National Forest spokeswoman told Mountain Journal she could not comment on “ongoing litigation.” Representatives for the plaintiffs, which included the Center for Biological Diversity, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and Council for Wildlife and Fish, with Gallatin Wildlife Association, Native Ecosystems Council, and WildEarth Guardians, were happy to fill the void.
Matthew Bishop, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center which represented the environmental groups, said the project targeted an especially vulnerable and problematic area for Yellowstone grizzly bears.
“By failing to inform the public about where over 58 miles of new roads would be located and arbitrarily defining secure habitat for grizzly bears as small as 10-acre patch sizes, the agencies played too fast and loose with the law and the science.”
