Across Montana this March, hundreds of people have been turning out to testify in support of the Roadless Rule. But for many, the bigger question was: Why are we here at all?
“Why are we turning our attention to these high-elevation forests which don’t provide economic returns?” asked Jim Burchfield, former dean of the University of Montana School of Forestry. “This is a wrong-headed, dramatic mandate in search of a problem.”
Burchfield was one of many speakers with deep knowledge of forest ecology and economy who spoke at seven rallies from Libby to Bozeman organized by a coalition of environmental groups. Rather than argue over competing values, such as preferring wilderness over timber sales, most of the critics challenged the factual basis of the government’s justification for throwing out the 25-year-old law.
Last June, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her intention to eliminate the 2001 Roadless Rule. Her stated reasons were to further President Donald Trump’s order to get rid of 10 rules for every new one proposed, reduce wildfire risk, and boost timber production. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz added that nearly 28 million acres of federal roadless areas “are at high or very high risk of catastrophic wildfire and are in desperate need of treatment.”
The Roadless Rule guides management of 44.7 million acres of inventoried roadless national forest land. That includes about 37 percent of Montana’s national forest acreage, and 35 percent of Wyoming’s. Idaho has a state-specific roadless rule covering 9.3 million acres not affected by the current USDA proposal. Colorado also has its own roadless rule for 4.2 million Forest Service acres.
Promulgating the Roadless Rule was one of the most intensive public processes in Forest Service history. It involved more than 600 public meetings, including 34 in Montana alone. More than 1.6 million people offered public comment. President Bill Clinton approved it in the final days of his administration.
Rescinding a federal rule is complex. The USDA opened a 20-day public comment period on its notice of intent to revoke the Roadless Rule last September. It received more than 600,000 responses, 95 percent opposed according to Roadless Rule advocates. An Agriculture Department spokesman told Mountain Journal on March 12 a draft environmental impact statement on the recension’s anticipated results should be published “in the coming months,” but no date has been set for that or the subsequent public comment period.
That DEIS will have its own public comment period, followed by publication in the Federal Register, and likely a lawsuit. President George W. Bush attempted to repeal the Roadless Rule during his first term. The process drew another 720,000 public comments, and was eventually overturned in court.
Mike Dombeck was Clinton’s chief of the Forest Service when the Roadless Rule was developed. He recalled how the agency’s road inventory went from about 100,000 miles at the end of World War II to 386,000 miles in the 1990s. By comparison, the mean distance to the Moon is 240,000 miles. The nation’s interstate highway system only consists of 46,800 miles of roadway.
Research shows that fire starts were four times more likely to occur within 50 meters of a road, compared to roadless areas.
Of that forest road network, only one-fifth are passable by passenger vehicles. And about half the network can be driven by high-clearance vehicles. That’s according to a Forest Service website that hasn’t been updated since 2002. At that time, it estimated the backlog of deferred maintenance was $8.4 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $15.6 billion today.
“There’s no appetite within the Forest Service to get this done,” Dombeck told the Wild Idea Podcast audience on March 10. “This is a totally top-down policy. We see no constituency out there that’s pushing this; the timber industry isn’t clamoring for this. What’s puzzling to me and especially to budget hawks, is this is a conservative policy. It doesn’t require maintenance and funding year after year. Getting rid of it would force us into below-cost timber sales again.”
In its March 12 statement, the Forest Service maintained that roads improve access for wildland firefighting, and that roadless areas were a particular threat to communities in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. However, the Forest Service’s own recently published research of California wildfires showed 95 percent of the fires were human-caused and two-thirds of them began close to roads.
Greg Aplet of the environmental advocacy group The Wilderness Society was part of a research team that collected datasets of every wildfire ignition between 1992 and 2024, and overlayed that on the Forest Service road network map. It found that fire starts were four times more likely to occur within 50 meters of a road, compared to roadless areas.
Then they studied the dataset of communities with wildfire protection plans, which show the at-risk landscapes in the WUI. They found that just 1 percent of the WUI was in an inventoried roadless area. The dataset, they discovered, conflated rural parts of Wyoming and downtown Los Angeles as WUI.
“There were huge errors of omission and commission in the dataset,” Aplet said on the podcast. “We concluded the whole dataset is inaccurate and not to be relied on.”
The timber sale justification came under similar scrutiny. Burchfield recalled how the impetus of the Clinton-era debate was the fact that building roads into the most inaccessible places for the low-grade timber there would never pencil out. National Forest supervisors around the Rocky Mountain West have added that existing forest plans provide enough trees to meet Trump’s 25-percent logging increase without touching inventoried roadless areas.
National Forest supervisors around the Rocky Mountain West have added that existing forest plans provide enough trees to meet Donald Trump’s 25-percent logging increase without touching inventoried roadless areas.
Even Roadless Rule revocation supporters offer lukewarm praise for the idea. The Society of American Foresters praised USDA for pulling the rule, arguing “forest roads are not simply conduits for timber extraction; they are lifelines for multiple land management objectives.” But the same statement warned “federal forest managers already face large backlogs of deferred road maintenance, exacerbated by declining timber receipts that once supported this work.” The National Association of Counties sent its members an advisory noting the change would have “considerable impact on forested counties” but didn’t recommend either supporting or opposing it.
That leaves the deregulation-for-its-own-sake rationale. And even there, some observers noted the USDA’s flimsy justifications for revoking the Roadless Rule indicate it was targeted as a way to hit the president’s quota of struck rules rather than a considered policy shift.
A December report from the Office of Management and Budget showed USDA in the front of the pack for deregulatory actions. It posted 73 removals and zero new regulations, for an estimated cost savings of $136 million. Only the Treasury Department (118 deregulations, $128.5 billion savings), Veterans Affairs (86 deregulations, $5.6 billion savings) and Transportation Department (78 deregulations, $23 million savings) took more off the code books. The 30 federal departments, commissions and administrations on the list combined for 656 deregulatory actions and overall $211.7 billion of savings in 2025.
The Forest Service has made occasional mention of its deregulatory efforts. On February 5, the agency declared its streamlining of the objection process to proposed agency actions was in response to Trump’s January 2025 deregulation order “to increase efficiency and allow the Forest Service to more quickly carry out projects that support healthier forests and communities.”
“This just shows they didn’t put any thought into this whatsoever,” Sierra Club spokesman Nick Gevock said of the Trump officials. “They saw a regulation and said, ‘We’re going to get rid of it.’ This is the classic strategy they’ve been planning for years: starve government agencies until they’re worthless and then get rid of them.”
