If the Forest Falls

by Robert Chaney

To run the old joke backward, if there’s no one around to hear them, will the trees fall in the forest?

President Donald Trump’s March 1 Executive Order calling for “Immediate expansion of American timber production” generated lots of enthusiasm in the Northwest wood products world. But analysts added equal amounts of concern that Trump’s DOGE-driven federal cuts might keep the woods quiet.

“It’s going to be a good thing in terms of helping stimulate activity on national forests,” University of Montana’s Todd Morgan said of Trump’s order. But Morgan, the forest industry analysis director of UM’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, also recognizes the uncertainty spiraling around Washington, D.C.  

“A lot is going to depend on who’s left in federal agencies at the end of the day, the week, the next four years,” he said. “All this funding- and budget-cutting, and the personnel cuts actively happening through DOGE, is going to interfere with the stated goals.”

Trump’s order blamed previous “heavy-handed federal policies” for the shortfall. 

“Our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply has impeded the creation of jobs and prosperity, contributed to wildfire disasters, degraded fish and wildlife habitats, increased the cost of construction and energy, and threatened our economic security,” it read. “These onerous federal policies have forced our nation to rely upon imported lumber, thus exporting jobs and prosperity and compromising our self-reliance.”

To fix that, Trump ordered his secretaries of Agriculture, Interior and Commerce to find ways of increasing timber production. He called for ways to “suspend, revise or rescind all existing regulations … that impose an undue burden on timber production,” expand the use of categorical exclusions from NEPA review, and make greater use of Good Neighbor Authority and similar programs for state/federal land management.

One intriguing section of the timber order requires the completion of the Whitebark Pine Rangewide Programmatic Consultation by the end of June. Whitebark pine are known far better to hikers than loggers, since their spindly trunks grow on high-altitude mountain ridges of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. They don’t provide any two-by-fours, but mature whitebarks produce copious amounts of protein-packed seeds that weave together entire ecosystems. Catastrophic die-offs, driven first by a century of blister rust fungus infections followed by pine bark beetle infestations aided by climate warming, landed whitebark pines on the endangered species list in 2022.

That led to a 2023 notice from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the Forest Service Regions 1 and 5 Rangewide Conservation Activities were likely to “adversely affect” whitebark recovery. However, that focused mainly on whether efforts to recover the tree might in fact harm it. The notice didn’t specify how any current or future timber sales would be affected by whitebark pine needs.

Throughout its wording, the order singled out the Endangered Species Act as an obstacle to be evaded. One section gave the agencies 60 days to come up with strategies to “streamline” requirements of the Endangered Species Act “to improve the speed of approving forestry projects.”

Another section focuses on the Endangered Species Committee, sometimes known as the “God Squad.” The order calls for this cabinet-level committee to use emergency powers to resolve endangered species questions in favor of timber production. It also demands a report on “obstacles to domestic timber production infrastructure specifically deriving from implementation of the ESA” along with recommendations for “improvements.”

The God Squad was amended into the ESA in 1978 as a way to override a listed species’ protection to allow development or other activity that might harm it. It has only considered three creatures; a 1979 dam project that threatened whooping cranes and snail darter fish was permitted to advance after its review.

Its most significant action in this circumstance was the dispute over the northern spotted owl in the early 1990s. The endangered bird was the focal point of Pacific Northwest timber projects. While the Bureau of Land Management won an exemption from the God Squad, later lawsuits argued that it was based on politics instead of science. In the end, President Bill Clinton brokered the Northwest Forest Plan which attempted to protect the owl’s old-growth habitat while allowing timber harvest to continue.

Trump’s order also calls for targets of timber production for the next four years. That’s something which has been missing from federal land management for a long time, according to Montana Wood Products Association Director Julia Altemus.

“You have to know where you’re going,” Altemus said. “Are we aiming for 3.5 billion board feet? Six billion board feet? We’re currently producing about 3.1 billion board feet, but 30 to 40 percent of that is firewood,” she said, referring to non-commercial trees too small to cut for lumber.

Timber production from national forests has fallen dramatically since the days of the “Timber Wars” in the 1980s and ‘90s. Forest Service records show those public lands cut about 12 billion board feet of lumber in the 1970s, before falling below 4 billion board feet in the late ‘90s.

While the Mountain West timber industry has shrunk over the past two decades, much of its production has been replaced by more productive private timberlands in the Southeast. Those areas currently face the problem of oversupply for a depressed U.S. housing market. Imports of Canadian lumber were already burdened by 20.07 percent anti-dumping duties in the latest thrust of a half-century-long trade dispute before Trump announced additional 25 percent levies on Canadian goods.

Trump took on the import market in a second March 1 order: “Addressing the threat to national security from imports of timber, lumber.” It called for studies on whether timber imports hurt U.S. commerce or defense interests, and whether tariffs and domestic incentives would increase the production of U.S. wood products.

That makes the orders more a “shout-out to timber harvesters,” according to an analysis in Bloomberg Law. It quoted Boise, Idaho attorney Murray Feldman explaining that because the order doesn’t cite any human health risk, it doesn’t actually trigger any ESA emergency exemptions. Furthermore, it doesn’t create any enforceable law that can override existing laws passed by Congress.

“The [Forest Service] is already short-staffed,” added UM’s Morgan. “One NEPA analysis takes a lot of time. If the cuts are deep into the NEPA shop, that potentially slows down timber production. Executive orders can’t summarily erase pieces of legislation. The Endangered Species Act is not going to go away. NEPA is not going to go away. The Administrative Procedures Act won’t just stop applying.”

And the economy won’t go away either. On the private side, the wood-products industry faces two different problems wrapped in the same word: Housing.

High interest rates, supply chain problems, trade war tariffs and other factors have stalled the U.S. home construction industry. As the stock markets continue to tumble and signs of a national or even worldwide recession grow, that’s not likely to improve. And that means the market for two-by-fours and plywood won’t get better even if the supply of trees grows.

In 2024, Canadian exports filled about a quarter of the U.S. demand for lumber. The U.S. has the capacity to mill 95 percent of its own lumber demand, although it’s currently running around 76 percent. Nevertheless, industry analysts predict that even with Trump trying to squeeze Canada out of the U.S. timber market, there will still be some slack left to fill from north of the border.

And that housing crunch ironically has a direct effect on the U.S. timber industry’s ability to saw wood. A steady decline in sawmill jobs throughout the West has gutted the industry in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. What few experienced mill workers remaining face expensive challenges finding a place to live near their mills. Lack of affordable housing was cited as a main cause of Pyramid Mountain Lumber Co.’s 2024 closure after 75 years in the Montana town of Seeley Lake near Missoula.

“The brunt of the pain over the near term will be carried by consumers as they absorb these higher prices, especially at a critical point when housing affordability in the US is also under a microscope and home builder margins are facing increased pressure,” international analysts at FastMarkets wrote on March 10. “This is one trade-off the current administration will be forced to grapple with in the coming months as concerns about the economy escalate and questions about what will catalyze a rebound in residential construction grow.”

DOGE orders have dismissed about 3,400 Forest Service workers, with an unknown additional number resigning or retiring. The service’s seasonal workforce hiring process has also been hobbled, leaving firefighting teams, maintenance crews and other summer jobs in limbo.

It’s unclear what those numbers are in Wyoming and Idaho, but in Montana, that translated to about 360 Forest Service workers. The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, which is the largest federal employer in the state. Many of those are the timber cruisers, biologists, legal analysts, map-makers and others intrinsic to the complicated task of assembling a timber sale. 

However, on March 11 the USDA released a statement telling all federal workers who lost their jobs through DOGE orders they would temporarily have their salaries restored and given back pay while the department developed a return-to-duty plan. Those reinstatements are expected to last through April 18 while the Federal Merit Systems Protection Board reviews the legality of the dismissal notices.

“I’m worried about staffing,” Altemus said. “The state has staff, but if they lose their counterparts, that loss of collaboration across jurisdictions is gone. If we’re going to hire those people back, let’s do it sooner than later.”

The risk extends far outside the forest. At the Bureau of Business and Economic Research, Morgan was also watching Trump’s cuts to university research funding.

“Our job is focused on understanding timber in western United States,” Morgan said. “We get lots of funding to help the Forest Service manage the wood products industry, so this is a nervous time for us. Will I be able to keep my workforce? The demand for information is going up because of these kinds of questions.”