This blog post is adapted from our How We Fight Back email series. Read more by clicking the links below.
- A Constitutional, Legal, and Moral Crisis
- Interior — Another Stress Test for Democracy
- EPA Turns Against Its Own Mission — How We Fight Back
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The next installment in our How We Fight Back series takes us to our national forests. Our first post, “A Constitutional, Legal, and Moral Crisis,” laid out seven themes driving our work in these times of turmoil. Two of them, growing coalitions and defending what can be defended, are at the heart of how we’re fighting to protect national forests.
I’m Chandra Rosenthal, PEER’s Western Lands and Rocky Mountain Advocate.
I’ll be blunt — this administration is coming for our national forests from every direction. It wants more roads, more motorized traffic, more logging, and less science, all with fewer people to watch over the land. Our forests and the wildlife and ecosystems they sustain are under direct attack.
Here’s how PEER is fighting back.
- Teaming Up with an Old Ally
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants to rewrite the Travel Management Rule, which has protected our 193 million acres of national forests from unmanaged cross-country driving for the last 20 years. The new plan would eliminate the criteria requiring managers to limit damage to soil, water, and wildlife habitat. It would also presume existing routes are open and push forests to consider new ones. USDA calls it “a uniform national policy favoring increased access.”
This week, PEER submitted formal comments opposing this plan with Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE), the organization that helped establish PEER more than 33 years ago. FSEEE’s members are current and former Forest Service employees and scientists who know these roads and this agency from the inside, and we greatly rely on their expertise.
FSEEE Executive Director Kevin Hood is a 20-year Forest Service veteran. As he put it, “Access to our national forests isn’t limited by the Travel Management Rule. It’s limited by roads the agency can’t afford to maintain.”
The Forest Service already faces an $11.44 billion maintenance backlog, and its FY 2027 budget projects cutting permanent staff by 67 percent. Opening more roads and trails while eliminating the employees needed to maintain, monitor, and enforce them is a recipe for more environmental destruction and physical danger in our forests.
- Defending Roadless Forests
For 25 years, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule has protected about 45 million acres of national forest from commercial logging and road construction. Now the administration wants to rescind it, leaving these wild places vulnerable to logging, drilling, and mining.
USDA’s own draft environmental impact statement found that landslides are six to nine times more likely next to forest roads. It also found that elk survival rose when roads closed and fell when gates came down. Roads split wildlife into isolated populations, and once a forest is fragmented, there’s no putting it back together. National forests also supply drinking water to more than 60 million people in 3,400 communities.
You can help. Public comments are open until October 6. Use our sample comment to let the Forest Service know you care or write your own to defend the Roadless Rule.
- Standing Up for Forest Science
As part of moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, USDA is closing 23 research stations from Alaska to Florida. No one knows how many of the agency’s roughly 1,500 scientists will be relocated or pushed out. The administration never assessed the research needs of the National Forest System before gutting its research stations.
As I have told the press, “Not all forests are the same.” Forest managers need local science to know whether their decisions are helping or hurting, especially as the administration pushes for more logging.
- Exposing “Emergency” Logging
In April 2025, the Forest Service issued an Emergency Situation Determination that designated 60 percent of National Forest System lands as an emergency zone. The designation allows expedited timber and fuels-reduction work under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
PEER filed two Freedom of Information Act requests to find out what is happening on the ground. The first seeks environmental review records, including assessments, impact statements, categorical exclusions, project acreage, and timelines. The second seeks the Forest Service’s mandated annual report to USDA. That report covers compliance status and consultations under the Endangered Species Act and National Historic Preservation Act, including coordination with tribes and emergency agencies.
We’ll have more information to share with you on this soon.
Why does this matter? We’re concerned the Forest Service is using emergency authority as a vehicle to fast-track logging while shortcutting the environmental review and consultation that would normally apply. These broad powers let the agency stretch “emergency status” beyond genuine wildfire and safety needs to serve a timber-production agenda.
The public deserves to know about the backroom deals that are driving national decisions about our forests.
Roads, emergency logging, gutted science, and a hollowed-out workforce are not separate problems. Together, they threaten the forests, wildlife, and clean water that belong to every American. PEER will keep fighting to protect them.
We’d love to hear how you think we should be fighting back. Feel free to contact us.
Thank you for standing with us.
Chandra Rosenthal is PEER’s Western Lands and Rocky Mountain Advocate.