Been working with Ben on this and fully support the draft legislation.

Public lands are a hot topic!

Respectfully,

Dan Waugh
Public Lands
501 E. Baybrook Ct
Boise Id, 83706
Dwaugh@alscott.com
Office: 208-424-3873
Cell: 360-791-1591

Public Lands – Idaho Legislator to unveil proposed constitutional amendment      (Published in the Idaho Capital Sun)

Senator Ben Adams to Propose Constitutional Amendment Protecting Idaho’s Public Lands

PINE – Senator Ben Adams, (R-Nampa) will unveil a proposed Constitutional Amendment next week aimed at permanently protecting Idaho’s public lands from sale and ensuring they remain open and accessible for future generations.

The amendment, which Adams will introduce in the 2026 legislative session, would prevent the State from selling future lands granted or acquired from the federal government. It also establishes guiding principles—with a focus on conservation, public access, and responsible use.

“Public lands are a precious inheritance for Idahoans who’ve hunted, fished, and explored them for generations,” Adams said. “This amendment makes it clear: these lands are not for sale to the highest bidder. They belong to the people of Idaho—now and always.

The proposal includes the creation of a “Public Lands of the State” trust. Revenues generated from responsible land use, like timber harvesting, grazing, and recreation—would be used to maintain the land and support Idahoans directly, especially in rural communities.

“Our rural schools are often surrounded by public land, but they lack the resources to maintain even basic facilities,” Adams said. “We should be using the abundant natural resources in those areas to benefit the people who live there.”

Adams emphasized that preserving land is not just about conservation but about resisting short-sighted deals and protecting Idaho’s identity.

“Selling off public land for a quick payday is a betrayal of our state motto: Esto Perpetua—let it be perpetual,” Adams said. “This land isn’t a developer’s project or a billionaire’s private hunting retreat. It’s our children’s birthright.

The official unveiling will take place at 12:00 pm on August 15 at the Pine Café in Pine, Idaho. Members of the public and press are encouraged to attend.

Senator Ben Adams is a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and third-term legislator representing District 12. He has been a vocal advocate for veterans, constitutional principles, and protecting Idaho’s land, people, and way of life.
Media Availability: Senator Adams is available for interviews before and after the event. To schedule a time, contact his office at 208-546-9393

The U.S. Forest Service has been searching for an identity almost since the federal government began managing trees in the 19th century.

It started in 1876 inventorying public lands to prevent over-logging. Then it became the lumber provider to the nation. Now, just shy of its 150th birthday, the Forest Service faces another fundamental reorganization announced by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins last week.

Or not. A week after Rollins’ announcement, the Senate Agriculture Committee ordered Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden to present a “Review of the USDA Reorganization Proposal.” Many public lands watchdogs hoped the Wednesday hearing would clarify where the idea came from and how the Forest Service’s tree focus fit in the farm-and-ranch world of the Department of Agriculture.

During the hearing on July 30, Committee Chairman John Boozman, R-Arkansas, offered his appreciation that Vaden, who took the job just two weeks before Rollins announced the reorganization on July 24, was working on his third week when he was summoned to explain the plan.

Ranking member Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, was less welcoming.

“The reason for the short notice is because the administration put out a half-baked plan with no notice,” Klobuchar said. Rearranging a major department that had already lost 15,000 staff members at a time when tariffs and pests such as the screwworm are roiling farm markets is “nothing short of a disaster,” she said.

Sharon Friedman, former Forest Service regional planning director, called the Rollins memo “way out of the normal range of ‘things to do.’” In particular, she pointed to the proposal to phase out Forest Service regional offices, instead of shrink them from the current nine to some smaller number. Earlier this year, draft maps showing a two- or three-region compression were in circulation.

“I think Congress is going to say this is a really stupid, bad idea,” Friedman told Mountain Journal on July 29 ahead of the hearing. “Go back to the drawing board.”

The National Association of Forest Service Retirees was equally aghast. “We do not see anything in the proposal that would improve services or efficiency,” they wrote in a July 29 letter to Senate committee leaders Boozeman and Klobuchar. “Rather, it appears to simply cut staffing and funding without describing how the work will continue to get done. It provides the classic direction to do more with less.”

NAFSR Chairman Steve Ellis told Mountain Journal the proposed reorganization of the Forest Service is nothing new. “I’ve been through a lot of these in my career, going back to when Jimmy Carter was in the White House,” he said. “The political ones are easy to smell, and this has the political smell to it. I doubt that it came from the Forest Service. It came from higher up. They were told ‘Eliminate regional offices and station offices — figure it out.’”

Where to call home?

While the impact that Rollins’ reorganization plan might have on the Forest Service has drawn particular attention, it affects all 29 agencies within the Agriculture Department. Rollins told Politico on Friday that “perhaps 50 to 70 percent of our Washington, D.C. staff will want to move” to five new hubs the agency is creating and the rest should seek jobs in the private sector.

That amounts to about 2,600 of the 4,600 USDA staff now in Washington, D.C. offices. The department has about 100,000 employees nationwide, 90 percent of whom work outside the national headquarters area.

The regional hubs would be in Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah. The memo did not say if the Forest Service regional offices would be redistributed among those five cities or eliminated altogether.

Vaden told senators that the plan removed some layers of middle management. “But that does not automatically mean everyone located in a former regional office of an agency will be moved,” he said. Vaden also pledged that USDA would help with moving costs for current employees, while “building the next generation of USDA leadership” in the regional hubs.

Most of Wednesday’s Senate hearing focused on two issues: Why there was so little advance notice of the plan and what senators’ districts were being considered for receiving the USDA jobs Rollins was moving out of Washington, D.C.

Senator John Hoeven, R-North Dakota, praised the reorganization’s goals, but warned he needed to see more collaboration with Congress.

“There’s a difference between you selecting hubs on your own and if we work together and come up with a plan,” Hoeven said. “Is this an outcome that we’re going to talk about, or a fait accompli?”

But Vaden did reveal a few expectations for the Forest Service.

Senator Ben Jay Luján, D-New Mexico, asked about the impact of “eliminating a regional office” of the Forest Service. Vaden replied that the Forest Service’s national human resources office in Albuquerque would not be affected in the reorganization, but that “the regional office will no longer be there.” Its building is already on a federal list to be closed and sold, and its employees would “be absorbed to other areas or asked to move.”

In his testimony, Vaden said one of the biggest reasons for the organization was to get the USDA workforce out of the National Capitol Region, which has “one of the highest costs of living in the country.” Federal salaries include a “locality rate,” or pay boost, to help employees afford expensive areas. The Washington, D.C. locality rate is 33.94 percent above a federal job’s base pay. Federal workers with new families couldn’t afford to buy homes in the Capitol area, where prices are averaging more than $800,000, he said.

What saves money?

“If you’re really looking for savings and belt tightening, focusing on the higher level of the organization doesn’t bother me,” said Mary Erickson, the recently retired supervisor of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest. “It’s not like you couldn’t downsize the regional offices, but the transitional costs of that are daunting. As you eliminate regional offices, where does that work go? And how do you do that in a year’s time? That’s a lot of work. And they say they don’t want to do this in fire season. Those are pretty long these days.”

Erickson pointed out that Fort Collins’ locality rate is 30.52 percent, resulting in almost no payroll savings. And although Salt Lake City’s locality rate is 17.06 percent, Utah’s public land is predominantly managed by Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, not the Forest Service.

“There’s been no explanation for those locations,” Erickson said. “No one seems to know who’s the mastermind behind this design.”

Nor does there appear to be any acknowledgement of previous federal reorganization attempts. Congress created a Special Agent in the Agriculture Department to survey the nation’s public forests in 1876, and opened a Division of Forestry in 1881. A decade later, Congress passed oversight of “forest reserves” to the Interior Department. President Theodore Roosevelt moved it back to Agriculture in 1905, naming Gifford Pinchot the first chief of the Forest Service.

An official history of the Forest Service’s first century labels eight more evolutions, including “The War Years,” “Environmentalism/Public Participation Era” and “Ecosystem Management and the Future Era.”

Ellis recalled the attempt at slimming down the BLM during the Clinton administration.

“They decided to take the district office layer out, which is like removing the forest supervisor layer in the National Forest System,” Ellis said. “It ended up costing a lot of money to move people around and get out of office leases. It ended up being a total flop. When the second Bush administration came on, they quietly put that layer back in.”

The first Trump administration took a similar track in 2019 when it moved the BLM headquarters out of Washington, D.C. Staff were dispersed to new offices in Colorado, Nevada, Utah and several other bases.

A 2021 survey of BLM workers by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility reported that 87 percent of reassigned employees either retired or quit rather than move. The field offices were staffed largely by new hires who lacked the scientific or experiential backgrounds of the former staff. “This lack of expertise in new hires has resulted in a shunning of science at the agency, and even a demonization of intellectual culture in some cases,” the PEER report stated.

It also resulted in a paucity of workers handling public business. At the time, the Utah area reported an average of one BLM employee for every 37,277 acres of public land. Arches National Park, which is surrounded by BLM lands, had one employee for every 1,530 acres.

Biden administration Interior Secretary Tracy Stone-Manning moved much of the BLM headquarters staff back to Washington in 2022. But she also reinforced the Colorado office, expanding its contingent from 27 positions under Trump to 56.

Friedman now runs the forestry policy blog Smokey Wire. She was a planning director in 2007 when a “Transformation Team” explored ways of performing Forest Service duties better. It did not appear to consider moving to another part of the federal org chart, such as Interior. But Friedman noted her own inability to find out what it actually accomplished: “I couldn’t find any documentation for the effort. It wasn’t even clear whom I would ask at the Forest Service. Historian? Archivist? I got some phone numbers and emails, but no one returned the messages.”

Some of that effort looked into moving the Forest Service from Agriculture to Interior. A 2009 Government Accountability Office report concluded “a move would provide few efficiencies in the short term and could diminish the role the Forest Service plays in state and private land management … [If] the objective of a move is to improve land management and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the agencies’ diverse programs, other options might achieve better results.”

The 2009 GAO report also cataloged other past consolidation initiatives. One was the colocation of wildland firefighting experts from the Forest Service, BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs to create the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. That took place in 1965.

Where’s the Fire?

One particular problem drags public lands management off balance: wildfire.

While logging trees and grazing cows and digging trail occur far from the average American’s attention, forest fires are literally front-page news. The Forest Service routinely spends nearly half its annual budget fighting fire. It handles between 70 and 80 percent of the public land ignitions, with Interior agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management chasing most of the rest.

Federal firefighters have long chaffed at being just a tool in a larger agency’s land management toolbox, according to Freidman.

“There’s a tension between wildfire people and everybody else,” she said. “They got pay raises and nobody else did. They want to work for other wildfire people, because they feel they’re a national asset. They think they shouldn’t have others holding them back when they could be making money.”

But wildfire and public land management are woven together in a tight braid. Fire-dependent ecosystems cover most of the western United States. Local ranger districts not only map and monitor their surrounding forest for fire potential, their staffs often donate their time to the community volunteer fire department and ambulance service.

Removing fire duties from the Forest Service would “hollow out” the agency, according to Ellis.

“Fire is integrated in every program the Forest Service does,” he said. “Anything you do on public lands affects the fuel. It isn’t just burning slash piles. It’s how you graze range land. It’s timber harvest. That’s all fuels management. The fuel in Los Angeles fires [last January] was homes.”

During the hearing, Senator Klobuchar asked if there was a bigger plan to move the Forest Service, or parts of it, to some other cabinet agency. She particularly wanted to know about the fate of wildland firefighting.

Vaden replied that the president’s budget, not the reorganization plan, called for the centralization of wildfire services. In other responses, Vaden said the Missoula-based Fire Lab would not be moving, and that the Salt Lake City regional hub was chosen in part because it offered “aviation assets” that would help the Forest Service in the “administration’s plan regarding centralizing wildfire efforts.”

Congress had already shown resistance to other Trump administration moves. Last week, both the House and Senate Appropriations committees rejected a plan to wrap the Forest Service’s firefighting duties into a new wildland fire management service housed in the Interior Department. Despite a Trump executive order creating the consolidated wildfire service and Forest Service and Interior budget reports detailing how it would work, congressional budgeters put the 2026 wildfire allocations back in their traditional multiagency bankbooks.

“The committee is disappointed with the utter lack of regard for complying with Congressional intent on spending funds as appropriated,” the Senate Appropriations Committee bill report stated. On other pages, the Senate committee overruled Trump’s order changing the name of North America’s highest mountain from Denali to McKinley. And it blocked an Interior Department plan to hand over some unnamed small national park facilities to state management.

“Over my whole career, the president’s budget, if you took it as reality, was completely drastic,” Erickson said. “We always expected it was going to be moderated by the Congressional process. Up to this point with Trump, you hadn’t seen that. Maybe we’re seeing some good signs there.”

This morning, USDA Secretary Rollins announced a major reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and restructuring of the U.S. Forest Service.

The Press Release can be found here

.The Secretarial Memorandum can be found here.    Secretary Memorandum: SM 1078-015 sm-1078-015

Here are some key takeaways (USDA-wide, not just the Forest Service):

• USDA currently has about 4,600 employees in the Washington, D.C. area.  That will be reduced to 2,000.  Employees will be relocated to new Hubs or the field.
• USDA’s five Hubs will be: Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah
• USDA will vacate certain office spaces in Washington, D.C. and will revisit (but retain) “the utilization and functions in the USDA…Yates Building…” which has been the permanent home of the Forest Service since the 1990s.
• This is the first step in a multi-step, multi-month process of reorganization and restructuring to reduce the size and costs of the USDA workforce.  As of today, 15,364 individuals voluntarily elected deferred resignation Department-wide.

What does this mean for the Forest Service?

There will be more information and announcements in the coming weeks and months.  Here’s what we know from the Secretarial Memo:

• The Forest Service will phase out the nine Regional Offices over the next year.  Implementation of the Regional Office phase out will consider the current fire season.
• While not stated in the Memo, we expect current Regional staff to be reassigned or relocated to the Hubs or individual forests.
• It’s our intel that Regional Foresters will also take on larger geographic and administrative responsibilities.
• Note: None of the Hubs are in AFRC’s service area and have little correlation to the National Forest System land base.
• The Forest Service will maintain a reduced state office in Juneau, Alaska and an eastern service center in Athens, Georgia.
• The current stand-alone Research Stations will be consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado.
• The Forest Service will retain the Fire Sciences Lab and Forest Products Lab.

We’ll continue to gather and share more information about these significant structural changes to USDA and the Forest Service.  We are already in touch with key agency leaders to better understand implications for the Forest Service, our industry, and our work.  Change is disruptive.  AFRC will continue to strategize and adapt accordingly to maximize our advocacy and effectiveness for our members under this new structure.  One thing is clear: the restructuring underscores the power and importance of AFRC’s model of having a presence, relationships, and involvement at the local and national forest level.

Sincerely,

Travis Joseph

President/CEO

American Forest Resource Council

(Washington, D.C., July 24, 2025) – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today announced the reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), refocusing its core operations to better align with its founding mission of supporting American farming, ranching, and forestry.

Over the last four years, USDA’s workforce grew by 8%, and employees’ salaries increased by 14.5% – including hiring thousands of employees with no sustainable way to pay them. This all occurred without any tangible increase in service to USDA’s core constituencies across the agricultural sector. USDA’s footprint in the National Capital Region (NCR) is underutilized and redundant, plagued by rampant overspending and decades of mismanagement and costly deferred maintenance. President Trump has made it clear government needs to be scrutinized, and after this thorough review of USDA, the results show a bloated, expensive, and unsustainable organization.

To be clear, all critical functions of the Department will continue uninterrupted. For example, we are at the height of fire season, and to date, have not only exceeded hiring goals, but have preserved the ability to continue to hire. Earlier this year, Secretary Rollins issued a Secretarial Memorandum exempting National Security and Public Safety positions from the federal hiring freeze. These 52 position classifications carry out functions that are critical to the safety and security of the American people, our national forests, and the inspection and safety of the Nation’s agriculture and food supply system. These positions will not be eliminated. However, employees may be subject to relocation.

“American agriculture feeds, clothes, and fuels this nation and the world, and it is long past time the Department better serve the great and patriotic farmers, ranchers, and producers we are mandated to support. President Trump was elected to make real change in Washington, and we are doing just that by moving our key services outside the beltway and into great American cities across the country,” said Secretary Rollins. “We will do so through a transparent and common-sense process that preserves USDA’s critical health and public safety services the American public relies on. We will do right by the great American people who we serve and with respect to the thousands of hardworking USDA employees who so nobly serve their country.”

The reorganization consists of four pillars:

• Ensure the size of USDA’s workforce aligns with available financial resources and agricultural priorities
• Bring USDA closer to its customers
• Eliminate management layers and bureaucracy
• Consolidate redundant support functions

To bring USDA closer to the people it serves while also providing a more affordable cost of living for USDA employees, USDA has developed a phased plan to relocate much of its Agency headquarters and NCR staff out of the Washington, D.C. area to five hub locations. The Department currently has approximately 4,600 employees within the National Capital Region (NCR). This Region has one of the highest costs of living in the country, with a federal salary locality rate of 33.94%. In selecting its hub locations, USDA considered where existing concentrations of USDA employees are located and factored in the cost of living. Washington, D.C. will still hold functions for every mission area of USDA at the conclusion of this reorganization, but USDA expects no more than 2,000 employees will remain in the NCR.

USDA will vacate and return to the General Services Administration the South Building, Braddock Place, and the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, and revisit utilization and functions in the USDA Whitten Building, Yates Building, and the National Agricultural Library. The George Washington Carver Center will also be utilized until space optimization activities are completed. These buildings have a backlog of costly deferred maintenance and currently are occupied below the minimum set by law. For example, the South Building has approximately $1.3 billion in deferred maintenance and has an average daily occupancy of less than 1,900 individuals for a building that can house over 6,000 employees.

USDA’s five hub locations and current Federal locality rates are:

1. Raleigh, North Carolina (22.24%)
2. Kansas City, Missouri (18.97%)
3. Indianapolis, Indiana (18.15%)
4. Fort Collins, Colorado (30.52%)
5. Salt Lake City, Utah (17.06%)

View the Secretary Memorandum (PDF, 2.6 MB)

This is only the first phase of a multi-month process. Over the next month and where applicable, USDA senior leadership will notify offices with more information on relocation to one of the regional hubs.

To make certain USDA can afford its workforce, this reorganization is another step of the Department’s process of reducing its workforce. Much of this reduction was through voluntary retirements and the Deferred Retirement Program (DRP), a completely voluntary tool. As of today, 15,364 individuals voluntarily elected deferred resignation.

Dan Waugh – Public Lands

501 E. Baybrook Ct

Boise Id, 83706

Dwaugh@alscott.com

Office: 208-424-3873

Cell: 360-791-1591

Breaking news: Senator Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off up to 3.3 million acres of public lands appears to have been removed from the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill.

Over the past two weeks, hundreds of thousands of outdoor enthusiasts—alongside hunters, anglers, motorized users, and conservationists—spoke up to defend public lands. Late yesterday evening, the land sales were removed on a technicality by the Senate parliamentarian, meaning that this dangerous proposal is out of the budget bill for now.

Lawmakers heard you, and the proposal to sell off millions of acres was already facing strong headwinds and was on the cusp of being scaled back or removed prior to this ruling.

This is a big win—for a few important reasons:
• Those 3.3 million acres will remain public, for now, accessible to the 175 million Americans who recreate each year.
• The outdoor community showed up in force. In just days, more than half a million letters poured into Congress—a volume we’ve never seen before.
• Lawmakers responded. In the past week, multiple Senators publicly opposed the sell-off proposal, sending a clear signal that these ideas aren’t welcome.

Thank you for raising your voice. This community continues to show that when public lands are under threat, we are ready to fight for them.

That said, we’re not out of the woods yet. Senator Mike Lee has already indicated he plans to revise his proposal and push again for public land sell-offs—this time with narrower language that he hopes will pass.

We’ll keep fighting—and we hope you will too.

Perpetua eyes possible Stibnite mine expansion – Valley Lookout

A gold and antimony mine approved in eastern Valley County is well-positioned for future expansion, according to executives for the mining company.

On Wednesday, Perpetua Resources outlined preliminary plans for a possible expansion of its Stibnite mine, which was approved earlier this year following an eight-year review by the Payette National Forest.

Marcelo Kim, who chairs the company’s corporate board, told shareholders that the company will explore additional zones that could add as much as 2.4 million ounces of gold to the mine’s current reserve of 4.8 million ounces.

“We believe there are ample high-grade extensions to our existing reserves that we plan to drill out,” Kim said. “Should we be able to bring this material into reserves, we could see a substantial benefit to our gold production from higher grades as well as antimony production.”
A shareholder presentation included a map showing more than two dozen new exploration zones and nine “priority targets.” Many of the areas are adjacent to the two existing pit mines the company is already permitted to develop.

Kim said the exploration zones are based on mineralization the company has observed and “not blue sky prospects.”

However, any expansion of the company’s planned mining operations would require further regulatory approval from the Payette and other agencies.

Marty Boughton, a Perpetua spokesperson, told Valley Lookout the acreage for the exploration zones is not currently available.

“We haven’t finalized a detailed plan yet, just some forward-looking targets,” Boughton said. “Our primary focus is bringing the Stibnite Gold Project as permitted online.”
Latest stock offering
Wednesday’s investor presentation came on the heels of Perpetua securing another $425 million in financing following a stock offering that opened last week.

The offering initially was for $300 million, but the company increased it to $325 million to fund the additional exploration work, Kim said.

At the same time, Paulson & Co., a New York City investment firm led by billionaire John Paulson, agreed to purchase another $100 million in stock.

The purchase raised Paulson’s total investment in Perpetua to $185 million since 2016. The firm owns about 32.3 million shares of Perpetua stock, giving it a 31% ownership stake in the company as its largest investor, Boughton said.

Kim, a Paulson partner since 2011, was appointed to his role as board chairman in 2020 when five longtime board members resigned amid Paulson’s demands for leadership changes.

$2B loan application
Most of the $425 million Perpetua raised through the stock offering will be used to meet equity requirements for a $2 billion loan the company applied for through the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

If approved, the loan would fund the $2.2 billion cost to build the mine, a process that Perpetua estimates would take two to three years.

Construction cannot begin, however, until Perpetua receives approval from the Payette on a financial assurance package that guarantees funding for clean-up of the site.

The company is actively seeking financial assurances totaling about $155 million to cover the construction phase of the project. It currently expects to begin mining operations in 2029.

Project background
Perpetua plans to extract more than $6 billion in gold, silver, and antimony from Stibnite, the site of historic mining operations during World War II and as far back as 1899.

The mine could produce an estimated 148 million pounds of antimony and 4.8 million ounces of gold, which would account for nearly all of the mine’s projected revenue.

The metals would be extracted from three open pit mines totaling about 473 acres within the 1,740-acre project zone, which is about three miles from the Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness.

Opponents of the mine fear it could pollute the East Fork South Fork Salmon River, which flows through the project site, and cause other environmental damage.

Water quality in the East Fork and other streams at the proposed mine site does not currently meet federal drinking water standards due to high concentrations of arsenic and antimony from pollutants left by previous mining companies.

Perpetua’s mining proposal is authorized by the General Mining Act of 1872, a federal law that allows anyone to patent mining claims on public land.

A review of the project began in 2016 under the National Environmental Policy Act, a federal law that requires all projects that could affect natural resources to be studied for environmental harm.

LINK TO SEND MESSAGE

Read full article

(Washington, D.C., April 4, 2025) – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins issued a Secretarial Memo (PDF, 2.9 MB) to establish an “Emergency Situation Determination” on 112,646,000 acres of National Forestry System (NFS) land (PDF, 19.8 MB). This Memo comes on the heels of President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order to expand American timber production by 25%, and it will empower the U.S. Forest Service to expedite work on the ground and carry out authorized emergency actions to reduce wildfire risk and save American lives and communities.

“Healthy forests require work, and right now, we’re facing a national forest emergency. We have an abundance of timber at high risk of wildfires in our National Forests,” said Secretary Rollins. “I am proud to follow the bold leadership of President Trump by empowering forest managers to reduce constraints and minimize the risks of fire, insects, and disease so that we can strengthen American timber industry and further enrich our forests with the resources they need to thrive.”

The Memo issued by Secretary Rollins is part of a larger effort to ensure American resources are properly managed for generations to come. This work will support rural economies, reduce wildfire risk, and build capacity through workforce alignment and expanded partnerships.

This Memo will also spur immediate action (PDF, 285 KB) from the U.S. Forest Service directing field leadership to increase timber outputs, simplify permitting, remove National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes, reduce implementation and contracting burdens, and to work directly with states, local government, and forest product producers to ensure that the Forest Service delivers a reliable and consistent supply of timber.

This action builds on Secretary Rollins’ announcement last month to unleash American energy by directing the USDA Forest Service to take action to remove burdensome Biden-era regulations that have stifled energy and mineral development on Forest Service land. As part of these decisive actions, the agency also canceled two mineral leasing withdrawals on Forest Service land that will help boost production of critical minerals.

USDA Secretarial Memo April 3, 2025   (PDF)