Trump Administration Seeks to Build More Roads in National Forests

The Trump administration is seeking to build more roads in U.S. national forests by revoking a decades-old policy that protects almost 60 million acres of forested land.

“For nearly 25 years, the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action — prohibiting road construction, which has limited wildfire suppression and active forest management,” U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said in a statement.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will soon formally attempt to undo the 2001 Roadless Rule, a federal regulation protecting inventoried roadless areas in the U.S. National Forest System. The department said the move is meant to help fight wildfires, but some forest ecologists and fire scientists have concerns.

"One of the most fundamental concepts in fire, especially in terms of fire geography, is that roads are the dominant place where you see ignitions," Alexandra Syphard, senior research scientist with the Conservation Biology Institute and the director of science for the Global Wildfire Collective, told NPR.

Humans cause a majority of wildfires and adding roads to forests can change the vegetation types growing on the forest floor.

“Speculation that eliminating road prohibitions would improve forest health is not supported by nearly twenty years of monitoring,” according to a 2020 study from the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station.

However, some researchers argue there are situations where roads can help wildfire suppression efforts. A 2021 study in Oregon found that roadless areas in Western forests had fewer ignitions than places with roads, but the fires there tended to burn more land.

"Fires that start near roads tend to be controlled more quickly and smaller for obvious reasons of rapid detection and access (for firefighters)," Matt Thompson, a former research forester at the Forest Service and the vice president of wildfire risk analytics at Vibrant Planet, told NPR.

Thompson said the Trump administration needs “a surgical approach” when building roads to fight fires.

"The question is, will we have the resources and can we get that done in time so it's not just a new risk sitting out there?" he said.

The public comment period on the proposed Roadless Rule revocation ends Sept. 19.

Sources: NPR, U.S. Department of Agriculture