The Trump administration has ordered the Forest Service to dramatically increase timber production while simultaneously closing the research infrastructure needed to understand the consequences.
The U.S. Forest Service is facing a contradiction so stark it reads like a policy parable: the federal government is ordering it to produce timber at volumes not seen since the 1970s while simultaneously eliminating the research infrastructure required to understand what that extraction will cost. In the span of roughly twelve months, the agency has been handed an aggressive production mandate, stripped of thousands of employees, and told to close 57 of its 77 research and development stations. The forests have not changed. The science required to manage them responsibly has not become less necessary. What has changed is the government's willingness to pay for either.
On March 1, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14225, directing the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior to develop plans for increasing domestic timber production on federal lands. The stated rationales were two: supply and fire. The administration argued that expanding logging would both reduce American dependence on imported lumber and thin forests vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire.
The Forest Service's response to that order set a target of 4 billion board feet sold annually by fiscal year 2028, a 25 percent increase over the recent baseline of roughly 3 billion board feet per year. To put that figure in historical context: national forest harvests peaked at approximately 11.3 billion board feet in fiscal year 1987, then collapsed over the following decade as the northern spotted owl received endangered species protection under the Endangered Species Act and public concern about clearcutting mounted. The harvest fell from that peak to under 2 billion board feet by the early 2000s, and has remained far below historical highs ever since. The Trump administration's 4 billion board-foot goal does not yet return to 1970s production levels, but it marks the most aggressive expansion of federal timber output since the era that produced the National Forest Management Act of 1976.
On April 4, 2025, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins followed the executive order with a formal declaration of an "Emergency Situation Determination" covering 112.6 million acres of national forest system land. The emergency designation empowers the agency to expedite project approvals, bypass standard environmental review on roadless national forest lands, and invoke statutory authorities designed for crisis response. Environmental attorneys immediately noted that the emergency classification allows road construction and logging to alter the physical character of roadless areas before any formal legal change to their protected status has been finalized.
If the national directive is aggressive, the most extreme version of it is playing out in western Oregon, where the Bureau of Land Management has proposed reopening 2.5 million acres of federally owned forests to what the agency explicitly calls "maximum" timber production. The forests in question are known as the O&C Lands: a checkerboard of federally owned parcels running through 17 counties, named for the Oregon and California Railroad that once held them before Congress revested them in 1916.
The BLM's notice of intent, published in the Federal Register on February 19, 2026, targets a sustained yield timber harvest of roughly 1 billion board feet annually. That figure would represent a fourfold increase over current harvest levels: in 2025, these same lands produced approximately 267 million board feet. At their historical peak in 1964, O&C harvests reached 1.638 billion board feet. The proposal would not merely increase logging. It would effectively repeal the conservation regime established by the agency's 2016 management plans, which placed about 75 percent of O&C lands in protective reserves.
Bev Law, a professor emerita of global change biology at Oregon State University and one of the world's foremost researchers on forest carbon dynamics, did not mince words about what this would mean. Law studies the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest and has testified before congressional committees on forest carbon sequestration. When asked about the BLM's proposal, she called it "insanity." Her reasoning is scientific, not rhetorical. "These forests are the low-hanging fruit," she explained. "The temperate rainforests and the long-lived forests that we have in Oregon and Northern California, they live for thousands of years. That's carbon that's not in the atmosphere, and they still keep taking in more carbon as time goes on." These forests, she noted, are among the most effective carbon sinks anywhere on Earth, and they are irreplaceable on any human timescale.
The timber industry's position is precisely the opposite. Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, called the lands among the most productive timberlands in the world and argued the 2016 management plans violated the intent of the O&C Act of 1937, which was written to maximize harvest. Joseph said the proposal would mean thousands of private-sector jobs and millions of dollars in county revenue for roads, schools, and mental health services. The O&C county revenue argument has long been the political anchor of pro-logging advocacy in western Oregon. At the county level in Linn County, a county that was home to 64 wood products facilities in the early 1970s and today has four, the prospect of restored federal timber revenue represents something economically material.
The northern spotted owl is why federal timber production in the Pacific Northwest fell so dramatically in the 1990s. The owl's listing under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 triggered legal challenges to timber sales and ultimately the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which protected up to 80 percent of old-growth forests and set harvest levels at 1.2 billion board feet per year across federal forests in the Northwest, a 70 percent decline from 1970s levels.
That legal history is now relevant again. To remove the species-protection obstacles that stand between the administration's production goals and the forests, the Trump administration has revived a mechanism so rarely used it is known informally as the "God Squad": the Endangered Species Act Committee, created by Congress in 1978 with the authority to grant exemptions from the act's prohibitions when five of its seven cabinet-level members agree. Since its creation, the committee has completed action in only three cases, involving dams and, in 1992, a set of timber sales in Oregon that were found to jeopardize the northern spotted owl. That 1992 exemption was ultimately withdrawn following litigation.
On March 31, 2026, the God Squad convened for the first time in decades, primarily to consider exemptions for oil and gas activities in the Gulf of America, not yet for logging. But the Trump administration's January 2025 executive order on energy directed the committee to meet quarterly and to identify ESA obstacles to domestic energy and resource infrastructure. Legal observers noted that the committee's revival as a regularly convening body, rather than a one-time emergency tool, represents a structural change in how species protections interact with resource extraction policy. The NRDC described the committee's March vote in favor of offshore oil and gas as appearing unanimous.
On March 31, 2026, the same day the God Squad met, the USDA announced what it called a "sweeping restructuring" of the U.S. Forest Service. The announcement moved agency headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, closed all nine existing regional offices, and proposed shuttering 57 of the agency's 77 research and development stations, representing 74 percent of the agency's research infrastructure. The Forest Service would also consolidate its multiple research stations under a single organization headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado.
The National Federation of Federal Employees estimated that about 6,500 agency employees would be affected by the reorganization, with another 2,700 impacted by research center closures. Josh Hicks of the Wilderness Society drew an explicit comparison to the first Trump administration's 2020 relocation of the Bureau of Land Management's headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, which resulted in the loss of approximately 90 percent of the agency's employees, as experienced staff declined to relocate. "The lesson that they learned," Hicks said, "is this is an awfully effective way to further dismantle and push agency staff out the door."
More than 80 percent of the 14,000 public comments submitted during the reorganization's public comment period were negative. Tribal representatives warned that eliminating regional offices would destroy working relationships and result in lost institutional knowledge related to treaty obligations.
The reorganization arrives on top of damage already done. In early 2025, DOGE cut an estimated 3,400 Forest Service employees, including what the agency's own records and multiple internal documents later confirmed included hundreds of "red card" certified wildland firefighters. When the fire season arrived, the administration acknowledged the problem and invited resigned firefighters to temporarily return. According to the nonprofit Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, the agency completed 38 percent less wildfire mitigation work in 2025 than in previous seasons.
The research stations targeted for closure are not abstract institutions. The Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle studies how wildfire affects human health, wildlife habitat, and ecosystem function. Long-term research projects at experimental forests track ecological trends over decades; if those projects are terminated, the data they would have generated is gone permanently. Abigail Cordner, a forest researcher, noted in an email to the Whitman Wire that facilities, projects, and people are three different things, and that the agency has not made public what happens to the projects themselves when the buildings close. "One concern is that the USFS sponsors many long-term research projects that have great value in terms of monitoring and understanding trends over time," she said. "If those projects get shut down, that's potentially a huge loss to resource management and risk mitigation."
From another angle: the Forest Service is being directed to dramatically accelerate an activity that has historically generated controversy, litigation, and unintended ecological consequences, at precisely the moment when the agency's capacity to monitor the results of that activity is being eliminated. The USDA's own published summary of public comments on the reorganization acknowledged concerns that cuts "could compromise ecological management, public access, and employee morale." That summary was produced, and then the reorganization largely proceeded anyway.
The administration's stated position is that the restructuring will make the agency more nimble and field-oriented, bringing leadership closer to the forests. Critics, including former White River National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams, who retired after being directed to fire 16 of his forest's employees, described the restructuring in terms of disruption rather than efficiency. "Given what I've seen in the last year and a half, when it comes to the policies, the organization, the budget cuts, the w…