House votes to renew Secure Rural Schools program, approving vital funds for Northwest counties around national forests

WASHINGTON – The House voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools program, renewing funding that had lapsed since 2023 for counties that contain national forests and other public lands.

Every Democrat and all but five members of the chamber’s Republican majority voted to authorize funding for the program, which Congress originally passed in 2000 to account for the fact that counties with large proportions of federal land lack the property tax revenue needed to fund schools. Every lawmaker from Washington, Idaho and Oregon voted for the bill in both the House and Senate.

The bipartisan House bill’s original sponsors include Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat who represents southwestern Washington, and Rep. Cliff Bentz, a Republican who represents Eastern Oregon.

In a statement after the vote, Gluesenkamp Perez called the bill’s passage “beyond overdue” and added, “Candidly, the only reason it took this long is because way too many folks in D.C. have been blissfully ignorant about how disastrous the lapse of SRS has been for timber communities in Southwest Washington and across the West.”

Bentz linked the bill to the sudden decline in timber revenue that followed a 1991 court decision that restricted logging on federal land after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife listed the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act. The congressman blamed that move for an increase in poverty and addiction in his district.

“When society enacts socially attractive laws that seemingly benefit the broader public but end up harming small communities, society must mitigate that harm,” he said in a statement. “This is what the SRS bill does.”

The Senate bill, led by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, passed in June with the support of Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Washington Democrats, and Sen. Jim Risch, another Idaho Republican. With its passage in the House, the bill will now go to the desk of President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it into law.