Trump order: Logging can skirt Endangered Species Act, environmental study

President Donald Trump took action last weekend to increase domestic logging by circumventing environmental protections and to staunch the flow of imported timber and lumber products into the country, primarily from Canada.

A pair of executive orders March 1 — one addressing timber and wood product imports, the other addressing logging on federal lands — drew swift praise from the logging industry, searing condemnation from environmental and wildlife groups, and concern from the construction industry over higher prices of tariff-hit building materials.

The order on domestic logging, titled “Immediate expansion of American timber production,” pertains to federal land under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service, an agency in the Department of Agriculture, and the Bureau of Land Management, an agency in the Department of the Interior. The Forest Service accounted for much of the U.S. domestic timber production through the 1990s but now represents only a sliver of domestic harvest.

The order rolls back the degree to which the agencies have to comply with the Endangered Species Act or consider negative environmental impacts of logging and forest thinning projects.

Contrary to a slew of social media posts criticizing the order, it does not call for or mention clear-cutting the roughly 280 million acres of forest under Forest Service and BLM control. Clear-cutting is not mentioned at all in the order.

However, because the order significantly lowers the regulatory hurdles for logging projects, it will be easier for environmentally damaging clear-cut logging to be approved.

Poll shows Western voters, including MAGA, support conservation, oppose Trump actions

“This executive order will decimate our federal forests,” a consortium of environmental and wildlife groups wrote in a March 1 statement. “It will use tax dollars to line the pockets of corporate logging interests, undermine environmental laws, and take public forests out of public hands. This directive is part of a pattern to undermine science, gut the federal workforce, and privatize our public lands. Clearcutting our public lands for private profit will destroy mature and old-growth forests, pollute our air and water, and in bypassing the Endangered Species Act, actively drive vulnerable wildlife to extinction.”

The joint statement, from the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, Earthjustice, Oregon Wild and WildEarth Guardians, noted that the Trump Administration recently picked logging executive Tom Schultz as the new chief of the Forest Service.

In contrast, logging industry group the American Forest Resource Council expressed “strong support” for both executive orders. The group’s president, Travis Joseph, called them “common sense directives Americans support and want from their federal government.”

“Our federal forests have been mismanaged for decades,” Joseph said in a statement Monday. “Americans have paid the price in almost every way. Lost jobs, lost manufacturing, and infrastructure. Lost recreational opportunities like hunting and fishing, and access to our lands. Degraded wildlife populations, water, and air. Landscapes and communities devastated by wildfire. Our federal forests are facing an emergency. It’s time to start treating it like one by taking immediate action.”

Recent data from the 2025 Conservation in the West Poll of eight western states including Montana showed that 60% of voters in the Rocky Mountain and Intermountain West oppose increasing access for commercial logging on public lands.

What the order does

Normally, the Forest Service and BLM are required to consult the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — the agency that implements and enforces the Endangered Species Act — on projects like logging or thinning work that could harm protected species. Projects generally are not legally allowed to harm such species.

The executive order on timber production directs the Secretary of the Interior to convene the rarely used Endangered Species Committee, which can exempt projects from complying with the landmark law. The committee can give emergency approval to projects, allowing them to proceed even if they will harm a protected species or result in its extinction. Historically, the committee has been used to aid recovery from natural disasters, not to expedite resource extraction.

The order further directs the heads of the Forest Service and BLM to use “categorical exclusions” for forest thinning projects and the salvage of trees in forests damaged by things like fire, flood, insects or disease — meaning those projects will be exempted altogether from in-depth environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. Such analysis would require consultation with FWS to ensure compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

The AFRC cited a June 2022 analysis from the Bozeman-based Property and Environmental Research Center, a group that advocates for free-market-based conservation instead of government regulations, that found that the Forest Service took an average of 3.6 years to complete an environmental assessment (the second-most robust level of NEPA analysis) on logging and thinning projects. The more robust environmental impact statement took an average of 5.3 years to complete.

The order directs the heads of the Forest Service and BLM to examine ways to streamline permitting rules around timber sales, and to issue new guidance to increase and accelerate timber harvest through partnerships with state agencies and tribes and contracts with nonprofits or businesses to conduct forestry work.

Impacts to Montana, housing costs

The domestic timber production order’s effects could be felt widely in Montana, especially in the western part of the state that harbors significant timber resources on federal land.

According to federal data compiled by the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, the state of Montana has a total 25.9 million acres of forestland, 69% of which is under federal ownership, nearly all of it by the Forest Service.

According to a 2020 report from the Congressional Research Service, in 2018 the Forest Service controlled 17.2 million acres in Montana, or 18.5% of the state’s total area. (Overall, Montana is about 27.8% forestland by area.) The BLM oversaw 8.02 million acres, or about 8% of the state. Much of the Forest Service’s land is forested; much of the BLM’s is plains and rangeland.

Federal ownership of forests is often much higher at the county level in western Montana than statewide. In Ravalli County, for example, 88% of forested land is national forest land. In Lincoln County, 80% of forested land is national forest land. In Lewis & Clark County, it’s 71%. More than half of forestland is under Forest Service supervision in Cascade, Flathead, Gallatin, Missoula, Silver Bow and Deer Lodge counties.

The American Forest Resource Council noted that Trump’s orders came as the U.S. faces “a severe national housing shortage.” Montana has been hit hard by housing shortages and skyrocketing prices in recent years.

It’s not clear the president’s actions will alleviate those problems.

The order on imports, titled “Addressing the threat to national security from imports of timber, lumber,” directs the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the threat that timber and wood product imports pose to the U.S. domestic timber industry, and whether measures like tariffs “are necessary to protect national security.”

The U.S. imported $61 billion of forest products like uncut timber, lumber and other wood products in 2021, the most recent year of data available from the U.S. International Trade Commission. Almost half of that, or $28.2 billion, came from Canada. At the same time, the U.S. exported more than $39 billion of forest products in 2021 — $9.8 billion, or one-quarter of exports, went to Canada. That disparity leaves the U.S. as a net importer of timber products overall and from Canada specifically.

Any tariffs specifically on timber or other wood products would go on top of a blanket 25% tariff Trump instituted on all Canadian imports, which went into effect Tuesday, March 4. (On Wednesday he gave automakers a one-month reprieve.) Last year, then-President Joe Biden almost doubled tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber imports to a total of 14.5%.

In a statement Jan. 31, well before Trump’s blanket tariffs took effect or he issued the order on timber imports, the National Association of Home Builders expressed concern that such measures would increase homebuilding costs and harm consumers.

“Tariffs on lumber and other building materials increase the cost of construction and discourage new development,” the group stated, “and consumers end up paying for the tariffs in the form of higher home prices.”

The group sent a letter to Trump expressing concern over tariffs.

“Bringing down the cost of housing will require a coordinated effort to remove obstacles to construction, be they regulatory, labor or supply-chain related,” the group wrote in the letter. ” NAHB stands ready to work with you to accomplish these goals. However, we have serious concerns that proposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico will have the opposite effect, by slowing down the domestic residential construction industry.”

U.S. still major timber producer

Trump’s administration and executive orders, and the industry groups that support them, portray U.S. timber production as a once-grand industry that was kneecapped by runaway environmental concerns. The reality is more complex and market-driven, although environmental concerns did lead to a significant shift away from timber production on Western national forests in the latter 20th century, costing thousands of jobs and stagnating some towns’ and regions’ economies.

The AFRC noted in its statement Monday that just 0.5% of total national forest land is logged annually, and that only 35% of national forest land is even available for logging. Forest Service data shows that timber production from national forests peaked at just shy of 12 billion board-feet annually in both the early 1970s and very early 1990s before plummeting to less than 4 billion board-feet by the late ‘90s. By 2017 it was just 2.6 billion board-feet.

In 1991, national forest lands provided 84% of all U.S. timber harvest. By 2017 it was only 5%.

But other land still produces. Although national forest production — the timber targeted by Trump’s order — has plummeted, overall U.S. timber production has roughly tracked with consumption and broader economic cycles.

A USDA analysis of U.S. timber production, trade and consumption from 1965 to 2017 showed that U.S. per-capita consumption of forest products decreased steadily from 1986 through 2008 and then roughly leveled-off through 2017. The drop was due in part to significant decreases in the usage of paper products. Homebuilding, whether single- or multi-family, also plummeted after 2006.

Also during that time, domestic timber production shifted from the Western U.S. to the South, and fluctuations in the market resulted in mill and other supply chain infrastructure closures that led the U.S. to rely more on imports when demand increased again.

The data show a cyclical landscape of domestic timber production that has shifted regions within the country, rather than one in a precipitous decline. While the South increased production, for example, the largely federal land-reliant West saw its timber industry atrophy. Less logging in the West did result in a measurable decline in overall domestic output. But production has rebounded in recent years.

“Since 1965, lumber production has generally trended upward, except for periods of economic slowdown such as the mid-1970s, early 1980s, and more recently 2006 to 2010. Many Western mills dependent on federal timber were forced to dramatically decrease production or close entirely,” the analysis stated. “This resulted in an overall decline in lumber production, shifts in production to other regions, and increased levels of foreign imports. These declining trends have reversed since 2011 as annual lumber production continues to increase.”