Press Release: Public Shut Out as Trump Administration Guts Bedrock Environmental Protections
Sweeping changes and loopholes impact public oversight of threatened ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Jade Hagan, PhD, Bark , jade@bark-out.org.
Grace Brahler, Cascadia Wildlands, grace@cascwild.org.
July 8, 2025
EUGENE, OR The Trump administration is dismantling the public’s ability to engage with federal land management decisions — an alarming shift with especially dire consequences for Pacific Northwest forests. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which governs the environmental review process for public land management decisions and mandates public input in the review process, has been a repeat target for the administration.
On June 30th, 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released an interim final rule changing NEPA implementation procedures for all of its agencies, including the Forest Service. These regulations come in response to the administration’s rescission of the Council of Environmental Quality’s NEPA regulations earlier this year (spurred by EO 14154, Unleashing American Energy) which prompted each agency to craft its own NEPA regulations during the development of the rule.
The USDA NEPA implementation regulations strip away mechanisms for public input. The implementation regulations no longer require scoping, an early and essential process where an agency provides the public with notice of a potential project and identifies the potential environmental impacts. The regulations also no longer require public comment periods during the draft Environmental Assessment and Environmental Impact Statement stages. The agency will no longer be required to provide a Schedule of Proposed Actions to the public. These changes, which took effect July 3rd, 2025 with the interim final rule’s publication in the Federal Register, impact all 193 million acres of land that the Forest Service manages, including Mt. Hood, Willamette, Umpqua, Siuslaw, and Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forests.
“Mandated periods for public comment allow everyone to weigh in on what happens on public lands, including those most impacted. Importantly, these public comments are put into the public record, which can be essential if a proposal is challenged in court,” said Grace Brahler, Wildlands Director at Cascadia Wildlands. “The Trump administration is systematically and strategically targeting the tools the public can use to fight against rampant logging in public forests.”
Importantly, these new NEPA regulations serve a strategic purpose for Trump’s agenda and come after months of setup by the administration. Just four days after its sweeping rescission of CEQ’s NEPA implementation regulations in February, the White House issued Executive Order 14225 calling for the “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” and instructing agencies to eliminate any regulations that hinder or delay approval of logging projects. In response to instructions in the EO, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins declared a national emergency, opening up roughly 60% of all national forest lands to emergency procedures intended to fast-track logging. Rollins’ emergency declaration and subsequent memos describing it, called for the elimination of scoping, public comment, and objection periods, among other damaging practices to speed up irresponsible logging. The new NEPA implementation regulations now codify Sec. Rollins’ national emergency into regulatory language that reaches beyond the emergency declaration timeframe and expands the functional application of the order. While Sec. Rollins’ order applies to 60% of national forest lands, the USDA’s new NEPA regulations governing the Forest Service now apply to all national forest lands. The new Forest NEPA regulations are, in this way, a culmination of the agenda that the Trump administration has been laying out for months.
“These policies represent a sharp pivot toward prioritizing timber production at the expense of environmental safeguards, public transparency, and ecologically based forest management,” said Jordan Latter, Bark’s Forest Watch Program Manager.
For months preceding the new FS’ NEPA implementation regulations, to align with Secretary Collins’ order, Forest Service districts have implemented actions to reduce public input in a ploy to increase timber output. Internal memos obtained by Bark reveal that the Forest Service was told in April to begin relying heavily on “Categorical Exclusions” (CEs) —a legal shortcut that allows timber sales to proceed without public comment or formal objection periods and with only minimal environmental analysis. To maximize use of this loophole, the agency has adopted over 40 new CE categories from other federal agencies. The new FS NEPA regulations suggest that this expanded use of CEs has become a permanent feature of Forest Service policy.
“The Trump administration has taken strategic steps since January to push their corporate, timber-industry agenda forward by eroding mechanisms for public input,” said Madeline Cowen, Grassroots Organizer with Cascadia Wildlands. “The new Forest Service NEPA implementation regulations take away the very tools and opportunities the public has to decide what happens to their public lands.”
Attacks on NEPA are only part of the administration’s aim. The Trump admin continues to target largely popular and impactful environmental Laws, regardless of the public support that they have. Agencies have been directed to repeal any policy not explicitly required by statute. In line with this directive, the Trump Administration recently announced that they plan to repeal the Roadless Rule, which protects 58.5 million acres from new road construction around the United States. In 2002, the Roadless Rule set the record for the most public comments submitted with 1.6 million public comments supporting its adoption. And this Spring, the administration proposed rescinding the definition of harm in the Endangered Species Act, despite the law’s broad support across political spectrums.
“What’s happening here is a shift from a multi-use, community-informed forest management model to one that prioritizes extraction and profit,” said Jade Hagan, Bark’s Director of Community Engagement and Communications. “That shift is happening fast, and the public is being locked out of the process.”
These policy changes eliminating formal opportunities for public comment and objection effectively force communities to resort to litigation if they want to challenge harmful projects, which is exclusionary for the public and costly for agencies and will not result in a more efficient process. Moreover, by reducing public notice and scoping requirements, the administration is making it harder for everyday people to even know what’s happening on their public lands—all while the federal government prioritizes industry profits over transparency, accountability, and environmental protection.
Despite these setbacks, Bark, Cascadia Wildlands and other watchdog organizations remain committed to defending our forests and advocating for public land management that is transparent, science-driven, and rooted in community values and environmental justice.