The Forest Service is using the threat of wildfires to meet timber targets
By Nathan Gilles. February 6, 2025. Columbia Insight
The year 2015 marked a turning point for the U.S. Forest Service. For the first time in its history, the agency spent more than 50% of its budget on wildfire management, according to an agency report from that year.
The burden of dealing with the wildfire crisis has even led the agency to “borrow” funds from its other programs, including wildfire prevention programs, to pay for putting out fires.
Recognized as both a legacy of the agency’s past fire suppression policies and the effects of climate change, the wildfire crisis now consumes a significant chunk of the Forest Service’s time and resources.
In crisis, however, the agency also sees opportunity, according to both public reports and internal Forest Service documents obtained by the nonprofit WildEarth Guardians through a public records request and shared with Columbia Insight.
Internal documents show the Forest Service discussing—both internally and with the timber industry—how its various legal and policy “tools” and emergency authorities related to its wildfire prevention programs could be and have been harnessed to increase sales of board feet of timber.
The documents discuss how “barriers” to achieving these “timber targets,” including civil litigation from environmental organizations, might be overcome through “streamlining” environmental oversight by using legal exemptions to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
For the Forest Service and the timber industry, “streamlining” means removing some NEPA red tape. It’s a necessary step, they argue, on the way to creating a win-win scenario that will help prevent wildfires, increase board feet of timber, and, in the process, grow rural timber jobs.
Critically, many of the preferred wildfire crisis tools also allow the agency and its partners to hold onto the timber revenue rather than send it to the U.S. Treasury.
While the timber industry has applauded the Forest Service’s efforts to “streamline” NEPA and has advocated for many of the same tools, many conservationists are skeptical.
Critics say it’s unclear whether the Forest Service and other public agencies that oversee these treatments are applying the best available science or if their legal and policy tools and the wildfire crisis itself have instead incentivized the agencies to cut mature and old-growth trees, as well as bureaucratic corners, in their pursuit of both wildfire prevention and timber sales.
This story examines the tools identified in both internal and public-facing Forest Service documents the agency is using to simultaneously increase timber volume and address the wildfire crisis. As most of the documents relate to the Pacific Northwest, it highlights the region’s efforts to meet its timber targets and the tools used to that end.
The Forest Service denied multiple requests for interviews from Columbia Insight for this report.
Nathan Gilles 