The Roadless Rule has survived 25 years of lawsuits, presidential administrations, state carveouts, and repeated attempts to weaken or eliminate it. On Tuesday, Aug. 18, the U.S. Department of Agriculture formally proposed getting rid of it.
Some early coverage has described the move as a repeal of the Roadless Rule. It isn’t, at least not yet.
The U.S. Forest Service filed a proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule in its entirety, along with a draft environmental impact statement. The existing rule remains in effect while the agency takes public comments through Sept. 21.
That means the Forest Service has committed to pursuing a full repeal, but the process isn’t finished.
What the Roadless Rule Protects
The 2001 Roadless Rule generally prohibits new road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvest within designated inventoried roadless areas, with several exceptions. It doesn’t designate those lands as wilderness or close them to public use.
Hunting, fishing, camping, grazing, habitat work, hazardous fuels reduction, and other activities can occur within roadless areas. Existing exceptions can also allow some timber harvest, energy infrastructure, mineral activity, and road construction.
The rule creates a national standard for when permanent roads and certain forms of development can enter some of the least fragmented pieces of the National Forest System. There are roughly 58.2 million acres of inventoried roadless areas nationwide. The 2001 federal rule currently governs about 44.7 million acres.
Idaho’s roughly 9.3 million acres and Colorado’s roughly 4.2 million acres are managed under separate state-specific roadless rules and aren’t part of this proposed repeal. Roughly 9.3 million acres within Alaska’s Tongass National Forest are included.
More than 95% of the acreage governed by the national rule is in 10 Western states: Alaska, Montana, California, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Repealing the rule wouldn’t automatically approve logging or road construction across those lands. Instead, it would remove the nationwide roadless restrictions and leave more of those decisions to individual national forest plans and Forest Service managers, along with other applicable federal and state laws.
For hunters, anglers, hikers, climbers, paddlers, and anyone else using roadless national forest land, that’s a substantial shift in how those places could be managed.
USDA Points to Wildfire and Forest Management
The USDA has centered much of its case for repeal on wildfire risk, forest health, and the ability of local managers to conduct fuels treatments.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has argued that the Roadless Rule prevents managers from adequately treating unhealthy and overgrown forests. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said more than 40% of inventoried roadless areas have high or very high wildfire hazard potential, and only 5% have received hazardous fuels treatments since 2014.
Several Western governors also supported the proposal on Tuesday, including Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon. Their arguments focused heavily on restoring more management authority to local forest officials.
There are national forests that badly need active management, and access can play a role in prescribed fire, thinning, restoration, and wildfire response. Research from the Forest Service itself, however, complicates the argument that the Roadless Rule is preventing that work.
Conflict of Information
A peer-reviewed 2020 study from the agency’s Rocky Mountain Research Station examined fire and fuels treatments within inventoried roadless areas. Researchers found that a lack of roads hadn’t prevented fuel-management projects. Treatments were actually more numerous per square kilometer within roadless areas, although projects conducted in roaded areas generally covered more acreage.
The researchers also found forests with and without roads had burned at similar rates since the Roadless Rule took effect. Roads can help firefighters reach some fires, but they also bring more human activity into forests, which can increase human-caused ignitions.
The study concluded that nearly two decades of Forest Service monitoring data didn’t support the claim that removing road-building restrictions would broadly improve forest health.
More Than 625,000 Comments Came in Last Time
Tuesday’s announcement begins another round in a public process that’s already drawn an enormous response. When the USDA announced its intent to rescind the Roadless Rule in 2025, the agency received 625,957 comments through Regulations.gov.
The nonprofit Center for Western Priorities later reviewed the comments and reported that more than 99% opposed repeal. That analysis came from an advocacy organization rather than the USDA and included both individual comments and organized petition submissions. The USDA continued with the repeal process.
Now the agency is taking comments on the proposed rule itself and its draft environmental impact statement. Anyone who commented during the previous round should consider submitting another comment during this one.
Want the Roadless Rule to Stay? Say Something by Sept. 21
The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the proposed rescission through Sept. 21, 2026. Comments can be submitted through Regulations.gov under docket FS-2025-0001. If you oppose the repeal, tell the Forest Service directly and explain why.
Specific comments are more useful than copy-and-paste outrage. Name the national forest, drainage, hunting area, trail, fishery, climbing area, or roadless landscape you use. Explain how additional roads or development could affect your use of it. If wildfire and forest management are part of your concern, address those as well.
The existing Roadless Rule already contains exceptions for certain hazardous fuels work and other management activities. If you believe those authorities should be expanded or changed instead of eliminating the entire rule, say that.
Congress can also act.
The Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2025, H.R. 3930 and S. 2042, would put Roadless Rule protections into federal law. A competing proposal, H.R. 7695, would permanently repeal the rule.
Call your representatives.
Submit a comment.
Tell them exactly what you want done with these lands and why.
