How the Trump administration is fast-tracking logging in national forests

When the Forest Service approved the sale of nearly 70 acres for commercial logging in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest in late 2024, Sam Stearns was furious. The Shawnee is the state’s only national forest and one of the smallest in the country. The agency initially presented the sale of timber from the McCormick Oak-Hickory Restoration Project as a “thinning” operation to remove older trees and make room for seedlings. Logging operations contribute to habitat loss, and Stearns found the Forest Service’s justification to be insufficient.

“Never in the history of this planet has a forest been logged back to health,” said Stearns, 71.

Stearns, founder of the preservation group Friends of Bell Smith Spring, planned to oppose the sale. He began keeping an eye on the agency’s public comment period, which gave residents like him an opportunity to voice their concerns. For months, he and other local environmentalists scoured the web and local newspapers for mentions of the sale to prepare for the comment period, but the McCormick project never appeared.

It turns out the Forest Service advertised the project under a completely different name. The sale was called “V-Plow,” and by the time advocates realized it, they were already a week into the project’s three-week comment period. In the past, advocates claimed comment periods on logging operations lasted up to 45 days. Court documents would later reveal that the agency initially received no offers. It ultimately awarded the contract to an interested buyer from Kentucky in June 2025.

The following month, Stearns and other environmentalists sued the agency to block the plan. They cited the presence of endangered bats and potential impacts to a nearby national natural landmark and alleged the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Earlier this fall, a federal judge temporarily blocked the project before allowing logging to continue. The case is still pending and a Forest Service spokesperson declined to comment due to ongoing litigation.

The legal battle is part of a broader clash between speeding up projects and ensuring environmental reviews as required by federal law. NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of projects, but it includes a provision for “categorical exclusions” that allow agencies to bypass comprehensive reviews and limit public participation for minor proposals.

“It can be a legitimate process, for example, when used for routine things where the impacts are minimal and well-established, like maintaining a campsite or trail,” said Garrett Rose, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Unfortunately, this administration has worked to aggressively expand the exemptions available for [the Forest Service]and minimize disclosure of projects affected by categorical exclusions.

In 2023, the Biden administration tried to use these shortcuts to speed up the permitting of projects like renewable energy and high-speed internet. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump began pressuring the Forest Service to speed up timber harvesting on public lands. In an executive order, he directed the Forest Service to adopt categorical exclusions developed by other agencies to “reduce unnecessarily lengthy processes.” That means, for example, that the Forest Service could use categorical exclusions developed by the Department of Agriculture’s rural development agency for wastewater treatment plants or transmission lines, according to Rose. The order also directed the Forest Service to develop new exclusions for “thinning” projects related to wildfire mitigation.

Supporters fear the agency will apply categorical exclusions more broadly than before to logging projects in order to comply with Trump’s directive. Local watchdog groups across the country are scrambling to ensure the public has a chance to provide input when logging and oil and gas extraction are approved on public lands.

Ryan Talbott, a conservation advocate with Wildearth Guardians in the Pacific Northwest, said the Forest Service recently cited categorical exclusions developed by the Tennessee Valley Authority to approve a logging project in the Mount Hood National Forest, which exempted it from the standard public comment process. The agency also used the same categorical exclusion to advance a project in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

“This all goes back to Trump’s executive order on timber,” Talbott said. “They are looking for every possible way to accelerate wood production. »

In Indiana, environmentalists recently won a rare victory against the Forest Service. In September, a federal judge halted a logging project in the Hoosier National Forest, siding with local advocates who claimed the agency’s plan violated NEPA. The ruling concluded that the Forest Service failed to properly assess the environmental impacts of a proposal to log 4,000 acres and cut another 4,000, among other actions, in Indiana’s national forest alone.

In Illinois, however, Stearns’ trial is still ongoing. A team of Kentucky logging harvesters harvested about half of the nearly 70 acres of timber sold in late August before temporarily stopping in early September because of Stearns’ lawsuit. The loggers have not yet finished their work.

In late November, away from the Cut Hills, Stearns said the Forest Service was bad at a lot of things, but it was good at one thing: cutting down trees.

“Even if they got a higher price for this wood, which I know is not the case, these trees would have much more value standing, contributing to the health of an ecosystem, than they would ever be cut down like that,” he said.

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