ADVISORY: House Committee to Consider Two Bills that would Undermine Forest Protections

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Wednesday, the House Natural Resources Committee is scheduled to consider two bills that would significantly undermine forest protection efforts in the United States.

The bills would resurrect outdated forest management regimes as top priorities at the U.S. Forest Service.They would open up thousands of acres of national forest land to logging activities without comprehensive environmental review. The markup comes as the Trump administration is pursuing a rushed process to open up millions of acres of national forest landscapes to industrial logging and development. The bills are:

H.R. 178 (McClintock, R-CA), a bill "to require the Secretary of Agriculture to carry out activities to suppress wildfires": This bill requires the Secretary of Agriculture to utilize all available resources to suppress wildfires within 24 hours of the fire's detection and to suppress all prescribed fires that exceed prescriptions to burn. The bill prohibits the Secretary from "inhibit[ing] the suppression efforts of state or local firefighting agencies that are authorized to respond to wildfire on [National Forest System] lands." The bill also prevents the Secretary from using fire for resource benefit unless the fire is prescribed, and the use of backburns to control wildfires are also limited.

A century of fire suppression policies are widely acknowledged - including by Forest Service scientists and leadership - to be a significant contributor to the intensity, scale, and destruction of current wildfires. This bill doubles down on those policies.

H.R. 179 (McClintock, R-CA), "Proven Forest Management Act": This bill requires the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior to coordinate with "impacted parties" to carry out forest management activities that "attain multiple ecosystem benefits" (except when the costs of doing so "are excessive"). It also creates a 10,000-acre Categorical Exclusion (CE) for forest management activities that reduce "forest fuels."

The Forest Service manages for multiple use under the National Forest Management Act of 1976. While it can be argued that timber yield has always been the dominant use, and indeed is the dominant metric for agency performance, the agency has made improvements in the last decades. This bill seeks to bring us back to the era of highly-contentious timber sales at the expense of many other values that are overwhelmingly found on National Forests - species habitat, sources of drinking water, carbon storage and absorption, and more.

Sierra Club spokespeople are available for interviews.

Schedule:

Markup of Committee on Natural Resources Full Committee

Wednesday, July 23, 2025 (TBD)

1324 Longworth House Office Building, and via webcast.

About the Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is America's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with millions of members and supporters. In addition to protecting every person's right to get outdoors and access the healing power of nature, the Sierra Club works to promote clean energy, safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and legal action. For more information, visit https://www.sierraclub.org.