The Roadless Rule and the Roadless Area Conservation Act
By Nicholas E. Holshouser · August 18, 2026 · Originally published on my Substack.
On August 18, 2026, USDA filed a proposed rule to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule in its entirety, together with a draft environmental impact statement. Public comments are due by the end of Monday, September 21.
That closes a fourteen-month administrative process and opens a 30-day window, the minimum for a rule of this scope. It also sits alongside a second effort that most coverage treats as the same fight: the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which would move the rule from regulation into statute. The two are not the same, and the difference determines what a win in either one is worth.
What the USDA is Doing
The proposed rule rescinds the national rule outright. It covers more than 44 million acres of the 193-million-acre National Forest System. Colorado and Idaho are excluded because they operate under state-specific rules retained at 36 CFR 294 subparts C and D. The Tongass is included, per Executive Order 14153. Management of former inventoried roadless areas would revert to forest-level land management plan direction. More than 95 percent of the affected acreage lies in ten Western states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
The comment window is 30 days, the minimum for a rule of this scope, and both ends of it fall on a weekend. The docket pre-publishes August 19, the Federal Register notice runs August 20, and comments open Friday, August 21. Day 30 is Sunday, September 20, which rolls forward to Monday the 21st. A comment campaign generates most of its press when the window opens and most of its volume just before it closes. Here the first falls on a Friday and the second on a weekend, when newsrooms, congressional offices and organizing staff are not working. The 2001 rule got 90 days, more than 600 public hearings and 1.6 million comments. The 2025 scoping period got 21 days and drew 625,957 comments; a roadless.org analysis found more than 99.8 percent opposed rescission, and a Center for Western Priorities analysis put it at 99.2 percent. Pew polling in February 2026 found likely voters supporting the rule 76 to 13, with 71 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of independents favoring conservation over expanded development.
The Reason? FIRE!!!!!!
Secretary Rollins framed the filing around wildfire, describing overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease. Chief Tom Schultz said more than 40 percent of inventoried roadless areas have high or very high wildfire hazard potential and that only 5 percent have received hazardous fuels treatment since 2014. Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden said the first step to managing forests is having access to them. Governors Gianforte, Cox and Gordon supplied supporting statements on local control.
Four points on that argument.
The rule does not prohibit hazardous fuels reduction. It prohibits road construction, road reconstruction and commercial timber harvest. The low treatment rate in roadless areas is not explained by the rule, and 23.3 million acres of non-roadless forest near the Wildland-Urban Interface are already available for treatment and largely untreated. That's a really interesting and important fact that tells you about the agency's real motivation — which isn't protecting life and property from wildfire. The MOST IMPORTANT places to protect are OPEN FOR PROTECTION that the agency says is so critical to do — but they aren't focused on those areas at all.
Hazard potential is a landscape characteristic, and there is no evidence that roads reduce any hazard. In fact, the science says exactly the opposite. Aplet, Hartger and Dietz (2026) analyzed 32 years of wildfire data across all eight contiguous-U.S. Forest Service regions and found ignition density of 7.99 fires per 1,000 hectares within 50 meters of roads against 1.97 in inventoried roadless areas. Eighty-four percent of U.S. wildfires are human-caused, and roads are the primary vector.
Eighty-four percent of U.S. wildfires are human-caused, and roads are the primary vector.
The release states that the rescission does not mandate timber cutting or road construction. That is accurate. It removes the prohibition and moves the decision to forest-level planning, where it receives substantially less public scrutiny than a national rule. And in today's Forest Service it is unlikely to get any public scrutiny because the agency increasingly uses 'Categorical Exclusions' to simply do what they want because FIRE!!!! EMERGENCY!!!!! It is happening already in EVERY REGION.
Schultz also noted that 11.3 million roadless acres, more than a quarter of the total, are already near existing roads. That is USDA's own evidence that the rule constrains less than the release implies.
Now to the important part about the real agenda here — and it is not FIRE!!! and it isn't protecting life and property. The June 2025 announcement led with deregulation, and the notice of intent stated the objective as facilitating domestic production of timber, energy and minerals to the maximum possible extent. The August 2026 release leads with wildfire. The executive orders cited are the same: 14192, 14225, 14154 and 14153.
The June 2025 announcement led with deregulation, and the notice of intent stated the objective as facilitating domestic production of timber, energy and minerals to the maximum possible extent.
The Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2025
The Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2025 — H.R. 3930 in the House, S. 2042 in the Senate — has four sections. Three are title, findings and definitions. Section 4 is the operative provision:
The Secretary shall not allow road construction, road reconstruction, or logging in an inventoried roadless area where those activities are prohibited by the Roadless Rule.
The legal weight sits in Section 3. The Act defines "Roadless Rule" as 36 CFR part 294 as adopted on January 12, 2001, as modified for Idaho in 2008 and Colorado in 2012 and 2016. That is a fixed reference to specific text on specific dates rather than a pointer to whatever the CFR says when the bill passes. If USDA finalizes a rescission first, enactment would restore the 2001 text.
The two bills carry more than 100 cosponsors between them. Seven former Forest Service chiefs have publicly criticized the rescission and urged Congress to act. S. 2042 received a subcommittee hearing on December 2, 2025. H.R. 3930 has had no hearing since it was introduced on June 11, 2025. Versions of the bill have been introduced in nearly every Congress since 2002 and none has been enacted.
Regulation versus statute
The Roadless Rule is a regulation issued under the National Forest Management Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The agency that issued it can rescind it, provided it follows the required procedure. That procedure is what the comment fight concerns.
A statute is outside that process. Repealing one requires a bill through both chambers and a signature.
Defeating the rescission, either at the agency or in court afterward, returns the rule to its position in June 2025: a regulation subject to the discretion of the next administration. The Act would change what kind of instrument the protection is.
Why 625,957 comments did not change the outcome
Of the comments filed during scoping, more than 99 percent opposed rescission. The proposed rule rescinds the rule in its entirety. Nothing in the filing reflects the balance of public input.
EO 14192 explains that behavior better than any account of agency indifference. It sets a ten-for-one quota requiring agencies to repeal ten regulations for every new one issued. The Roadless Rule is among the largest federal land-use regulations on the books, so rescinding it counts heavily toward that target. By December 2025 USDA had logged 73 deregulatory removals and zero new regulations, the highest ratio in the cabinet.
Comment volume is not an input to that calculation. Litigation and legislation are.
What comments can accomplish
They build the administrative record. Under the APA an agency must consider substantive comments and respond to significant ones. When a rescission is later challenged as arbitrary and capricious, the court asks whether the agency confronted the evidence before it. Evidence that was never submitted is difficult to raise at that stage.
The content of a comment therefore matters more than its existence. A comment citing Aplet, Hartger and Dietz (2026) — which analyzed 32 years of wildfire data across all eight contiguous-U.S. Forest Service regions and found ignition density of 7.99 fires per 1,000 hectares within 50 meters of roads against 1.97 in inventoried roadless areas — places a specific peer-reviewed finding on the record that the agency has to address. A comment naming a particular watershed and describing the effect of a road does the same at local scale. Identical form letters are logged as a single entry.
The draft EIS is now the specific document to respond to. Comments that identify what the analysis omits, misstates or fails to consider are the ones that matter in a later challenge.
There is a documented example of what this produces. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz testified to the Senate that 24.5 million acres of inventoried roadless area lie within one mile of the Wildland-Urban Interface, describing it as the agency's primary concern. A GIS analysis by The Wilderness Society, using Forest Service data, put the figure at 2.8 million acres — under 5 percent of roadless acreage rather than the 42 percent the testimony implied. Separately, 23.3 million acres of non-roadless forest near the WUI are already available for fuel reduction work. That gap between testimony and agency data is now in the record.
You're on the website built exactly for this. Start your comment → Make a comment that demands an answer — not an opinion that's easily ignored.
The repeal moved to Congress
On the evening of June 9, 2026, an amendment repealing the Roadless Rule was filed to S.140, the Wildfire Prevention Act, a bill introduced by Senator John Barrasso that had been bipartisan and concerned thinning and prescribed fire targets. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee took it up the next morning. An amendment by Senators Wyden, Cantwell, Padilla, Gallego and Hirono to strike the repeal language failed 9–11. The committee reported the amended bill 11–9. Both votes were on party lines.
The provision nullifies the 2001 rule and bars the Forest Service from issuing similar protections in the future. Idaho and Colorado are excluded because they operate under state-specific rules. A House repeal bill, H.R. 7695, received a Federal Lands subcommittee hearing in May 2026.
S.140 is eligible for a Senate floor vote and would need 60. It has not been scheduled. Committee-passed wildfire bills have died without floor action in previous Congresses.
One accuracy note for anyone writing about this: several outlets reported Senator Mike Lee as the amendment's sponsor. The committee's communications director stated it was Barrasso-sponsored. Lee chairs the committee and spoke in favor. Published material should not assert Lee sponsorship.
Comparative status
H.R. 3930 was introduced fourteen months ago and has not received a hearing. The repeal language was filed overnight and cleared a Senate committee the following morning. On the legislative track, the repeal is further along than the protection.
Public opinion does not explain that. Support for the rule runs 76 to 13 and crosses party lines. The difference is where organized effort has gone. The comment docket absorbed most of it, and the docket is run by an agency operating under a deregulation quota.
The repeal provision also differs from the Act in a way that matters. A later Congress could repeal the Act. The S.140 language would foreclose readoption by the agency, placing the outcome beyond both a future administration and a court.
Limits of the Act
The Act carries the Idaho and Colorado carve-outs forward. Those states negotiated less restrictive rules in 2008 and 2012. Codifying the 2001 rule as modified locks those in.
The Act would not stop S.140. If the repeal language became law afterward, the later statute would control. The Act protects against administrative rescission only.
The Act is not the sole protection on every acre. Roughly 41 percent of inventoried roadless acreage is already covered by forest plan prescriptions prohibiting road construction. On the remaining 59 percent, about 34 million acres, the Roadless Rule is the only prohibition in place.
Order of operations
If S.140 passes first, the rulemaking becomes moot. The draft EIS, the second comment period and the litigation the record was being built for all lose their object. A statutory repeal is not reviewable the way a rule is. That will not happen now — the Roadless Rule rescission is the action for the public to engage in.
If the rescission finalizes first, litigation begins on the record assembled during the comment periods. H.R. 3930 becomes a restoration bill rather than a preservation bill, which is a harder vote to whip. This is the actual danger now — and the clock is ticking.
If neither happens before the next Congress, the rulemaking clock restarts under new leadership and the Act keeps its current form. The missed March deadline moves the situation toward this outcome. That is another reason why comments — real, substantive comments — are vital NOW. The rulemaking cannot be allowed to go into effect before the next Congress, because by then it will already be in force ON THE GROUND and projects will already be started. So after this burst of commenting, the advocacy MUST CONTINUE in Congress.
Three Things I am Asking Now
The comment deadline is September 21, 2026.
S.140. Call your senators. The bill needs 60 votes and has not been scheduled. Senate offices count constituent contacts; the comment docket does not function that way.
The comment period. Comments close end of day Monday, September 21 at regulations.gov. Supporting material posted August 19 at fs.usda.gov/managing-land/planning/roadless. Read the draft EIS, write about a specific place, cite specific findings, and identify what the analysis does not address.
H.R. 3930 and S. 2042. Ask your delegation to cosponsor. More than 100 members already have.
Sources: USDA press release no. 0110.26 and proposed rule (Aug. 18, 2026); H.R. 3930 and S. 2042 (119th Cong.); USDA Forest Service notice of intent (Aug. 29, 2025); Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee action on S.140, June 10, 2026; roadless.org key facts, counterargument ledger, rescind coalition, and comment-record analysis; Pew Charitable Trusts (Feb. 18, 2026); Aplet, Hartger & Dietz, Fire Ecology (2026); The Wilderness Society WUI analysis; Center for Western Priorities.
Originally published on Nicholas E. Holshouser's Substack.