Trump’s Logging Efforts Struggle to Sell Industry on Public Land

The Interior Department says it’s on track to meet a federal goal to increase logging on federal lands, even as timber industry analysts warn low prices, scarce sawmills, and litigation will likely threaten progress.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has increased timber sales by 4.6% so far in fiscal 2025 over all of fiscal 2024, with more sales expected through September, Interior spokeswoman Alyse Sharpe said Tuesday. Timber sold on US Forest Service land increased about 12.5% in the first three quarters of fiscal 2025 over the same period in 2024, agency data show.

Fast-tracking an expansion of logging on federal land is among President Donald Trump’s top priorities in order to cut lumber imports and grow domestic timber industry jobs. The administration is loosening public notice and environmental review requirements for logging and other projects under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Environmental groups standing ready to challenge timber sales in court say they expect the Trump administration to cut regulations and decrease oversight in order to intensify logging, even if the timber market remains soft in the short term.

“We’re waiting for the onslaught of logging projects to roll out under all these regulatory rollbacks,” said John Persell, senior staff attorney for Oregon Wild, an environmental group. “If we lose public notice and involvement, there’s a real concern that some of those most egregious logging practices will return to the landscape.”

Trump’s logging goals face fierce headwinds, however, as depressed lumber prices, a worker shortage in the timber industry, and an overriding sense of uncertainty about the future of logging are chilling timber industry interest in actually cutting down the trees sold in federal sales, said Mindy Crandall, associate professor of forest policy at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore.

“The Forest Service can put the timber up for sale, but someone has to want it,” Crandall said.

The BLM is increasing timber sales and harvesting using existing staff by “streamlining regulations and increasing the priority to develop and permit forest management projects,” Sharpe said. The US Forest Service didn’t respond to a request for comment.

‘Going to Take Time’

High housing costs are creating weak demand for lumber and depressing prices, and significant relief for the timber industry isn’t likely until after 2026, said Rocky Goodnow, vice president of timber at Forest Economic Advisors, a consulting firm in Massachusetts.

It will likely take federal agencies four years to achieve Trump’s logging goals, he said. The Interior Department is aiming to increase logging on federal lands by 25% by fiscal 2026.

The US Forest Service, which is suffering from layoffs and long-running staffing shortages, doesn’t yet have the capacity to process new timber sales, while the timber industry faces its own capacity challenges, said Todd Morgan, director of forest industry research at the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research.

In the current market, it could take up to a decade for timber companies to cut trees on existing timber sales, he said.

“And that’s if there’s no litigation or appeals along the way,” he said. “They have timber sales they’ve sold over the past year to 10 years that are still in progress.”

Environmental groups have challenged proposed timber sales on federal land across the Pacific Northwest on the grounds that they violated the National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws, and they’re closely watching the BLM and Forests Service’s implementation of Trump’s logging policies.

Logging in Oregon’s federal forests has been quiet in the first nine months of the Trump administration as the Forest Service grapples with staffing cuts and processes timber sales that were prepped by the Biden administration, said Susan Jane Brown, chief legal counsel at Oregon-based nonprofit environmental law firm Silvix Resources.

“The pace of western Oregon BLM sales has been more consistent, but I wouldn’t characterize things as the wild west,” Brown said. “That is going to change soon.”

Weakened NEPA regulations that require less public scrutiny of logging projects’ environmental impact will harm federal forests despite challenges facing the industry, she said.

“I expect there will be a lot more logging that the public only finds out about after it’s too late,” she said.

Limited Scope

But Trump’s logging policies are likely to have limited reach across the US in part because federal lands make up only a small part of the timber supply, and tariffs are unlikely to crush the demand for Canadian lumber.

About 85% of all timber harvested in Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, and Montana comes from private and state land, despite federal ownership of large swaths of those states, Goodnow said.

The number of sawmills in the US has declined in recent decades as the market focused on Canada, preventing the timber industry from being able to process any increase in trees cut from federal land, Crandall said. The US simply doesn’t have the sawmill capacity to replace lumber imported from Canada, she said.

“If you want to replace all Canadian lumber, you’d have to build 70 modern sawmills at $200 million each,” said Russ Taylor, a wood market consultant in British Columbia. “That’s the scale of the absurdity of replacing Canadian lumber.”

Producers are hesitant to invest in new sawmills to process trees logged on federal land because it’s unclear whether federal policies aiming to boost timber production will outlast Trump’s current term, Crandall said.

“Nobody’s going to build a facility without a long-term guarantee of supply,” she said.