Among the maddening features of Donald Trump’s presidency is this: His instinct for identifying structural weaknesses is keen. His capacity to decide and execute solutions is generally terrible.
How else to explain that, for Trump, stopping the killing in Ukraine means siding with the dictator who started the conflict. Or that Trump identified the deep resentment of working people who supported him, but proposes stark changes in health, food, job, childcare, and retirement programs that will make their lives harder.
Earlier this month Trump put his finger on another profound national challenge: the deteriorated condition of federally managed forests. But this time his proposed solution might actually lead to a useful outcome.
The White House put the problem this way: “Our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply has impeded the creation of jobs and prosperity, contributed to wildfire disasters, degraded fish and wildlife habitats, increased the cost of construction and energy, and threatened our economic security.”
The administration’s broad outline of a solution arrived on March 1 with two executive orders, issued without fanfare, that call for the Commerce Department to study the effects of timber imports on national security. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada, the largest foreign supplier to the U.S., will make lumber more expensive.
The other executive order directs the Interior and Agriculture departments to draft a plan to increase timber production on federal lands. One tool that Trump proposes is to hasten evaluating logging plans for their effect on endangered species, a process that often takes a few years.
The immediate response from some of the nation’s leading national and regional environmental groups was predictable. Anybody who’s seen industrial logging practices knows cutting trees makes a mess of woodlands. Critics also noted that just like other Trump executive orders, these two had an apparent major flaw. How could the president improve forest management while Elon Musk was simultaneously forcing thousands of federal forest employees, including timber managers and wildland firefighters, out of their jobs? Many environmental leaders, as a result, condemned the logging plan as an imminent threat to animals and fish, clear streams, and standing trees in the 188 million acres held in the 154 national forests.
But for the thousands of people who live and work at the frontlines of America’s federal timberlands Trump’s order made perfect sense. They’ll tell you that America’s national forests, particularly those in the West, are not only in wretched condition, they’ve also become deadly.
The 100-plus-year policy of suppressing natural fire caused trees to grow too close together. Climate change produced warmer temperatures and drier conditions. And with population growth and vacation homes, communities expanded into the forest. The U.S. Forest Service now counts 100 million acres of its domain as “susceptible” to ruinous fires like the four that occurred in California over 13 months in 2017 and 2018 that killed 118 people, destroyed nearly 27,000 properties and torched 700,000 acres. One of the fires burned down a third of Redding in California’s Central Valley, and killed eight people. Another fire weeks later in the Sierra Nevada killed 86 people and destroyed Paradise.
Aside from the perils to human life, the aftermath of big fires also is a period of ecological turmoil. Storms clog mountain streams with topsoil and ash, wrecking fisheries. Bark beetles feed on downed trees, and when that food source disappears, turn their attention to healthy trees. Nearly 10 million acres of Forest Service timberlands have been ransacked by beetles. The dead trees turn into more fuel for wildfire.
Recognizing the increasing menace the U.S. Forest Service has championed what it considers more ecologically sustainable practices to log and care for its domain. One of them is “prescribed fire.” The intent is to reduce fuel for wildfire by setting deliberate, low-intensity fires that burn underbrush and small trees under controlled conditions of temperature and humidity. The agency and its partners used prescribed fire on nearly 2.2 million acres in fiscal year 2024.
In too many cases, though, prescribed fire has caused wildfire disasters. Nearly three years ago, for instance, a controlled burn in Santa Fe National Forest ignited the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history. Ash and sediment flushed into the Gallinas River from the burn scar and wrecked the drinking water source for more than 17,000 people in and around Las Vegas.
Reining in the fires and halting the damage to watersheds calls for being much more intentional about limiting fuel. That means cutting many more trees and quickening the pace of approving salvage operations to remove valuable logs in areas that have been burned. Any of the nation’s land grant university forestry programs will tell you such practices can be done while also being sensitive to streams, fish and animals, and human recreation.
President Trump and his aides also noted other purposes for increasing logging on federal lands like generating jobs at reopened sawmills, and reducing the price for lumber to build the 4.5 million new homes needed in the U.S. A typical new stick-built house requires over 12,000 board feet of lumber that at current prices costs roughly $9,000.
Given the administration’s record of managing complex and sensitive tasks it’s entirely appropriate to be skeptical of anything useful coming from cutting more trees. Will the economic drivers of logging neatly align with the goals of fire-risk reduction and watershed health? Which forests will be prioritized for logging? Can ecologically valuable stands be protected?
Yet here is why the administration may actually be capable of doing something worthwhile. Trump’s point man for the new timber program is Tom Schultz, a career forester and forest industry executive who was recently named U.S. Forest Service chief, the third director from outside the agency in its 120-year history.
Schultz is no ordinary faceless bureaucrat and definitely not a member of MAGA’s fictional deep state. Schultz directed the Idaho Department of Lands, which oversees several million surface acres of state lands and minerals. He led the Water Resources Division for Montana’s Department of Natural Resources.
The real source of optimism that lies in Schultz’s appointment is what he did just prior to joining the U.S. Forest Service. He served as a top executive of the Idaho Forest Group, which not only is one of the country’s largest timber companies, it’s also recognized in and outside Idaho as a company dedicated to land conservation, forest health, and ecologically sensitive logging practices.
I know this because almost a decade ago I spent several days in Idaho reporting on the Idaho Forest Group. I learned how the company collaborated with the Forest Service and environmental groups, including the Wilderness Society, to design and execute timber cutting projects that restored big stretches of degraded forest, removed hundreds of old roads, and repaired miles of wild stream banks. The company even supported setting aside nearly 14,000 acres of national forest in Idaho as permanently protected wilderness.
I checked this week with sources for that article. All said the Idaho Forest Group remains, as it says on the company’s web site “committed to sustainable forestry practices and environmental stewardship in a way that balances environmental protection, while securing resources for the long term.” They also said that Schultz upheld those assurances in their interactions with the company.
Shultz, in short, has real depth in land conservation, clean water management, and environmentally sustainable forest practices. He brings a different ethic and operating style to federal forest management. If the president doesn’t get in his way, Schultz actually has an opening for doing what needs to be done in the country’s federal forests: producing more timber, generating more jobs, and removing fuel that feeds the West’s megafires.
— Keith Schneider
