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| - Trump signed an executive order allowing federal permitting agencies to ignore environmental protection laws in an effort to increase domestic timber and lumber production. The executive order also calls for expanding domestic logging production on federal lands.
The executive order does not directly call for 280 million acres of national forests and other protected public lands to be clear-cut.
On March 1, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at fast-tracking logging on federal lands. The order, titled "Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production," ordered the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, two of the largest caretakers of federal lands, to update guidelines in order to "facilitate increased timber production," among other things.
Some posts on social media presented the executive order in a different way — claiming that it would lead to the clear-cutting of 280 million acres of trees in national forests and other protected federal lands. Snopes readers wrote in sharing this claim and asking whether it was true.
While the claim was exaggerated, it was based in truth. The executive order was real, and it did greatly impact logging rights on federal land. However, it did not explicitly call for the clear-cutting of 280 million acres of trees. As such, we rate the claim a mixture of true and false.
The U.S. Forest Service manages 193 million acres of land across the country, while the BLM manages just under 58 million acres of forest and woodlands, according to their websites. Unlike national parks, national forests and BLM forests allow for logging and resource exploitation as well as wildlife conservation and recreation.
Trump's executive order specifically asked those agencies to investigate and implement ways to increase both the speed and quantity of timber produced by cutting environmental regulations.
The executive order asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to streamline approvals for forestry projects that could potentially be halted by the Endangered Species Act within 60 days of the order. It also asked the Agriculture and Interior departments (which control the Forest Service and BLM, respectively) to exempt "timber thinning" and "timber salvage activities" from the National Environmental Policy Act. That act, signed into law by then-President Richard Nixon in 1970, requires the U.S. government to consider the environmental effects of its proposed actions through environmental impact statements.
The executive order also encouraged the Agriculture and Interior departments to use the emergency regulations of the Endangered Species Act "to the maximum extent permissible under applicable law." Those regulations allow the act to be bypassed in situations where time is of the essence, such as "acts of God, disasters, casualties, national defense or security emergencies." (Trump's executive order was issued alongside another order declaring that importing timber and lumber poses a risk to national security). Under the emergency regulations, the Fish and Wildlife Service provides "strictly advisory" recommendations for how to protect endangered species that can be "implemented at the discretion of the emergency response personnel."
In other words, the executive order aims to allow the logging industry to bypass environmental restrictions found in the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.
The executive order did not explicitly mention the environmentally damaging practice of clear-cutting. However, the reduction of environmental regulations like the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act would certainly make it easier for a logging company wishing to clear-cut a forest to gain the necessary approval from the government.
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