Cut Food Aid, Log the Forests: The Farm Bill’s Cruel Bargain
Markup in the House is Monday. Here’s what the logging-industrial
complex is trying to slip through — section by section.
We are now heading into a third year under a continuing resolution. The farm bill expired in September 2023 — over two years ago — and Congress has failed to pass a replacement. The cost of that failure falls on farmers, food assistance recipients, and conservation programs operating in limbo. It didn’t have to be this way.
Now House Republicans are pushing a markup on February 23 with a floor vote potentially as soon as March 3. The bill, as written, cuts SNAP — the main federal food assistance program — which may prevent House Republican leadership from mustering enough votes to pass it on the floor. The Senate has yet to release their version. Democrats should let it fail. The better play is to hold the line, run out the clock to the 2026 midterms, and fight for a farm bill under conditions where there are actual checks and balances on what passes. It’s not a sure thing. But passing this bill is worse.
Why? Because buried in Title VIII — the forestry title — is a package of provisions that would hand the logging-industrial complex unprecedented access to our National Forests, strip away what little public oversight remains, and launder the whole thing as wildfire prevention. It’s the “Fix Our Forests” Act playbook recycled into a farm bill. And we should be clear about what it actually is: a logging bill.
Some of this will look familiar. The “categorical exclusion” (CE) expansions–provisions that exempt logging on public lands from public participation and environmental analysis across vast landscapes–mirror provisions in the Fix Our Forests Act, which passed the House in January and is currently stalled in the Senate. But Title VIII doesn’t simply recycle FOFA — it omits two of its provisions, the Fireshed Center framework and litigation “reform”, while adding something far more troubling: a blank check exemption for timber sales in mature and old-growth forests, and post-fire clearcutting, on public lands under the deceptive guise of the term “emergency”, which makes litigation largely beside the point. After all, why limit lawsuits when you’ve already written the rules to prevent accountability in the first place?
Here’s what’s in it.
Conservation Easements: Paid to Protect, Now Paid to Log
Section 2701 amends the forest conservation easement program — allowing existing easements to be modified to support the “viability and sustainability of working forests.” In plain English: under the guise of wildfire protection, landowners who are already receiving taxpayer subsidies to protect their forests could now also be paid to log them. That’s not conservation. That’s double-dipping on the public dime.
Section 2702 repeals the Healthy Forests Reserve Program outright — a voluntary conservation program that protects private forest land for wildlife habitat — and folds it into the new easement framework above. What was explicitly a conservation program is now a ‘working forests’ program. Never mind that forests disrupted by fire or insects are already doing the hard work of recovering — sequestering carbon, rebuilding soil, restoring habitat. Logging them doesn’t help. It compounds the stress, strips away the very structure that supports recovery, and more often than not sets the stage for the next fire and the next outbreak.
Watershed Protection: Now with Logging
Section 8203 funds projects to protect watersheds from wildfire impacts — including logging adjacent to streams. Read that again: logging next to streams, framed as water source protection. The provision doesn’t protect watersheds. It uses them as a justification to put chainsaws next to the water supply.
Salvage Logging: The Insect and Disease Pretext
Sections 8205 through 8207 authorize salvage logging and timber sales in response to insect and disease infestations, with streamlined contracting. Bark beetle outbreaks and other disturbances are — like wildfires and droughts — regular, recurring conditions on our National Forests. Treating them as emergencies that justify expedited logging with reduced oversight is the same blank check logic as Section 8416, applied to a different trigger. Dead and dying trees are ecologically valuable. This bill treats them as inventory.
Categorical Exclusions: FOFA’s Unfinished Business
A “categorical exclusion” (CE) lets federal agencies skip full environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. CEs were initially designed for genuinely low-impact, routine work. The logging-industrial complex has spent decades pushing to expand them — because the bigger the CE, the less public scrutiny taxpayer-subsidized logging projects face on public lands. Section 8202 quietly reauthorizes funding for hazardous fuels treatments — including logging and mechanical thinning — through 2031, providing the financial backbone for everything that follows.
This bill delivers exactly that, on a massive scale.
Section 8401 adds yet another new CE for “hazard tree” removal — defined so broadly, and with such a generous acreage cap, that it functions as a pretext for large-scale logging. The Forest Service already has authority to remove genuinely dangerous trees. This section doesn’t solve a problem. It creates a workaround.
Sections 8402, 8403, and 8404 each triple the size of existing CEs from 3,000 to 10,000 acres for each logging project — covering collaborative “restoration” projects, wildfire “resilience” projects, and fuel breaks. To put that in perspective: Yosemite Valley — the iconic heart of Yosemite National Park, home to El Capitan and Half Dome — covers roughly 8,000 acres. A single categorical exclusion under this bill could exceed an area that size. The current 3,000-acre limit — already larger than most people would consider routine — is being tripled to 10,000 acres, with no limit on the number of CE logging projects. Neither number belongs in a categorical exclusion.
Section 8407 creates a brand-new CE for work up to 10,000 acres, with up to 3,000 acres of commercial logging built in. And the Forest Service can contract the entire project out to a third party — meaning private timber companies could propose, plan, and execute commercial logging on your public land with minimal environmental review and effectively no public input.
Suppression Without Accountability
Section 8408 authorizes broad wildfire suppression activities on federal lands with minimal public consultation. Suppression sounds unobjectionable — of course we want to protect communities from wildfire. But fire is not the enemy of our National Forests. It’s an ecological necessity. Fire drives regeneration, creates habitat, and shapes the forest structures that support biodiversity. Decades of aggressive suppression haven’t just failed to prevent large fires — they’ve deprived forests of a process they depend on. Open-ended suppression authority with no consultation requirements and no reporting obligations doesn’t protect forests. It deepens the damage. Combined with the CE expansions and the blank check timber sales in Section 8416, this provision helps complete a system designed to move fast, suppress fire, and log what’s left.
Endangered Species? Ignore Them.
Section 8411 allows forest planners to skip consultation on the needs of listed endangered species and the impacts of proposed logging on those species. The Endangered Species Act requires this consultation because federal actions on public land can permanently destroy habitat for wildlife already pushed to the edge. Waiving it doesn’t speed up anything meaningful. It just means the damage gets done without anyone having to account for it.
Section 8405, covering greater sage-grouse and mule deer habitat, removes the requirement that management treatments benefit both species. The dual-benefit standard was supposed to be the safeguard that made expanded management in sensitive habitats acceptable. Eliminating it makes clear that wildlife protection was always an afterthought.
Roads: The Wildfire Prevention Bill That Builds Wildfire Causes
Section 8412 expands Good Neighbor Authority — adding “special districts” as eligible partners for logging and fuels projects on federal lands. More troubling: it explicitly authorizes the construction of new permanent roads on National Forest land. New roads mean new access. New access means more logging, more fragmentation, and less wilderness. Roads are one of the most lasting and damaging changes you can make to a forest — and one of the most dangerous. Research shows that nearly 95% of human-caused wildfires occur within half a mile of a road. If the goal is actually wildfire prevention, building more roads in our National Forests is precisely the wrong answer.
A Blank Check for Timber Sales — No Appraisal Required
Section 8416 may be the most brazen provision in the entire title. Any time the Secretary of Agriculture determines there’s an “extreme risk” — wildfire, insects, disease, wind, flooding, drought — the Secretary can conduct timber sales without an appraisal, under rules that the Secretary writes unilaterally.
Think about what that means in practice. Wildfires, droughts, and bark beetle outbreaks are not rare emergencies on our National Forests. They are regular, recurring conditions. This provision effectively transforms emergency authority into a permanent logging mechanism — one that can be triggered at will, that sets no ceiling on how much public forest can be sold, that allows sales below fair market value, and that lets the Secretary waive public involvement, environmental protections, and worker safety laws at their discretion.
This is not about protecting communities from wildfire. This is a blank check for the logging-industrial complex, written in the language of crisis.
Grazing as Wildfire Management: Seriously.
Section 8418 authorizes federal grazing as a wildfire risk reduction tool. The science on grazing as fire management is, to put it charitably, thin. What it does do is open public lands to livestock under the cover of fire prevention — another extractive industry handed a wildfire justification.
Carbon-Washing by Congressional Mandate
Section 12410 is a remarkable piece of policy fiction. It simply declares that burning “qualified renewable biomass” — wood from our forests — has a greenhouse gas emission rate of zero.
It doesn’t. Burning trees releases the carbon stored in them. The peer-reviewed science on this is unambiguous: biomass combustion generates substantial carbon emissions, and the idea that future regrowth offsets those emissions depends on timeframes and assumptions that are actively disputed in the scientific literature. As we’ve documented, this kind of accounting is carbon-washing — using accounting tricks to make extraction look like climate action.
Congress cannot legislate away the carbon in a burning tree. But it can require federal agencies to pretend the emissions don’t exist. That’s exactly what this section does.
Let’s Stop Calling This “Wildfire Prevention”
The logging-industrial complex and its allies in Congress have spent years perfecting the art of using wildfire fear to justify logging. The LA fires burned through chaparral and grassland — not forests — yet within weeks they were being cited as proof that we need to log more National Forest land. Peer-reviewed research, including Lindenmayer et al. (2025) and decades of fire ecology studies, shows that commercial thinning operations kill far more trees than they save, and that logged areas often burn hotter and faster than unlogged ones. Dead trees don’t drive fire intensity — weather does. This is settled science.
None of that research is reflected in Title VIII. What is reflected is a decade of lobbying dressed up in the language of resilience and restoration.
The markup is Monday. This needs to be stripped from the bill entirely. Our forests — and the communities that depend on them — cannot afford another generation of the same lie.
If you’re in a position to contact your representative before Monday, especially if they sit on the House Agriculture Committee, now is the time.
Rim Fire, May 2022 © Jennifer Mamola