The ‘Fix Our Forests’ Act: Cutting Trees, While Putting Communities at Greater Fire Risk

The Senate’s “Fix Our Forests” Act (FOFA) hearing on May 6, 2025, gave us a master class in how to mislead the public while pushing business-as-usual logging policies that worsen climate change and increase wildfire threats to communities. Despite claims from politicians and forestry officials that this bill is about curbing wildfire and saving towns, it’s really about propping up the timber industry at the expense of real community wildfire protection.

The Safeguard Illusion: Why Fewer Trees Won’t Stop Wildfires

Deputy Forest Service Chief Chris French responded to concerns about the bill’s potential to accelerate the timber industry by assuring the committee that “there are so many safeguards in our system.” This claim, while meant to reassure, overlooks a key issue: the existing safeguards often lack meaningful oversight and are vulnerable to industry influence. If FOFA is passed by Congress, it will be far worse, and the few safeguards that remain will be largely eliminated. French claimed that less than 1/10th of 1% of forest material is harvested, and that much of what’s removed is non-commercial. It’s not clear what he meant by this or what the source was for this claim. It is well known that, in the typical “thinning” logging project on national forests these days, the Forest Service kills and removes upwards of 50-70% of the trees on any given acre on average, and most of the wood that is removed is in the form of mature and old-growth trees. French’s comments were highly misleading. In addition, these numbers don’t address the bigger concern: allowing industry even greater access to public lands sets a dangerous precedent for further exploitation under the guise of wildfire mitigation.

French insists the system works “well and right,” but we must ask: for whom? Without real public oversight and stronger enforcement, this system risks prioritizing corporate interests over the long-term well-being of communities facing wildfire risks. The Forest Service’s own science shows that removing trees, especially mature and old trees favored by logging companies, reduces wind resistance and makes fires spread faster toward vulnerable towns, giving people less time to safely evacuate. Current research shows that faster-moving fires cause by far the most harm to communities, in terms of losses of homes, businesses, and lives. We have seen real-world evidence of this in many tragic examples where fires raced through vast “thinned” forests before burning down towns and often claiming many lives, such as the Camp fire of 2018, the North Complex fire of 2020, the Dixie fire of 2021, and the Caldor fire of 2021.

Forests Aren’t Air Filters for Fossil Fuel Fantasy

Then there’s Senator Justice from West Virginia, who made the perplexing claim that forests in his state “clean up 12 coal plants a year.” It’s a nice sentiment to think of forests as the planet’s natural air purifiers. Yet, if forests are so effective at absorbing carbon pollution, why isn’t wildfire treated the same way? Wildfires are often villainized for “releasing carbon,” but in reality, they consume less than 2% of total tree biomass, according to multiple studies. ”Thinning”, on the other hand, emits at least 3 to 5 times more carbon per acre than wildfire alone.

Senator Justice’s selective framing reveals a deeper bias: natural processes like wildfire are blamed for climate impacts, while the far greater carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion and extractive land uses are treated as background noise. It’s easier to villainize forests than to hold polluters accountable.

Business as Usual, No Real Answers: Democrats Drop the Ball on Community Protection

Perhaps most disheartening was the near-total lack of resistance from Senate Democrats. While there were comments about funding gaps and small-scale equity, no one challenged the bill’s core premise: that logging on backcountry public forests protects communities. No one asked how speeding up timber sales and cutting down more mature and old-growth trees solves the root causes of wildfire threats—such as home vulnerability, poor evacuation infrastructure, and lack of defensible space.

Representative Neguse recently reminded Congress that they are sent to Washington to “debate.” But when it comes to forests and fire, we saw no debate—only deference to an agency deeply entangled with the logging industry. That’s the real message behind FOFA.

If we’re serious about protecting communities, it’s time to stop confusing industry-driven “forest management” with climate and community safety solutions. That begins with questioning the revolving door between agency leadership and timber interests.

The Misguided Push for “Salvage” Logging

Senator Schiff expressed concern about areas that need to be “salvaged” and replanted, implying that forests cannot recover from wildfire on their own or that removing vast areas of fire-killed trees will somehow curb fires. That assumption ignores decades of ecological science. Forests are not passive victims; they are dynamic systems with powerful regenerative capacity. Post-fire landscapes typically experience rapid natural recovery—without logging or artificial replanting. Moreover, multiple studies, including by the Forest Service’s own scientists, and letters to Congress from hundreds of scientists, conclude that (a) the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence finds that dead trees do not have any significant influence on wildfire behavior; and (b) post-fire logging tends to increase, not decrease, fire severity.

Maybe next time, instead of another aerial tour, Senator Schiff could join us on the ground in a post-fire forest and witness the wonders of natural regeneration firsthand, and then see the devastation caused by post-fire logging.

“Salvage” logging is less about helping forests and more about extracting profit from them while cloaked in ecological justification. The truth is, nature doesn’t need help to bounce back after fire. It needs protection from misguided interventions.

When Fire Hype Fuels Logging Policy

The “Fix Our Forests” Act is nothing more than a cynical attempt to clear the way for more logging. The same industry that’s already wreaked havoc on public lands is now being handed more tools to continue its work—at the cost of actual environmental protection, community well-being, and the ability of forests to naturally regenerate. If the backers of this bill truly cared about forests and wildfires, they wouldn’t be doubling down on the same destructive policies that have contributed to this crisis in the first place.

At the heart of this bill is a dangerous assumption: that fewer trees mean fewer fires. But the science doesn’t back that up. Wildfire behavior is driven by weather, wind, and climate conditions—not simply tree density. In fact, logging typically removes the larger, more fire-resistant trees while leaving behind flammable debris and creating hotter, drier, and windier conditions that sweep flames and embers more rapidly toward towns. Cutting our forests won’t save our communities. It will put them at greater risk. But it will pad the profits of the timber industry.

Science vs. Spin: What the Evidence Actually Shows

The Forest Service routinely claims its logging policies are backed by science—but independent, peer-reviewed research tells a very different story.

A landmark study by Baker et al. (2023) revealed that historical forest densities were far higher than the Forest Service claims—largely due to methodological errors and deliberate misrepresentation and omission of historical evidence in Forest Service–funded reconstructions. The agency has not contested or corrected these findings. Notably, the great majority of the historical evidence about very dense historical forests, which the current Forest Service habitually omits from any mention in their studies, was produced by the Forest Service itself, when the agency was young (early 1900s), before it was all about logging.

Further analysis in Lindenmayer et al. (2025), including contributions from forest ecologists around the world, shows that thinning operations kill vastly more trees than they prevent from being killed by drought or bark beetles. That fact alone undermines the central rationale behind the commercial thinning agenda.

And, again (this point bears repeating), despite frequent fear mongering, dead trees (snags) do not increase fire intensity. The overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed studies find that snags have little to no effect on wildfire severity. Fire behavior is influenced far more by pine needles, leaves, and twigs on the forest floor, and especially weather conditions, than by dead wood, standing or fallen. [See our fact sheet for a summary of this research.]

In short, the “Fix Our Forests” Act doesn’t fix our forests—it exploits them. What it really protects is the timber industry’s bottom line, not our communities, our climate, or the ecosystems we all depend on.