Shelby Powell
reporter@thefranklinpress.com
Many changes at the U.S. Forest Service have been proposed or implemented since January that could change the management or makeup of the Nantahala National Forest.
MountainTrue has been tracking legislation and policy shifts at the USFS, examining their potential impact and encouraging environmentalists and advocates to action to protect natural resources. Resilient Forests Director Josh Kelly said many changes have already been enacted, but others could still be slowed or stopped.
Since January the USFS workforce has seen thousands of jobs cut; a 10% initial workforce reduction early in the year led to the loss of approximately 3,400 service employees.
“I think that the firing of the Forest Service and Park Service employees has had and will continue to have a huge impact on conservation locally,” Kelly said.
Changes to interpretation and implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) would eliminate transparency. The act as it was previously interpreted required the government to notify the public of public land decisions and solicit input from locals and experts to determine the environmental and economic impacts of the decisions. A July 3 statement from the Council on Environmental Quality described NEPA requirements for allowing public input and comment on USDA actions as “voluntary,” due to the Supreme Court ruling the law is “purely procedural.”
“The big change,” Kelly said, “is instead of doing notification of a project beforehand, the Forest Service is now only issuing decision notices … so there will be essentially only voluntary public notification on behalf of the Forest Service and other federal agencies. So there’s potentially going to be a lot of things happening on public land that the public has no knowledge of and no way to influence.”
An April 3 letter from Chris French, deputy chief for National Forest Systems, directed district rangers and forest supervisors to “in addition to regular timber sale solicitations, utilize direct timber sale opportunities with interested purchasers operating on and around forests,” a practice Kelly said was ended decades ago because of the potential for corruption. The USFS typically solicits bids for timber contracts.
A recent Department of the Interior Secretarial Order on Sept. 4 sought to impose new restrictions the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The LWCF “takes a percentage of the royalties of oil and gas leasing from United States lands and waters” and directs those funds toward conservation efforts, such as purchasing new land or funding local programs, Kelly said.
“The idea is they’re going to try to make amends for some of the environmental destruction from oil and gas leasing and use those monies to purchase public land and make investments in public land,” he said.
The LWCF Coalition published its condemnation of the order, saying it imposes unhelpful restrictions that would limit the fund’s ability to expand recreational access to public lands, conserve wildlife habitat and invest in local communities nationwide.
“Fortunately, the order does not include one of the administration’s worst ideas, leaving out its prior proposal to divert LWCF funding for unauthorized purposes. We are grateful to the LWCF’s bipartisan Congressional champions for forcefully rejecting that out-of-touch proposal,” stated a release from the LWCF Coalition.
Kelly said of the rejected proposal, “The latest proposal is to divert over a third of the money that’s supposed to be used for investments and switch it over to maintenance and administration. So they’re actually trying to fund the Park Service and the Forest Service out of LWCF.”
The USDA is also attempting to eliminate the “roadless rule,” passed in 2001 to prevent the building of roads for logging purposes in certain sections of protected forests. The department said it was “initiating an environmental impact statement,” for which a public comment period concluded on Sept. 19. The notice said an additional public comment period should accompany a draft impact statement and the proposed rule in March 2026.
Kelly said the USDA’s reorganization plan, which would close the Southern Research Station in Asheville and potentially the Coweeta Hydrologic Station in Otto, was in line with Project 2025’s goal of disabling and privatizing large swaths of the federal government, including the USFS. The reorganization push is still in its early stages with a public comment period to conclude on Sept. 30.
“It’s not a done deal,” he said, “but the proposal is to consolidate research to Fort Collins, Colorado. What that means for Coweeta is unclear, but certainly seems like they could close Coweeta altogether if the proposal is successful … Coweeta could stay open, I’ve heard rumors of some Forest Service research facilities remaining in Athens, Georgia, but those are just rumors. The hope that’s out there is that a lot of congresspeople and senators are skeptical of this plan … and see it as being inefficient and costly. It’s possible that the reorganization doesn’t happen as long as the public speaks up.”
Kelly said if the reorganization goes through, “Research on wildfire trends would be lost. Pests that are destroying our forests and diseases that are harming our forests – monitoring and preparation for those would likely be lost. Services for forest landowners would be lost.”
“One very concrete loss would be the loss of people in our communities,” he continued. “There are people working from the Southern Research Station all over Western North Carolina … that have done a lot to make the community a better place. You’re going to be losing folks like that from living in local places.”