USDA’s Roadless Rollback Puts America’s Wildlife in the Bulldozer’s Path

The flow of regulatory filth from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) just keeps getting more toxic for America’s wildlife.

And I say it without a hint of partisanship. I’ve spent decades fighting to protect animals, and I’ve always been eager to work with Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Any policymaker who is a friend to animals is a friend of mine, regardless of party affiliation.

I’ve been quick to applaud the Trump administration when it has done good work, including on reducing animal testing and experimentation at the FDA, NIH, CDC, and EPA. While there’s much more to do on this front to accelerate the transition away from the use of beagles, primates, and other animals and toward 21st-century, animal-free science, the progress has been consequential and, in many ways, historic.

But the record of the Interior Department has been pernicious and unrelenting. [Here are some of the lowlights of its work.] The department is hellbent on stripping away protections for wolves, bears, lions, wild horses, eagles, owls, and so many other species that have come to symbolize America’s diverse and already stressed ecosystems:

• Promoting the mass killing of half a million federally protected North American barred owls. I’ve written about it here.
  
  
• Redefining “harm” under the Endangered Species Act to allow the destruction of habitats that endangered and threatened species call home, including the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest that provide critical nesting sites for Northern spotted owls. My prior thoughts can be read here.
  
  
• Restoring baiting of grizzly bears and black bears on national wildlife refuges in Alaska. See my past blog here.
  
  
• Seeking to strip federal protections for gray wolves across so much of their U.S. range. See this blog.
  
  
• Spending millions of your tax dollars to round up federally protected wild horses and burros and allow their sale to kill buyers who illegally funnel them to kill pens and slaughter plants in Canada and Mexico.
  
  
• Opening more national wildlife refuges in the United States to sport hunting, even though the father of the system, sportsman Teddy Roosevelt, wanted to restrict hunting on these units to provide safety for some animals so that they could propagate and spill over onto other habitats open to hunting.
  
  
• Repealing regulations that protect public health and safety by wiping out policies forbidding lead ammunition use on eight national wildlife refuges.More on that here.
  
  
• Abdicating federal management of grizzly bears in the Northern Rocky states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming — three states that have permitted merciless killing of wolves ever since gaining control over those populations more than a decade ago. 

The USDA, known more for its work on farm animals and other domesticated animals, is in on the anti-wildlife act, too.  Sure, it’s been wholly unsympathetic on the farm animal front. The department has worked to vitiate states’ rights and to try to overturn the states’ most important farm animal protection laws, including in California (Prop 12), Massachusetts (Question 3), Michigan, and other states. This work is not only an assault on animal welfare, but also an attack on thousands of family farmers who have invested billions in more humane housing systems and face bankruptcy if markets for their products are badly disrupted. Farmers need certainty, and they have it now in these important state policies.

But USDA’s assault on wildlife — including its ruthless predator control program through Wildlife Services, including the return of sodium cyanide bombs to kill coyoteson our public lands — is right in line with Interior Department values. The USDA’s repeal of the so-called Roadless Rule allows for road building on a third of our national forests, which fall under the authority of the department. New roads on these public lands will allow access to sensitive landscapes by poachers, bear baiters, and other trophy hunters, barred owl shooters, and timber companies and their bulldozers.

Award-winning nature writer Ted Williams, a lifelong sportsman, has done detailed reporting on this dramatic turn in the road and its costs to wildlife. And below, I provide a teaser consisting of a few paragraphs of his must-read piece, and a link to his complete news story.

We’ll be joining other organizations to block this bulldozer invasion of our public lands, along with a raft of other anti-animal policies from the Interior Department and other administration agencies.

An excerpt from “The Trump Administration Moves to Rescind the Roadless Rule,” by Ted Williams. Read the entire story here.

On Aug. 18, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration has filed a proposed rule to rescind in its entirety the national 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule that provides protection for 58.5 million acres of roadless areas, only 30.3% of the 193 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

“Our forests can’t afford another decade of inaction,” proclaimed Rollins. “For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities. Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands. It’s time to turn the page on the failed Roadless Rule and return our forests to health and productivity.”

And Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden weighed in with this: “[It’s] commonsense policy sought since the first Trump administration … It is a credit to President Trump.”

Wildlife advocates, economists, watchdog groups, scientists, and independent foresters are outraged. Wayne Pacelle, president and founder of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy: “The Roadless Rule, in place for a quarter century, is one of the most important federal policies to benefit wildlife and intact habitats. Maintaining just a portion of our national forests as roadless keeps out poachers and also allows these natural systems to maintain surface water purity and to reduce carbon loads in the atmosphere.”

Drew Caputo, a senior attorney with the environmental group, Earthjustice: “The Roadless Rule protects some of the most valuable public lands that belong to all Americans. It is the most important land protection measure of the last 60 years.” And Steve Ellis, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense: “Before the Roadless Rule, we would build roads into areas, and we would have money-losing timber sales that would cost taxpayers billions of dollars.” …

In the Aug. 20 Federal Register, the Trump administration announced a public comment period for its proposed Roadless Rule rescission and accompanying Draft Environmental Impact Statement. The comment period will run from Aug. 20 through Sept. 21. Comments can be filed online via Regulations.gov and the USDA Forest Service Roadless Areas Page.

What do American citizens think about abolishing the Roadless Rule? The answer is evident in the 183,000 public comments filed with the Trump administration last September, of which 99% were opposed. The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to consider public commentary and provide a rational, evidence-based explanation for their final rule, a directive the Trump administration routinely ignores. For example, on July 14, 2026, it finalized a rule that basically repeals the Endangered Species Act. While the administration refuses to list the number or percentage of negative responses, random sampling by policy analysts at Earthjustice and independent data scientists reveals that about 99% of the 357,000 public comments were opposed. …