letter opposing the USDA’s NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACT rollbacks:
On behalf of the undersigned organizations and individuals, we write to provide the Department of Agriculture (“USDA” or “Department”) and the United States Forest Service (“Forest Service”) with the below comments on the Department’s interim final rule (“IFR” or “Rule”) regarding National Environmental Policy Act procedures, 90 Fed. Reg. 29,632 (July 3, 2025), RIN 0503-AA86. Our organizations collectively represent decades of experience with the Forest Service’s implementation of NEPA across the spectrum of land management actions, including forest planning, vegetation, wildlife, mineral, range, aquatic, travel, and recreation management decisions, and our comments focus narrowly on how the Department’s IFR will affect the Forest Service and its land management decisions. Our organizations and members would be adversely affected by this proposal, which would immediately eliminate important procedural rights that we and other members of the public rely on to ensure the lawful stewardship of National Forestlands. The proposal would have far-reaching effects on the places we advocate for and help to steward, as well as the communities dependent on these lands. We have extensive expertise regarding the Council on Environmental Quality’s (“CEQ”) prior NEPA regulations, the Forest Service’s NEPA regulations and procedures, and the body of federal case law interpreting the agency’s legal obligations under NEPA. Our experience in agency decision-making processes, in collaborative efforts, and as plaintiffs in NEPA litigation lends us unique insight into the promises and pitfalls of the Forest Service’s NEPA policies and practices. While we generally agree that the environmental analysis process can be more efficient by focusing on providing essential funding and training for Forest Service NEPA personnel, the Department has released a final rule that brazenly removes the public from public land management decisions and seeks to expand the scope and scale of land management without sufficient environmental analysis. This is not the type of decision-making required by NEPA. NEPA requires transparency, accurate scientific data and analysis, and inclusion of the public?including local communities, Tribes, local governments, scientists, and many others who use, enjoy, and rely upon the National Forests for a variety of values in federal agency decision-making. The IFR serves the present Administration’s agenda to elevate the interests of extractive industries above those of the public in public land management. This agenda is particularly inappropriate on the national forests, which are owned in common by all Americans, not just a privileged few. The IFR will drastically reduce and, in some cases, eliminate public involvement in the management of their national forests, curtail the role of science in land management planning, and will ultimately undermine the credibility of the Forest Service as “expert scientists” in the eyes of the public it was created to serve. We predict that the IFR will erode the public’s trust in the Forest Service, increase controversy and litigation, and compromise the agency’s mission. The Department has ignored the successful efforts of its most talented agency staff to accomplish more and higher-quality work by accepting stakeholder contributions. Instead, it promulgated a rule meant to avoid accountability, with a rationale that is not supported by the information before the agency. Because the Department has failed to prepare a sufficient administrative record to support its IFR, we anticipate that the Rule will not survive judicial review, or, if it does, it will irreparably compromise the agency’s relationship with the public it serves. We therefore recommend that the Department abandon this rulemaking effort and focus on immediate needs such as forest plan revision, science-based forest restoration, monitoring, and internal cultural changes.