Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

10. Department of Agriculture · Notable

Revive Executive Order 13855 on active forest management and timber sales

Partially done

308 10. Department of Agriculture

“Champion executive action, consistent with law, and proactive legislation to reduce wildfires. This would involve embracing Executive Order 13855, building upon it, and working with lawmakers to promote active management of vegetation, reduce regulatory obstacles to reducing fuel buildup, and increase timber sales.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    USDA amended the objection process itself, the one the 2025-04-03 emergency determination had only suspended for listed emergency actions. The final rule on the Project-Level Predecisional Administrative Review Process (36 CFR part 218) consolidates and streamlines how the public files objections to projects implementing national forest plans, "to … increase efficiency, and better align with the Agency's statutory obligations and recent rescissions and revisions to National Environmental Policy Act regulations". It removes more of the regulatory-obstacle limb, now by rule and across the whole system. Still `partial`: the roadless rescission is still a proposal, the sales target has not been met, and nothing has been enacted on the legislative limb.

  2. Partially done

    Implementation began to bite. On 2026-08-20 the Forest Service proposed rescinding the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which bars road construction and timber harvesting across inventoried roadless areas — the single largest regulatory obstacle to federal timber sales — following its advance notice of 2025-08-29; and on 2026-08-24 Interior added a categorical exclusion for timber salvage harvest to its NEPA implementing procedures, the step EO 14225 section 2(f) called for. `partial` and not `done`: the roadless rescission is a proposal, and the legislative limb of the Quote ("working with lawmakers") has produced nothing enacted; and the sales limb has not moved yet — the Forest Service's own cut-and-sold report for FY2025 shows 2,950,631 thousand board feet sold, below the 3 billion a year the Secretary's memorandum gives as the five-year average and well short of the 4 billion target for FY2028.

  3. Partially done

    EO 14308, Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response (signed 2025-06-12), builds on it as the Quote asks: it consolidates the Interior and Agriculture wildland fire programs, directs EPA and USDA to consider modifying or rescinding rules that impede prescribed fire and fire retardant use, directs USDA to facilitate innovative uses of woody biomass to reduce fuel loads, and cross-references EO 14225 by name.

  4. Partially done

    The plan EO 14225 section 2(c) asked for exists, with a number in it. The Forest Service's National Active Forest Management Strategy, released 2025-05-29 with $200 million to implement it, sets the goal of increasing the annual timber volume offered by 25 percent over the FY2020–FY2024 average, with a goal of selling 4 billion board feet by FY2028 — against the 3 billion board feet a year the Secretary's memorandum gives as the five-year average. Still `partial`: a target set is not a target met, and nothing enacted answers the legislative limb.

  5. Partially done

    The Secretary implemented EO 14225 with an instrument that has immediate legal effect. Secretary's Memorandum 1078-006 (2025-04-03) makes an Emergency Situation Determination under IIJA section 40807 covering 112,646,000 acres — 59 percent of the National Forest System — so that timber salvage, sanitation harvest, hazardous-fuel removal and the other listed emergency actions there need analyze only the proposed action and no-action alternative and are exempt from the pre-decisional objection process at 36 CFR Part 218; it also directs the Forest Service to issue Good Neighbor Authority, stewardship and Tribal Forest Protection Act guidance, to streamline every timber-production process, to write a strategy for increasing the volume offered, and to identify legislative proposals. The Chief's implementing letter of the same day directs every Regional Forester to plan for an agency-wide 25 percent increase in timber volume offered over four to five years, delegates designation-by-prescription authority to Forest Supervisors, orders direct sales to be used alongside solicitations and base rates to be applied under the emergency authorities. `partial`: the regulatory-obstacle limb has a mechanism in place across most of the system, but the memo sets no board-foot figure, and the increase-timber-sales and work-with-lawmakers limbs are directions, not deliveries.

  6. Attempted

    The substance of Executive Order 13855 was revived under a new title. EO 14225, Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production (signed 2025-03-01), directs the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior to issue guidance on Good Neighbor Authority, stewardship contracting and Tribal Forest Protection Act agreements within 30 days; to submit within 90 days a plan setting an annual target, in millions of board feet, for timber offered for sale from federal land over four years; to adopt categorical exclusions to speed NEPA compliance for timber production, forest management and wildfire-risk-reduction treatments; and, in section 3, to "suspend, revise, or rescind" every regulation, order, guidance document, policy, settlement and consent order imposing an undue burden on timber production. Nothing had been delivered at signature. Executive Order 13855 is not named or reinstated by number anywhere in the window: a Federal Register full-text search for "13855" over the whole period returns no presidential document.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • USDA’s 2026 Unified Agenda carries four further Forest Service deregulatory items on the same track — RIN 0596-AD66 (roadless repeal), 0596-AD70 (travel management rule repeal), 0596-AD73 (timber export and anti-substitution) and 0596-AD74 (directives modernization).
  • EO 13855 (Promoting Active Management of America’s Forests, Rangelands, and Other Federal Lands to Improve Conditions and Reduce Wildfire Risk, 2018) was not reinstated by name; this item is leveled on delivery of its substance, on the rule that progress is measured on this ask.
  • The board-foot target plan required within 90 days of EO 14225 is not in the Federal Register. Read on usda.gov 2026-09-06: it is the Forest Service’s National Active Forest Management Strategy of 2025-05-29, which sets the target — 25 percent over the FY2020–FY2024 average, 4 billion board feet sold by FY2028. Whether the Secretaries also sent the President a separate plan is not knowable from usda.gov; a usda.gov site search for “board feet” returns nothing dated after 2018.
  • Progress against the target, from the Forest Service’s own cut-and-sold reports (fs.usda.gov/managing-land/forest-management/products/cut-sold): FY2025 full year 2,950,630.88 MBF sold across 110,551 sales (report run 2025-12-08); FY2026 through Q3 2,104,481.06 MBF sold (report run 2026-08-04). The FY2026 figure is three quarters of a year and is not comparable to a full-year total until the Q4 report lands, expected in December 2026.
  • 2026-10-13 event, added on review 2026-10-12. The event was first written from the abstract; on review we read the rule (91 FR 64760, FR 2026-20890). It amends 36 CFR part 218 and is effective 2026-11-12. It loosens the process: minimum comment periods drop from 30 to 15 days for an EA and from 45 to 30 for an EIS (the February proposal had 10 and 20); objections are capped at 15 pages (EA) and 30 (EIS); responsible officials answer within 15 or 20 days in at most five pages; the separate reviewing-officer role is eliminated; categorically excluded actions are written out of objection, as the 2014 appropriations act already required; and notice moves to the web. The rule itself puts the old process at 120 to 165 days. The event holds. No automated match surfaced it; it was found by reading every new final-rule title.
  • The 2025-06-12 event was re-leveled from attempted to partial on 2026-09-06 when the 2025-04-03 event was inserted: an event records the ask’s rung after the instrument, and the rung had already been reached. The item first reached partial on 2025-04-03, not 2026-08-20.
Action
reinstate
Object
Executive Order 13855
ID
799