(Resiliance) Brooke Rollins, the USDA Secretary who called the Roadless Rule an "absurd obstacle" to forest management, declared an emergency just over a year ago on 112 million acres of your national forests — 59 percent of the entire National Forest System. In the Tongass, the "obstacle" she wants removed is 800-year-old cedars. The declaration has been operating since April 2025, exempting logging projects from the environmental reviews, public comment periods, and administrative objections that have governed federal forests for fifty years.

She did this unilaterally, using an authority buried in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — an authority Congress wrote for discrete wildfire emergencies. She applied it to more than half of America's forests, all at once.