Trump admin plans to rescind ‘roadless rule.’ Here’s what that means for millions of acres of forest across Utah.

As wildfires rage across southern Utah, the Trump administration is looking to remove decades-old protections for millions of acres of forests in a move it says will help prevent such blazes.

At a meeting of the Western Governor’s Association in New Mexico last week, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the Department of Agriculture is rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule, which prevents logging and roadbuilding on nearly 59 million acres of national forest land.

“This outdated administrative rule contradicts the will of Congress and goes against the mandate of the USDA Forest Service to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands,” the department said in a press release.

If the Trump administration successfully repeals the rule — doing so will first require formal rulemaking — it will open up millions of acres of previously protected roadless national forest lands for road construction and logging across the nation, including nearly 60% of forest service land in Utah, according to the department. In March, President Trump issued an executive order directing the Interior and Agriculture departments to increase timber production on federal lands.

Gov. Spencer Cox, who met with Rollins at the Western Governor’s Association gathering, was quick to speak out in support on X. “That’s a huge win for wildfire prevention and the health of our lands,” he said.

Utah has long been against the roadless rule, and in 2019 it petitioned the USDA for exemptions. In the petition, the state said exemptions were needed so the Forest Service could “more proactively address threats” such as wildfires and high fuel loads.

“[The roadless rule has] prevented us from removing dead and dying timber, fueling catastrophic wildfires across our state,” Gov. Cox said in a statement.

While Utah leaders and the Trump administration argue the roadless rule has caused and worsened disastrous wildfires on national forest lands, environmental groups disagree.

“It’s ridiculous for Secretary Rollins to spin this as a move that will reduce wildfire risk or improve recreation,” said Rachael Hamby, policy director for the Center for Western Priorities, in a statement. “Commercial logging exacerbates climate change, increasing the intensity of wildfires.”

Meanwhile, scientists have found that the relationship between roads and wildfire is complex.

“Like with most natural resources topics, I think it really is complicated, and it doesn’t fit into a sound bite very well,” said Larissa Yocom, executive director of Utah State University’s Utah Forest Restoration Institute.

What the science says

A 2020 study by Sean Healey, researcher with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, found that “forests in roadless areas burned at similar frequencies” as national forest lands with roads.

“Speculation that eliminating road prohibitions would improve forest health is not supported by nearly twenty years of monitoring data,” Healey wrote.

Another study in 2021 found no difference in severity of wildfires across roadless and roaded national forest lands in the West. That research team did find, though, that roadless national forest areas experience a greater fire extent — meaning more acres burned.

The reasons for that are “fairly obvious,” according to James Johnston, the lead author of the 2021 paper and a professor at the University of Oregon. “It’s easier to corral fires when there’s a road system to facilitate direct attack with hand crews and bulldozers,” he said.

His team found that almost twice as many fire ignitions escape initial control efforts in roadless national forest areas versus roaded areas.

But there was also “enormous variability in the extent of fire within different ecoregions,” according to the study. In Utah, particularly the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains, researchers found fire extent was similar across areas with or without roads.

“A lot of the roadless portions of the national forests in Utah are not super fire prone relative to the lower elevation areas,” Johnston said.

Beyond suppression, roads may make some forest areas more accessible for fuel reduction activities, such as prescribed burns and thinning.

“Roads improve access for wildland firefighting when timing is critical, and lives are at risk,” a USDA spokesperson told The Tribune over email.

However, the lack of roads has not stopped fire prevention activities in roadless areas altogether, according to Healey’s 2020 study. Healey reviewed all fuel treatment activities recorded in the Forest Service Activity Tracking System, which documents management activities, between 2001 and 2019. He found that roadless areas accounted for 34% of total fuel treatment activities and 8% of total area treated.

While roads may help firefighters suppress fires quickly, roads can also be a “vector for fire ignitions,” Johnston said. “It’s a bit of a double edged sword.” Humans cause 84% of wildfires in the U.S.

Roads not only attract humans who may spark fires by dragging chains or flicking cigarette butts, they also significantly increase invasive species on surrounding forest lands, according to Healey’s research. Invasive grasses may catch fire more easily, and some invasive woody species may burn more intensely.

Since roads both increase ignitions and aid in suppression, it’s hard to pinpoint what the exact overall effect of a roadless rule reversal may be.

“Changes in roadless policies might reduce fire risk or might increase fire risk, and it’s really going to be complicated depending on the location and what management is actually done,” said William Anderegg, climate scientist and director of the Wilkes Center at the University of Utah.

Seeing the forest through the trees

There also may be little effect on wildfires without other substantial changes in funding and management policies, researchers told The Tribune.

“I can’t see how [rescinding the roadless rule] would make a bit of difference when it comes to managing wildfire,” Johnston said.

The Trump administration has cut 10% of workers at the Forest Service, where 75% of agency staff are trained in wildland firefighting, according to reporting from Politico. Additionally, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal recommends cutting over $1 billion from the Forest Service.

Currently, the Forest Service lacks the budget and capacity to deal with wildfires on roaded areas, according to Johnston, let alone roadless areas. “The only way to effectively manage wildfires in the Western United States is to make significant investments in fire prevention, fuel reduction and preparedness, and develop a skilled workforce to carry out that work,” he said.

Building new roads is also expensive, and the Forest Service struggles to maintain existing roads. According to the agency’s 2025 budget explanation, “there is an almost $5 billion backlog in transportation related deferred maintenance.”

With limited budgets, researchers question whether the Forest Service should really prioritize mitigating and suppressing wildfires in roadless areas that are often far away from communities.

“There’s only so many acres we could actually try to manage for fire risk, and we’re going to want to really prioritize areas that are close to where people live,” Anderegg said, “especially in the wildland urban interface. And those are often not roadless areas.”

There are also benefits to letting fires burn in areas that won’t hurt communities. “[Fire] has a role on the landscape,” said Yocom, the Utah State University researcher. “It has shaped vegetation. It has influenced the evolution of plant traits.”

Because roadless areas are far from communities, they may be “excellent places for forest to burn” to help reduce fuels, Yocom added.

Meanwhile, climate change continues to be one of the biggest drivers of increasing wildfires across Utah and the West.

“We have a lot of clear science over the past decade or so that climate change is likely responsible for about half of the area burned in the Western U.S. over the past 30 years, and roughly half of the trend of the increase in fires,” Anderegg said.

Historic land management decisions, such as suppression policies and regrowth after large-scale forest clearing, have been responsible for the other half, he added. “The roadless rule probably does play some role in that, especially in terms of active forest management, but it’s not clear how large a role it plays.”

Over the next 30 years, climate change is projected to double wildfire risk in Utah, according to Anderegg.

In addition to cuts to the Forest Service, the Trump administration has gutted national climate policy and slashed federal funding for climate change research. More than 100 National Science Foundation grants for climate studies have been terminated, according to the MIT Technology Review.

“A proactive and science based approach to managing our forests is going to be most successful at tackling our wildfire challenges in the West and deliver the largest benefits for people in Utah and around the West,” Anderegg said.