This funding request is one of the few requests for an increase in the federal budget, as the US Department of Agriculture is seeking an overall spending cut of 4.9 billion US dollars. The White House has announced plans to move the Forest Service headquarters out of Washington.
The US Forest Service oversees 78 million hectares across 44 states and employs around 35,000 people. The service has, however, undergone major changes, with 4,000 posts recently eliminated, which sits at odds with the planned increase in funding to raise timber volumes.
President Trump's administration has asked Congress to fund a substantial increase in timber harvesting at federal level, requesting 175 million US dollars in the new budget for logging and sales. Compared with 39 million US dollars in the previous funding period, that is a fourfold increase, and it is regarded as one of the few budget lines to grow within the Department of Agriculture, where an overall cut of as much as 4.9 billion US dollars is envisaged. This illustrates the particular character of the US administration's latest budget proposal. The Department of Agriculture has announced plans to reorganise the US Forest Service by moving the service's headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City in the state of Utah.
Before this proposal, funding for logging had remained unchanged for years. Speaking to E&E News, the public affairs director of the American Forest Resource Council, Nick Smith, noted that the requested funding is a long-awaited investment in a part of the Department of Agriculture that has operated on a small scale for decades. The new proposal forms part of a broader timber use programme in the USA, which includes both the March 2025 order allocating 45 million hectares of national forest for logging and a change of policy on timber imports.
The fiscal watchdog organisation Taxpayers for Common Sense, for its part, is not convinced that these funds will be put to good use, warning that the funding request lacks the transparency needed for proper taxpayer oversight. Taxpayers for Common Sense pointed to the situation in the Tongass National Forest area in the state of Alaska, which incurred losses of 1.73 billion US dollars between 1980 and 2019. The organisation described this as evidence of problems with returns on forest sector investment, stressing that the new funding request will change nothing for the better.
The budget also calls for greater investment in staff. Since January this year, more than 4,000 employees have left the US Forest Service, as confirmed at a recent meeting by Senator A. Klobuchar of the US Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. She warned that the US Forest Service has been left by highly experienced wildland firefighting professionals, which is a very negative factor with the fire season approaching, when considerable resources will have to be devoted to forest protection measures.
The former supervisor of the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, Bill Avey, told Mountain Journal that “the maths doesn't add up”: “The Forest Service traditionally had around 5,000 employees. Now forest oversight will be carried out by fewer than 500. How do they plan to manage a larger area of land from now on?” A. Klobuchar stressed that the US Department of Agriculture's proposal “falls substantially short of what rural residents need right now”, cutting almost a fifth of the department's budget at a time when farmers are already having to contend with the effects of tariffs and rising input costs.
Last year, Fastmarkets analyst Austin Lamica calculated that the USA would have to increase timber harvesting at federal level by 450 per cent in order to make up for the shortfall in Canadian plywood, OSB panels and softwood sawn timber. The American housebuilding sector depends on the availability of these materials. This 450 per cent target is described as “incredibly difficult to achieve” without enormous capital investment and a substantial increase in staff numbers.