The rulebooks that decide how your national forests get run, who gets a grazing permit, how a timber sale gets reviewed for damage to water and wildlife, what deadline you have to object before a decision goes final, aren’t written by Congress. They’re written inside the Forest Service, in a system of manuals and handbooks most people never see. And for decades, the law has treated the important parts of that system as public business, something the agency can’t change without telling you and taking your comment first.
The Forest Service just proposed a rule that would start cutting the public out of those decisions. It landed on July 1, under the same corner of federal regulation that guarantees the public a say over agency directives, and it arrives as part of the administration’s broader February 2025 deregulation order.
Picture the system as two shelves. One holds the Manual, the binding direction the agency’s people have to follow. The other holds the Handbooks, the detailed guides…
