The Public Lands Logging Economy Doesn’t Add Up
A 4 percent harvest, a money-losing program, and a recreation economy 100 times bigger. The numbers tell a different story than the emergency declaration.
The Trump administration is selling the country a story. The story goes like this. America’s national forests are full of timber. Federal regulations have locked that timber away. Cutting more of it will create jobs, lower lumber prices, reduce wildfire risk, and make the country self-reliant. On March 1, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14225 ordering federal agencies to expand timber production by 25% over four to five years. A month later, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins declared an emergency on 112,646,000 acres of national forest, almost 60% of the entire National Forest System.
We’ve covered the politics from every angle. The timber emergency itself and how “Chainsaw” Tommy Schultz, a former timber executive at Idaho Forest Group, now runs the agency that decides where the chainsaws go. The Oregon old-growth assault where the BLM wants to quadruple logging on 2.5 million acres of western Oregon’s last great forests. The Roadless Rule rescission opening 45 million acres to chainsaws. The NEPA gutting. The Fix Our Forests Act that would legalize the whole operation. The emergency-industrial complex pattern where fake crises drive resource extraction. The absurdity of still allowing old-growth logging in 2026. And the dismantling of the Forest Service itself.
This piece is about something else. The economics. Strip away the wildfire language and the self-reliance language and the emergency language, and what’s left is a policy that doesn’t add up on a balance sheet. The country isn’t reliant on national forest timber. The federal program loses money. And the recreation economy that depends on these lands dwarfs the entire forest products industry, much less the small slice of it that comes off federal land.
National forests supply almost none of America’s wood
The first thing to understand about the public lands logging economy is how small it actually is.
National forests sold about 3 billion board feet of timber in 2023 according to the Forest Service’s own data. Resources for the Future, the nonpartisan economic research institute, calculated in their July 2025 report that USFS lands represent only 4 percent of total US timber harvests, based on average annual harvests since 2015 of 491 million cubic feet against US total annual harvests of 13,349 million cubic feet.
Private lands, especially in the South, do almost everything else. The Forest Service says private forests provide over 90 percent of all domestically produced forest products. The South alone holds 40 percent of the country’s timberland and is dominated by industrial plantations.
Even the timber industry’s own trade group concedes this in passing. The American Forest Resource Council acknowledges that one-half of one percent of national forest lands is harvested for timber each year. They frame this as neglect. It’s also the reality of where American wood actually comes from.
A 25% increase in federal timber output, even if Tom Schultz hits the 4 billion board feet target by fiscal year 2028, would barely move the national supply. Resources for the Future put it plainly. The national significance of expanded federal harvests is limited. Federal lands have long accounted for a small share of total US timber production, and most timber now comes from private lands, particularly in the South.
The country isn’t reliant on national forest timber. Pretending otherwise is the foundation of the entire policy.
The Forest Service loses money on the timber program
The second thing to understand is that this isn’t a profitable business the government is running. It’s a money pit subsidized by taxpayers.
The most comprehensive accounting Congress ever required came from the Government Accountability Office. The federal timber program lost more than $2 billion between 1992 and 1997 according to GAO’s analysis, an average of more than $333 million per year. Taxpayers for Common Sense calculated the program lost another $407 million in fiscal year 1998 alone.
After 1998, the Forest Service stopped publishing the comprehensive accounting reports it had been required to file. By 2001, the GAO concluded that the annual costs of the timber sales program were not even determinable from the agency’s books. Congress lost its ability to audit the program. The agency stopped admitting losses. The losses didn’t stop.
Where the data still exists, it tells the same story. Taxpayers for Common Sense reported in 2024 that timber sales in the Tongass National Forest alone have lost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion since 1980. Forty years of sales generated $227 million in revenue against $1.96 billion in costs. That’s the Tongass. One forest. One eight-to-one ratio of cost to revenue.
A big driver across the system is roads. The Forest Service maintains over 370,000 miles of logging roads across the National Forest System, more roads than the entire Interstate Highway System. Most are built so private companies can reach the trees. The agency designs them, builds them, maintains them, and absorbs the costs. The companies cut the timber and keep the lumber.
The independent research center PERC, which generally argues against environmental restrictions on logging, found in 1995 that the Forest Service spent between $45,000 and $50,000 per mile of road compared to $4,000 to $8,000 spent by state agencies on similar roads. The Forest Service builds expensive permanent roads while state agencies tend to build cheaper temporary ones.
This is how the public lands logging economy actually works. Public money pays to identify the trees, build the roads, prepare the sale, and administer the contract. Then a private company shows up, harvests the timber, and pays the government less than what the government spent. The losses don’t appear on a corporate balance sheet because they don’t have to. The Treasury covers the difference.
The math gets worse from here. Trump’s FY2026 budget proposes nearly $800 million in Forest Service cuts. The agency has lost more than 25% of its workforce. Schultz has been ordered to push 25% more timber output. Fewer staff to administer sales, more sales to push through, looser environmental review on every one of them.
The recreation economy is in a different league entirely
Here’s where the policy gets indefensible. The thing the timber program threatens is dramatically more valuable than the thing it produces.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its 2024 outdoor recreation data on March 5, 2026. The outdoor recreation economy generated $1.3 trillion in gross output and $696.7 billion in value added, which is 2.4% of US GDP. It supported 5.2 million jobs, 3.2% of all US employment. BEA reports that outdoor recreation contributes more to the US economy than farming, oil and gas extraction, mining, and utilities.
Compare that to the entire US forest products industry, including paper, pulp, and the parts that have nothing to do with national forests. The American Forest and Paper Association reports the industry employs more than 925,000 people. The Forest Service’s research arm puts it at roughly 950,000 employees. Recent estimates put total annual output around $288 billion. The slice that comes from national forests specifically, that 4 percent of total US harvest, is a small fraction inside that number.
We laid out the full case for why outdoor recreation dwarfs every extractive sector combined when Doug Burgum tried to frame public lands as a “balance sheet” full of oil and gas waiting to be cashed in.
National forests are where Americans go to ski, hike, hunt, fish, mountain bike, ride horses, ride snowmobiles, climb, and camp. These are the lands that feed the gateway towns of Bend, Bozeman, Asheville, Flagstaff, Truckee, and hundreds of others. Outdoor recreation employment grew in 36 states and DC in 2024. The sector grew faster than the overall US economy on every measure BEA tracks until 2024, and even with the slowdown, employment, compensation, and gross output all kept rising.
When the Forest Service fast-tracks logging on 112 million acres, it’s putting the foundation of the recreation economy into competition with an extractive industry that contributes a fraction of the value.
What the “emergency” actually covers
The Rollins emergency declaration is being sold as wildfire response. The Defenders of Wildlife analysis of the actual map tells a different story.
The Emergency Situation Determination area overlaps with more than 20 million acres of designated critical habitat for threatened and endangered species, 8.4 million acres of grizzly bear recovery zones, 26 million acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas, and 11 million acres of designated Wilderness, about one-third of all Wilderness in the National Forest System. It covers 340,000 acres of Research Natural Areas, around 70 percent of the Forest Service’s entire scientific reserve network. One-third of the entire emergency zone is Inventoried Roadless Area or Wilderness.
These are the places Congress and previous administrations specifically designated as off-limits to industrial logging because of their conservation value. They are not the places where wildfire exposure is highest. Defenders found that 65 percent of the highest fire-exposure firesheds inside the National Forest System are captured by the emergency zone, but those firesheds account for only 12 percent of the emergency area itself. The majority of the highest fire-exposure firesheds in the country lie outside the National Forest System entirely, on lands the Forest Service doesn’t manage and this declaration doesn’t address.
The emergency framing isn’t about fire. It’s a legal mechanism to log conservation lands without the reviews that conservation lands normally require. With NEPA gutted, the Endangered Species Act sidelined, and the Fix Our Forests Act poised to make the whole operation permanent, the only thing left between the chainsaws and the oldest trees in America is public pressure.
What this is really about
Strip away the emergency language and the self-reliance language and the wildfire language and what’s left is a transfer. National forests, owned by every American, are being opened up so that a small extractive industry can cut trees the country doesn’t need at prices that don’t cover what taxpayers spent to prepare the sales. The trees being targeted include the oldest and most valuable for habitat, water filtration, carbon storage, and recreation, because those are the trees worth the most at the mill.
If the country wants more domestic lumber, the answer is in private southern plantations and improved milling capacity, not old growth in the Pacific Northwest. If the country wants reduced wildfire risk, the science points to community-protection work in the wildland-urban interface and good fire on appropriate landscapes, much of it led by tribes whose ancestors managed these forests with fire for thousands of years before federal suppression policy made the problem worse. None of that requires industrial-scale clearcuts on 112 million acres of federal forest. If the country wants jobs, the recreation economy is already creating them at five times the rate of the entire forest products sector.
There’s no economic argument for what’s happening. There’s only a political argument, and a small group of beneficiaries who profit when the public absorbs the costs. Silence is permission. The lands aren’t going to defend themselves.
Tell your senators and representative where you stand on the public lands logging emergency. Look up your reps and the call scripts at the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard. Then share this piece. The data is on our side. It’s just got to be heard.
Until next time,
Will
Imagine that. Corporate interests want to cut old growth trees that shouldn't even belong to them and that aren't really needed just to make a profit for themselves so badly that they get the corrupt Trump government to declare an emergency. Meet the new boss - same as the old boss. The real emergency in America is that corporate greed is destroying our country.
It's like the Lorax is playing out in real time. I'm from Utah, and Cox is the governor who was not elected but installed obviously. People should be very afraid, and had better get off their couches and actually go protest, picket, and truly form constitutional melitias before your state loses the right to hunt and fish, and have beauty all around. We are literally going to have to stand up to these infringements.