2025 Fix Our Forests Act Talking Points

By Environment America

  • Please oppose the so-called “Fix Our Forests Act” (FOFA). This bill is not a bill to protect communities from wildfire – the legislation will likely make fires worse.

  • There are a lot of bipartisan solutions to address the risks of wildfire that were included in the bipartisan Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission wildfire commission report, but the poison pills in this bill were not recommendations made in that report. The poison pills will make wildfires worse because it will allow profit driven decisions to drive forest management, leading to more clear cutting which has been proven to exacerbate wildfires, making them more dangerous.

  • Rushing this legislation to the floor without any process is a cynical political move to use the suffering of millions in Southern California to advance legislation to support the timber and wood pellet industry – this legislation has nothing to do with the fires in the Los Angeles area. Instead of rushing this problematic legislation, Congress should be supporting the protection of communities like these from the risks of wildfire through legislation like the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act to harden homes, and it should be getting disaster aid to impacted communities and families.

  • Unlike the scientifically based solutions in the Commission recommendations and the Community Protection and Wildfire Resilience Act which are focused on the Wildland-Urban Interface, FOFA is a bill about federal lands and forests, whereas the fires in LA originated on private lands and are chaparral/urban fires. And of course the LA fires are about climate change – drought conditions only increase the likelihood and severity of wildfires.

  • This is an opportunistically-timed vote that only distracts from the real solutions needed to protect communities, landscapes, and wildlife: strategically-located development, home hardening and defensible space, a fully-staffed and funded workforce, and, of course, climate action. We should enact legislation that responds to these solutions, not politicize a tragedy to pass long-standing anti-environmental priorities.

  • The bill is about stifling citizen voices, removing science from land management decisions, and a large-scale rollback of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Historic Preservation Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on millions of acres of federal lands. Its sweeping provisions remove standards and accountability in service of the short-term interests of extractive industries, which will likely exacerbate wildfires.

  • The bill means the “hard science based look” and community input on logging projects that is supposed to be done through NEPA will be done after (post hoc) a project, which defeats the purpose because you certainly can’t put a tree back up after it has been cut down. This harms communities and tribes who live around, use or rely on the forests for everything from subsistence to outdoor recreation jobs. And on top of post hoc NEPA it provides massive and unprecedented 10,000 acre categorical exclusions from NEPA.

  • The Forest Service has said that it already uses CEs for 85% of projects. Expanding some CEs from 3,000 acres to 10,000 would virtually remove all oversight and public engagement from National Forests.

  • Removing (or punting until after a project is done) environmental review also removes the process to evaluate impacts and determine whether a project, like commercial logging, is truly helpful or harmful to protecting communities. Without this process, we stand to repeat mistakes of the past and reap unintended consequences of projects that favor logging over genuine restoration.

  • Another section guts key pieces of the ESA by broadly exempting the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management from the regulatory requirement under Section 7 of the ESA to reinitiate consultation when new species are listed, new critical habitat is designated, or new information indicates that implementation of land management plans may be harming threatened or endangered species in a manner that was not previously accounted for. Such reconsultation is rarely needed but plainly important for the recovery of species, particularly as we learn about new threats posed to species by climate change.

  • Section 121 undermines democracy by inappropriately interfering with the power of federal courts to say what the law “is” and provide appropriate redress to litigants, including limiting their right to even seek justice in court – a crucial component of allowing citizens to hold the government accountable. Shortening the statute of limitations from 6 years to 120 days will deprive communities from having their voice heard in court. The bill also precludes courts from requiring agencies that broke the law in preparing an environmental document to fix that violation with a new one.

  • Section 306 newly added that this Congress would declare the Forest Service to not be “considered” in violation of its existing statutory obligation to revise a forest plan at least every 15-years simply because it in fact broke the law by failing to update a plan as required. Although it includes a caveat that if the agency is not working expeditiously in good faith to use its available resources to update forest plans, that provision would prove challenging to enforce in practice. This effectively insulates the agency from accountability for failing to align its plans with current information. Together with the removal of ESA-consultation requirements elsewhere in this bill, it would significantly undermine forest planning.

The Forest Advocate
Santa Fe, New Mexico