Last week, the Trump administration quietly posted a set of executive orders pertaining to logging and forestry that riled environmentalists and business leaders alike. The first executive order aims to increase timber production on federal lands, with the second focused on wood product imports. According to the administration, both of these executive orders are aimed at "boosting" American timber production, which has gone through a number of boom and bust cycles over the last 20 years.

The orders appear to create a pathway for clear-cutting forests on federal lands, based in part on laughable claims Here's what's actually in the Trump logging plan, how it might affect the future of our federal lands and forests, and what the economic and long-term climate implications might be.

What is in Trump’s Executive Orders on Timber and Forestry

The explicit aim of the executive orders is to "increase timber harvesting on federal lands by reducing regulatory barriers, expediting environmental reviews, and setting annual timber sale targets," while also leading "an investigation into the national security implications of timber and lumber imports, potentially leading to tariffs or restrictions on foreign wood products."

As Yahoo reports, the administration told the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to find ways to "facilitate increased timber production" and "improve the speed of approving forestry projects." He also instructed the departments of the Interior and Agriculture to "exempt timber thinning" and "timber salvage" from the National Environmental Policy Act, as Yahoo explained, “meaning the government would no longer require environmental assessments or environmental impact statements before approving those activities.”

While timber groups and rural leaders heralded the announcements as a boon for the timber industry, climate groups, scientists and forestry experts warned that this was a step in the wrong direction.

Separating Truth & Fiction in the Executive Orders

The text of the executive orders makes room for grievances about "heavy-handed Federal policies” from Trump’s predecessors and sprinkles in empirically false claims about the environmental benefits of logging.

First, logging more timber and dealing with fires are two separate issues with different solutions. A litany of scientific studies has shown that logging, or even less aggressive “thinning” techniques, are not an effective means of forest fire prevention. Removing healthy trees from dense forest just creates more room for wildfire to spread while also increasing temperatures, creating hotter and drier conditions for fires to rapidly spread.

The idea of logging as a fire solution runs parallel to viral claims that logging would have stopped the huge LA fires in January. The land that burnt in those fires is primarily made up of chaparral, not trees. As experts in the USA Today story point out, chaparral is not commercially viable timber, and it's not clear that any change in forestry management would have stopped the fires that devastated the county. As Inside Climate News points out, taking out larger (more commercially viable trees) on Federal lands is directly counter to preventing fires–as the best process is to take down the smaller trees, instead.

Additionally, there is no clear economic gain to be harvested from in clear-cutting federal lands. The reality is that the timber sector has waxed and waned with demand, economic cycles, and housing shifts over the last two decades. From the early 2000s to just before the recession in 2006, the timber industry was on a steady upswing, largely driven by a robust housing market and strong demand for wood products. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, the timber industry began to flag because of a reduced demand thanks to the housing crisis and economic uncertainty during that period.

From 2010 onward, the timber industry has been in a slow recovery, according to the USDA. In 2017, timber consumption per capita reached 52.4 cubic feet, marking an eighth consecutive year of increase. The industry has also faced increased competition from abroad, as well as a significant contraction in sectors like printed media and full-wood products like furniture and building materials. Automation in everything from logging operations to paper and timber production has cut into employment – and yes, AI is also now being used to manage our forests.

At the moment, according to USA Today, about 70% of the US's demand is met by domestic logging. Just 30% is met by Canadian imports, which are currently subject to Trump’s irresponsible tariffs on Canadian goods. Around 50% of forest land in the US is privately owned and not impacted by these executive orders.

A lot of the infrastructure that supported American logging is long gone, thanks to the boom and bust cycles that the timber industry has been through over the last 20 years, and building up new sawmills and paper mills (which are highly pollutive) will take time, and retraining of workers, since, as the USA Today points out, “you can’t just take people off the streets and have them start cutting trees.”

The U.S. Forest Service has also been left short-handed after Elon Musk’s DOGE department have fired more than 3,400 U.S. Forest Service employees, firings which specifically targeted managers of timber production on federal lands. That has left fewer people with more responsibility forced to make quick decisions about forest land that could end up negatively impacting the forests and people who live near them.

Finally, we can't talk about deforestation and logging without pointing out the tremendous impact that felling large numbers of trees (whether old growth or not) will have on the climate. It will significantly increase the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere and set us on a path to increased global warming at a time when it's likely we’ve already surpassed the 1.5-degree C threshold set forth in the Paris climate agreement.

At the same time, some caution is warranted before ringing the death knell on America’s federal forests. A social media post that went viral wrongly estimates the number of acres that could be destroyed by Trump's latest executive orders, and as Yahoo points out, it's not likely that Trump will "flatten hundreds of millions of acres of trees."

What is clear is that there will be more trees cut down on federal lands. What that will look like is really anyone's guess, but the disingenuous claims of expanding logging across the country while simultaneously promising a boom to the economy and improved wildfire resistance will not be based in fact or science anytime soon.

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