The American Loggers Council helped draft the Trump administration’s executive order to increase US timber production, securing the policy directive within three weeks of its first meeting with White House officials in early 2025. That is according to Scott Dane, executive director of the American Loggers Council, who delivered the Hamilton Roddis Foundation Keynote Address at the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association’s Spring Celebration in Harris, Michigan.
The order was co-written with the American Biomass Energy Association, Dane said, with both organisations meeting administration officials shortly after the inauguration before the directive was issued. Eighteen months on from that policy win, the US industry remained squeezed from every direction by mill closures, quota limits and shrinking domestic outlets, with the search for new buyers now defining the council’s policy agenda.
The challenges confronting the industry, Dane said, reduced to a single common denominator: markets. The US had lost so many outlets that supply now exceeded demand, leaving the sector with overcapacity and forcing a search for new buyers to absorb the country’s timber resource.
Mill closures, fuel costs, stagnant wood prices, labour shortages and equipment expenses were squeezing operators across the country, with quota limits preventing loggers from running at capacity even when they had wood on hand. Price volatility made planning impossible whilst global competition pushed domestic prices down, and rising operational costs continued to erode margins.
“Any one of these challenges is manageable. All of them at once is not,” Dane said.
Loggers carried the entire financial risk across the supply chain, including equipment loans, payroll, insurance, timber purchases and contract deadlines, yet remained the only link in the chain expected to operate at full cost with half the certainty. “The frustration is real, and so is the fear,” Dane said, describing an industry being asked to run businesses with no control over production, price or market access.
Fixable solutions identified by Dane included predictable quota practices, advance notice, transparency, balanced contracts and a prohibition on unilateral changes. Dane also called for a wholesale rethink of how forestry sat within agricultural policy, invoking Gifford Pinchot’s century-old argument that timber was a crop and forestry was farming.
Wisconsin sat at the forefront of emerging market opportunities, with a proposed partnership between Johnson Timber and Germany’s Synthec Fuels that would convert 800,000 tons of woody biomass into 48 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel annually by 2029 at a Hayward facility. Increased domestic lumber production and cross-laminated timber rounded out the demand-side picture, with the council also in active discussions with the US Environmental Protection Agency about the inclusion of biomass in data-centre energy mixes.
Coalition-building was the second priority within the council’s five-year plan, Dane said, with members now spanning the American Biomass Energy Association, the Forest Landowners Association, Weyerhaeuser and GT Logging, Inc. Some members opposed new markets, but the spread of representation produced common ground and gave the council standing to influence policy dialogue in Washington.
The Trump administration has aggressively pursued timber and forest products policy on several fronts, directing increased harvesting from national forests, rescinding the roadless rule, raising tariffs on softwood lumber, and reviewing the renewable fuel standard to expand the scope of eligible wood feedstocks. The Environmental Protection Agency declined to expand eligible biomass under the renewable fuel standard, but Dane said the council had not abandoned the issue.
The Fix Our Forest Act, which carries a litigation reform component, has passed the House of Representatives and is now before the Senate, with Dane projecting it could reach the president’s desk by December. Secure Rural Schools funding has been re-established, whilst Wisconsin’s Republican Representative Tom Tiffany co-sponsored the bipartisan Safe Routes Act of 2025 aimed at improving safety and efficiency for the logging industry.
The American Loggers Council was named one of five working board members on the Federal Timber Purchasers Coalition, a new national collaborative, and developed grant programs with the US Forest Service to administer $10 million in hazardous fuels reduction funding. The council has also led opposition to the EU Deforestation Regulation, helping delay implementation whilst pushing to secure a no-risk classification for the United States.
“We’re not asking for special treatment,” Dane told the audience, calling instead for a fair, functional system that allowed loggers to operate and survive.
With the Fix Our Forest Act expected to reach the president’s desk by December and the Hayward sustainable aviation fuel project targeting 2029 commissioning, the next 18 months will determine whether Dane’s coalition-built policy momentum translates into the market depth multi-generational logging businesses now need — or whether mill closures continue to outpace it.
