House Republican appropriators have backed President Donald Trump’s order to expand logging across the national forests while refusing to fund most of it, advancing a Forest Service budget on Wednesday that carries only a fraction of the timber money the administration sought. The House Appropriations Committee recommended US$45 million for the agency’s timber program in fiscal 2027, far below the $175 million the White House requested for the year beginning 1 October.
The figure represents a $6 million increase on the current year, one of several agency goals the Republican-led panel scaled back despite its stated support for heavier harvesting. The committee approved the wider Interior and Environment bill 35 to 27, sending it towards the House floor.
Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Mike Simpson said the $45 million was about all the committee could afford, given competing priorities. The Idaho Republican said the legislation “supports the Trump Administration’s policy goals, and reduces regulatory burdens.”
He told POLITICO’s E&E News that Congress could not meet the request in full, even as House Republicans endorsed the President’s push to expand the national harvest. The gap leaves the Forest Service short of the money it says it needs to reach Trump’s logging targets.
It comes as the White House presses to expand harvesting under an executive order that opened millions of hectares of national forest to timber production, reversing Biden-era protections for old-growth stands days before Trump threatened a 25 per cent tariff on imported lumber and forest products. Trump cast the order as a break from foreign supply, declaring, “We don’t need trees from Canada or anybody else.”
The order reaches across more than 144 million acres of Forest Service land, four-fifths of it old-growth or mature, in a country that remains the world’s largest lumber producer yet leans on Canada for close to a third of its supply. Support for the move ran strong in the US logging sector, which helped write it and has since pushed for new markets to match the extra timber.
Simpson said the committee could stretch no further, leaving the timber line at $45 million for the year beginning 1 October, $130 million below the administration’s request.
