The Trump administration has asked Congress to fund a sweeping expansion of federal timber operations, with its new budget requesting US $175 million for timber extraction, preparation, and sale — up from US $39 million in the current year, a fourfold jump that stands as one of the few increases inside a proposed US$4.9 billion cut to the Department of Agriculture. That is according to the administration’s latest budget request, which comes days after the department announced plans to fully revamp the US Forest Service, including moving its headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City.
Spending on forest products had been flat for years before the proposal, Nick Smith, Public Affairs Director for the American Forest Resource Council, told E&E News, saying the requested increase was a long-overdue investment in a programme that had operated at a small scale for decades.
Wood Central understands the new request is the latest in a broader lumber sovereignty push that included a March 2025 executive order to free up more than 112 million acres of national forest to logging, and a Section 232 national security probe into timber imports.
Fiscal watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, however, is not convinced the money is well spent. The group warned the request lacks the transparency required for proper taxpayer scrutiny and pointed to the Tongass National Forest — which ran a net loss of US$1.73 billion between 1980 and 2019 — as evidence that the Forest Products line item has a poor return-on-investment record that the new request does nothing to address.
The budget also asks more from a workforce it has already cut deeply. The Forest Service has lost more than 4,000 employees since January, Senator Amy Klobuchar — Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry — confirmed at a recent committee hearing, warning the departures included staff holding wildfire “red cards” critical to the coming fire season.
Whilst former Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest Supervisor Bill Avey told Mountain Journal the math doesn’t work: “The Forest Service traditionally had 5,000 employees. DNRC has fewer than 500. How are they going to manage more land?” Klobuchar said the USDA proposal “falls far short of what rural Americans need right now”, cutting nearly one-fifth of the department’s budget at a time when farmers were already under pressure from tariffs and input cost increases.
Last year, Fastmarkets analyst Austin Lamica estimated the US would need to increase federal timber harvests by 450 per cent to offset the Canadian plywood, OSB, and softwood lumber its housing sector depends on — a target Lamica described as “incredibly challenging” without the capital outlay and workforce expansion the programme currently lacks.
