Seven senators and 25 House members have told the Trump administration that American hardwood lumber must be included in China’s $17 billion procurement commitment, replacing the raw logs now flowing back to Chinese sawmills. That is according to a letter sent to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on 30 June and released this week, led by Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Jeanne Shaheen with Representatives GT Thompson and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
“American forests are supplying the raw material for foreign mills to displace American workers,” the members told Greer, warning that a procurement deal built on logs would see China simply buying American timber and undercutting the domestic manufacturing it feeds.
Buried in the letter is a structural first: the value of US hardwood log exports exceeded the value of hardwood lumber exports in mid-2024 for the first time ever. China and Vietnam are processing those logs into lumber that re-enters global markets, directly competing with American-made products, the letter states.
The signatories cite Hardwood Federation data showing that the United States once supplied more than 31 per cent of China’s hardwood lumber imports, a $1.5 billion annual relationship that has collapsed to $701 million. That share has been ceded to competitors from Russia, Malaysia and Thailand, with the cumulative cost of lost access put at $9.882 billion in foregone sales.
Lost sales have hollowed out production, with domestic hardwood lumber output down 48.3 per cent since 2018, capacity down 6 per cent between 2020 and 2022 and first-quarter 2025 production 19 per cent below the year before. China historically accounted for one-quarter of US hardwood lumber production, a relationship the letter describes as essential to communities across the country.
The warning cuts directly across the current shape of the trade, with new USDA data showing raw American logs surging back into Chinese ports: 69,700 cubic metres in May, or 12.9 per cent of all US log exports, at a $623 per cubic metre price squarely in walnut and oak territory. Every one of those logs is sawn in Chinese rather than American mills, the exact outcome the 32 signatories want the Board of Trade to prevent.
Supporting local mills is a matter of national security
Away from the trade figures, the letter presses a national security case: American hardwood sawmills cut industrial mats for energy development, shipping pallets for military and civilian logistics and railroad ties for freight and passenger rail. Once sawmill capacity is lost, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore, the members warned, because the workforce disperses and infrastructure deteriorates.
Established after Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping struck their one-year truce in South Korea, the same agreement that saw Beijing restore American log trade from 10 November, the Board of Trade is where the letter wants the fix made. Its three requests are explicit inclusion of hardwood lumber in the framework, lumber rather than logs in the $17 billion commitment, and enforceable compliance mechanisms that are regularly reviewed to ensure actual purchases are made.
Wood Central understands the Vietnamese capacity named in the letter runs to 50 sawmills and eight veneer plants, opened around Ho Chi Minh City during the ban years to cut Appalachian hardwood. Those plants sell finished lumber into the very markets the letter is trying to win back.
Capito’s West Virginia producers spent those years signing contracts with buyers from Mumbai and Hanoi, and Southeast Asia has since overtaken Greater China as the largest buyer of American hardwoods. The members have offered to discuss the request with Greer, leaving two numbers on his desk: a China trade worth $1.5 billion a year to American sawmills in 2018 and the $701 million it returns today.
