Forest Service Moves to Reduce Public Oversight and Public Comments on Its Policies
New proposal aims to give USFS employees broad freedom to ignore its own procedures and eliminate the public's ability to comment on policies
On Tuesday, June 30, the U.S. Forest Service proposed a quiet but potentially far-reaching rewrite of how it governs itself—one that could make many of the agency’s internal rules easier to waive, easier to revise and, in some cases, easier to remove from public view before the public has a chance to weigh in.
Published as a proposed rule by the Department of Agriculture, the measure would amend regulations governing the Forest Service’s Directive System.
That system encompasses the sprawling body of internal manuals and handbooks that guides how the agency manages national forests and grasslands, issues permits, conducts environmental reviews, administers grazing, handles special uses, manages road rights-of-way, and carries out other programs across 193 million acres of public land.
In a brief press statement, the agency says the changes are meant to “redefine the agency’s manual and handbooks to reduce procedural burdens, encourage innovation, and return decision-making authority to employees closest to the land.” Remember that last part—it’ll come back at the end of this piece.
Beneath that dry bureaucratic language is a substantial shift in administrative power.
The proposed rule would redefine the Forest Service Manual as the sole source of “mandatory” internal direction, but even that direction could be waived by responsible officials whenever they decide an alternate action is “in the public interest,” legal, and documented.
That’s a significantly lower bar than the current standard, which allows deviations only in “extreme or highly unusual circumstances.”
Meanwhile, the Forest Service Handbooks—where many technical procedures and operational guardrails live—would be redefined as merely “advisory and informational.” All of them would become optional, in other words.
Employees would be allowed to deviate from them without documenting or justifying why. That matters because handbooks often contain the technical details of how programs are actually carried out.
That includes such wide ranging things as grazing permits, special-use permits, road rights-of-way, pesticide use, land-management planning, civil rights, health and safety, environmental review methods, appeal procedures, permit criteria, public-comment timelines, spatial buffers, operational limits, and other implementation rules.
The new proposed rule also limits when the public gets to comment.
Federal law requires the agency to provide notice and an opportunity to comment on “standards, criteria, and guidelines” applicable to Forest Service programs. However, because the handbooks would now be reclassified as “advisory” only, future changes to them would generally fall outside that public-comment requirement.
The rule goes further. It would state that the “rescission or removal of directives” is not covered by the public-comment process.
In other words, while creating or revising certain binding directives may still require public notice, deleting directives would not necessarily trigger the same obligation.
For public lands advocates, that may be the most consequential sentence in the proposal.
It could allow this and future administrations to remove internal direction—including direction that shapes public participation, environmental review, permit administration, or resource protection—without the procedural scrutiny that currently comes with notice and comment.
In a very real sense, it would remove the public’s opportunity to chime in on numerous things the Forest Service is responsible for. It would remove public feedback.
The American public would effectively be silenced.
The mechanics of public notice would also change. Current regulations have long used formal channels such as the Federal Register or newspapers of record. The proposed rule would allow notices to be published in any “broadly accessible public forum,” including a simple agency webpage.
It would also remove the requirement that the Forest Service provide a physical mailing address for comments, making electronic submission the default unless the agency decides otherwise.
While that may sound like modernization, it could—and probably would—also make agency actions easier to miss, especially for rural communities, Tribes, permittees, conservation groups, and members of the public who rely on formal notice systems to track changes across a vast federal bureaucracy.
Notably, the Department of Agriculture itself acknowledges that the rule has Tribal implications. Its own review concludes that the proposal “would have substantial direct effects on Indian Tribes” and that consultation and coordination with Tribal governments is required.
Here’s the thing: this newly proposed Forest Service rule is explicitly tied to the Trump administration’s broader deregulatory agenda.
The Department says the changes advance Executive Order 14219, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” a presidential memorandum on “Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations,” as well as two memoranda from the Office of Management of Budget.
The latter’s director is Russell Vought, who’s one of the key authors of Project 2025.
That context matters. A lot.
This isn’t just a technical revision to an agency filing system. It’s part of a larger effort to repeal regulations on what happens on public lands and waters, limit the circumstances in which public comment is required, and give agency officials more leeway to ignore or circumvent established procedures.
The result would be a Forest Service Directive System with fewer hard edges. Some national direction would remain mandatory, but much easier to waive “in the public interest,” whatever that actually means.
For an agency that manages our forests, watersheds, wildlife habitat, grazing allotments, roads, recreation sites, and sacred landscapes across the country, that’s a gigantic shift.
The most likely outcome here—or goal, rather—is that it will make the Forest Service significantly less transparent, less consistent, and less accountable to the public whose lands it manages.
Let’s make no mistake about what’s happening here.
On June 30—the same day his agency published this proposal—Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz spoke at the annual meeting of the Western Governors’ Association in Deer Valley, Utah.
“You think about the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and we delegate primacy to the states to manage those programs under state authorities. And that’s what we’re thinking about,” Chief Schultz said. “We have opportunities working with states and tribes and counties to identify landscapes that they can manage for the national forest system.”
“We still have to maintain the decisions. We still have a national environmental framework we have to operate within, but there is interest among states in stepping up and assisting in the management and driving the management of the national forest system.”
All of this is yet another small step toward less federal management, less public oversight, and more local control over our national forests and grasslands.
You can leave a comment in the Federal Register here. The comment period is open until July 31, 2026.
Thanks for reading!
See you on our public lands and waters,
Bram