When "Streamlined" Means Unchecked: Section 603 and the Quiet Unraveling of Federal Environmental Review
Somewhere in a Forest Service office, a simple memo called a FANEC is being drafted. It's a few pages long and will authorize logging on up to 3,000 acres of national forest. Soon, if a bill in Congress passes, up to 10,000 acres. No thorough environmental assessment. No mandatory public comment or objection period. Not even the basic checklist designed to identify unique factors, that most categorical exclusions (CEs) are required to include.
The Section 603 CE passed by Congress as part of an amendment to the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) comes closer to total statutory NEPA exemption than any other USFS logging tool. It’s intended to make it easier to do forestry that helps steward forests through the period of increased insect, disease and wildfire disturbance made worse by climate change. The prior systematic conversion of old-growth forests into timber plantations by the Forest Service that went largely unchecked from the late 1940s until the early 1990s has dramatically altered forest conditions and made them less resilient to fire (1). Meanwhile, our strategy of attempting to eliminate fire through suppression (instead of adapting society to this unavoidable natural process) has led to unnatural levels of fuel in many forests simultaneously struggling with other emerging ecological stresses like persistent drought caused by warming climate (2).
§603 was supposed to help land managers respond to these changes and begin to restore more stable forest conditions. It was sold as a way to speed up planning and leverage state and local partnerships. For example, congress wrote a requirement that §603 projects include a "collaborative process" while loosely defining exactly what that means. In doing so they created an opening that can now be abused by agency leaders who are actively hostile to governmental norms and conservation of public lands.
But what makes Section 603 so unique is that unlike other congressionally enacted CEs, the §603 CE includes no specific requirement for the agency to follow the standard CE procedure that includes devoting meaningful staff and other resources to considering extraordinary-circumstances. And in late 2025, the agency issued explicit guidance that “evaluation of extraordinary-circumstances is not required” (3). But the authors of §603 could never have anticipated the unprecedented politicization of today’s Forest Service which has transformed a provision the authors likely saw as a narrow, low-risk efficiency measure into something far more consequential. While regional forest plans and other laws like the Endangered Species Act still apply, this innocuous exemption has the potential to turn the entire NEPA process, the “hard look,” into a simple two-page form capable of authorizing a new era of piecemeal degradation of intact forest.
Areas in orange meet the requirements to qualify for projects under the §603 CE and include much of the eastern slope of the Cascades in Washington and the majority of NFS land in Idaho, Oregon, and California.
A USEFUL TOOL BEING MISUSED
The categorical exclusion system works under the premise that land managers can expedite environmental analysis and still be confident in a project’s ecological effects if it’s similar enough to other projects of known impact. How similar? That’s where extraordinary-circumstances come in. They’re a simple list of factors managers must think about when deciding if a project shouldn’t qualify for a CE because something about the project warrants special attention––things like the presence of ESA species or being a source of municipal drinking water. Merely having an extraordinary-circumstance doesn’t disqualify the project, it just means the agency must consider the impacts to things like listed species and disclose this to the public.
The HFRA §603 CE, in effect, eliminated this core provision of the NEPA CE framework. Now, as long as the project meets the basic requirements imposed by the statute, little stands in the way of the project moving forward, essentially bypassing the NEPA process. What does this mean? It means Tribal and other historically significant areas are more likely to slip through the review process and end up being logged. It means a project can cut a municipal watershed with no NEPA requirement to consider impacts to drinking-water quality. And it means the difficult, taxpayer-funded work the USFS has already done to restore functional forest ecosystems could be undone by poorly planned, if well-intentioned projects.
INTERNAL USFS REGULATIONS BECOMING DISCRETIONARY
This all becomes more concerning when we consider the broader context. For example, the agency’s plan (FR Doc. 2026-13281) to designate Forest Service Handbooks (FSHs) as discretionary (rather than firm requirements) and to allow personnel to deviate from them (with no requirement to document or justify) has the potential to drive misuse of the §603 CE. Especially in the context of politicized performance standards for senior USFS staff and a Secretary and Chief selected by an executive who has demonstrated he values loyalty far more than expertise or integrity (4,5).
Most of the specific §603 CE requirements that USFS planners use to interpret Congress’s statute live in a Forest Service Handbook that could soon become a mere suggestion. How might that play out? Lawsuits opposing destructive projects become harder because the paper trail proving the project’s statutory compliance would be removed. Or for a more on-the-ground example; nothing in the statute prevents §603 projects from including large clearcuts and while it includes a requirement to "maximize the retention of old-growth and large trees...to the extent that the trees promote stands that are resilient” it does not include a legally enforceable prohibition on harvesting old trees–something the agency might argue is necessary to fund projects given how thin the USFS budget is already spread. For example, old growth silver-fir trees that can outcompete species with higher fire-resistance like ponderosa, could be at risk despite the fact that structure of the old growth (height to the bottom of the crown) makes it highly resistant, more-so than a stand of young ponderosas.
These concerns remain speculative at the time of writing and it’s unclear how much of the FSH’s interpretive guidance will be retained in Forest Service Manuals, which should remain compulsory according to the proposed rules change. But the threat to the important
procedural and substantive requirements in FSHs remains.
Commercial logging underway in Lassen National Forest. Photo by USFS
SIMULTANEOUSLY CHANGING REGIONAL FOREST PLANS
It’s also worth considering that while §603 does require projects to comply with regional forest plans, the agency is currently in the process of revising or amending multiple major forest plans including the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) and plans for the Tongass NF, the Blue Mountains, and several others. The NWFP, and its protections for old-growth and hundreds of old-growth dependent species have in many instances acted to blunt the impact of otherwise potentially ecologically questionable or outright degrading projects and policies. But there’s little doubt that the agency is using current revision and amendment processes to weaken important conservation tools currently housed in Forest Plans.
WEAKENING OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL & TRIBAL PROTECTIONS
One last layer to pile on top of all of this: while the ESA does still apply to §603 CEs, the administration, courts and members of the GOP have carefully whittled away important requirements of the ESA. In combination, they’ve removed ESA habitat protections critical to species survival and attempted to realign the ESA to prioritize economics and supposed "national security" concerns alongside species preservation, making it easier to ignore the habitat destruction both individually at the project level and cumulatively, at the landscape level (6).
A parallel effort is underway to gut the National Historic Preservation Act's Section 106 review, the main remaining check on Tribal cultural sites since §603 skips NEPA's extraordinary-circumstances screen. A proposed rewrite would exclude unimproved natural features (sacred sites, ceremonial areas, etc.) from counting as "historic properties" at all, and would create a NEPA-CE-style "exemption" track with no required public involvement. If finalized, a §603 project could log Tribal cultural sites with no Section 106 review whatsoever.
The endangered northern spotted owl - §603 loopholes and recent changes to ESA definitions mean spotted owl habitat could end up being logged. Photo by USFS Region 6
BIPARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL ATTACKS
The so-called Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) seeks to not only expand the acreage of these projects to 10,000 acres, but also seeks to expand the types of forest where the projects can occur. Currently only forests within the wilderness-urban-interface or with relatively frequent, short-moderate interval fire regimes qualify. If passed, FOFA would allow §603 projects in stands with fire return intervals greater than 200 years that burn at high intensity. These are lush, green, long-lived temperate rainforests that USFS has been working to restore in western Washington, Oregon, and northern California since the mid 90s. Thinning this type of forest can lead to drier forest floors and other conditions that actually increase fire severity (7). Setting aside the fact that private timberland accounts for the majority of forest nationwide, even for forest types that might benefit from fuel treatment, thinning is expensive and since the benefits are temporary those costs pile up.
This doesn't mean we should abandon communities to wildfire but rather that we need to be strategic with the public resources available. The evidence is clear that home hardening, defensible space, and fireproofing the built environment do far more to protect lives and property than logging a national forest can––especially if we want to be fast and frugal (8).
Meanwhile, bills like the SPEED Act and ESA Amendments Act of 2025 are just some of the misguided congressional attempts to improve management of public lands. There are bills to add even more enormous logging CEs and to weaken the Clean Water Act. Bills that drastically narrow the time advocates have to file lawsuits to challenge destructive or outright illegal projects. Bills that remove crucial aspects of the ESA like prohibitions against damaging listed species habitat. Importantly, these bills, including FOFA and the SPEED Act, often have bipartisan support. It’s unclear whether politicians are misinformed and feel forced to "do something," even if that something has the potential to make the problem worse. Or if they’re simply in the pocket of extractive industries addicted to the revenue pouring from public lands.
DWINDLING OPPORTUNITY FOR PUBLIC OVERSIGHT OF USFS
Thankfully, the statute governing the §603 CE requires “public notice and scoping for any [§603] project.” But recent (and potentially unsettled) legal precedent resulting from Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Higgins (9th Cir. 2026) means the agency doesn’t have to hold a formal comment period and it has no hard legal responsibility to respond (let alone iterate the project in response) to individual comments (9).
Section 603 is just one of a large and growing arsenal of low-oversight, high impact forest management project categories, many of which include no public notice or comment requirement. The authors of the HFRA and the 2014 amendment that expanded §603 and other CEs could not have imagined the current state of the agency or our forest ecosystems and climate. These lands are already in a period of extreme uncertainty, brought on by a century of fire suppression and systematic clearcutting of virgin forests, and accelerating climate change. That’s before accounting for significant staffing disruptions at USFS or a timber directive driven by politics rather than the public interest.
The premise that we should be expediting and massively expanding weakly researched logging projects at a time of such ecological uncertainty is dubious at best. Our understanding of forest ecology, while growing, is undercut by how fast conditions are shifting under climate change. But given the important role of forests in capturing carbon, we must take action to minimize conversion of forest to non-forest eco-types which has already been seen following the most severe, climate-driven wildfires. There's important work to be done stewarding our forests through this important period, especially in dry forests types where suppression has greatly altered fuel loads that can lead to unnaturally hot fires when combined with summer drought, high wind events, and an ignition.
Removing small, unhealthy trees to preserve large trees and forest legacies is great, even better when combined with careful prescribed fire, but projects must be thoroughly researched and planned with strong public involvement. But we can't forget: land stewardship that assumes the forest needs our help to thrive, that we know better and can ignore the Indigenous knowledge accumulated over thousands of years, is exactly what left us with today's patchwork of degraded stands and a landscape that barely resembles the wild, wooded country that once covered much of this continent.
An example of the "variable retention harvests" that could be accelerated if Congress expands the §603 CE. Photo by Franklin and Donato
GOOD GOVERNANCE DEMANDS ACCOUNTABILITY FROM THE PUBLIC
The FANEC memo is still being drafted. Somewhere in an office right now, someone is navigating unsettled science and a politicized and understaffed agency pressuring them to increase timber output. They’re deciding where to send the bulldozers and feller-bunchers next. While the people who hike through that forest, drink water that flows from it, but who aren’t scouring agency websites for CE paperwork may never find out the project was approved until they notice the logging trucks heading for the highway.
None of this is settled. It's being decided in D.C. committee rooms and court houses right now, mostly without the public in attendance. But the government tends to follow public opinion, at least when the public makes its will known. The most significant moments in conservation came when concerned Americans shook politicians by their shoulders and demanded change: the passage of NEPA during the first environmental movement, the adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan after the timber wars. It starts with a deluge of calls to congressional offices asking for more environmental analysis, not less. It starts with constituents calling out their members on social media. It starts with a public speaking up to be a voice for the forest, a public that's done accepting industry as a stand-in for stewardship.
CHECK OUT OUR PAGE DEVOTED TO PUBLIC PARTICIPATION AND ENGAGING WITH CONGRESS ON PUBLIC LANDS ISSUES.
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CITATIONS
1- Since the 1950s the Forest Service itself has understood (and made known to Congress) that mature trees are more resilient to fire and since adoption of the NWFP in 1994, has worked to recruit more mature trees, often of species known to be more resilient to fire. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service & U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, The Healthy Forests Initiative and Healthy Forests Restoration Act Interim Field Guide, "Large-Tree Retention" § 102(f); Countryman, C.M., "Old-growth conversion also converts the fire climate," USDA Forest Service Fire Control Notes, vol. 17, no. 4 (1956): 15–19.
2- See Scott L. Stephens et al., Managing Forests and Fire in Changing Climates, 342 Science 41 (2013) (identifying a century of fire suppression policy as a primary driver of unnatural fuel accumulation in frequent-fire forest types); see also Scott L. Stephens et al., Drought, Tree Mortality, and Wildfire in Forests Adapted to Frequent Fire, 68 BioScience 77 (2018) (synthesizing evidence that suppression-driven overstocking and climate-driven drought compound one another, increasing both tree mortality and wildfire severity in frequent-fire forest types).
4- See U.S. Office of Personnel Management, New Senior Executive Service Performance Appraisal System and Performance Plan, and Guidance on Next Steps for Agencies to Implement Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives (Feb. 25, 2025) (stating that OPM will evaluate senior executives — including Regional/State Foresters, Deputy USFS Chiefs, and the USFS Chief — on whether they advanced the President's policy priorities and promoted government efficiency, among other metrics).
5- See Marc Heller, Political Hires Break with Tradition at the Forest Service, E&E News (June 22, 2026) (reporting that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins appointed Tom Schultz, a timber-industry vice president, as Forest Service Chief in February 2025, bypassing the agency's career foresters for the first time in its history; that Ken Verheyen, a senior adviser instrumental in the agency's reorganization, has "no forestry experience," per Chief Schultz's own testimony; and that Verheyen, fellow senior adviser Jon Christianson, and Under Secretary Michael Boren all previously served together as directors of the Sawtooth Conservation & Recreation Alliance, a private landowners' property-rights group in Idaho).
6- See Jessica R. Graham, Worth a Double Take: The Removal of “Harm” from the Endangered Species Act, Ecology Law Quarterly (2025). Environment and Energy Law Program- Harvard Law School, Endangered Species Act Regulations (2026). Auslander, Jamie, Parker Moore, Jonas Reagan, and Mariel Tang, FWS Resurrects ESA Rules on Threatened Species Protections and Critical Habitat Exclusions, Beveridge & Diamond PC (2026)
7- See Harold S.J. Zald & Christopher J. Dunn, Severe Fire Weather and Intensive Forest Management Increase Fire Severity in a Multi-Ownership Landscape, 28 Ecological Applications 1068 (2018) (finding that older, denser federal forest burned at lower severity than intensively managed private timberland during the 2013 Douglas Fire); see also Damon B. Lesmeister et al., Northern Spotted Owl Nesting Forests as Fire Refugia: A 30-Year Synthesis of Large Wildfires, 17 Fire Ecology 32 (2021), (finding that dense, structurally complex old forest used by nesting spotted owls consistently burned at lower severity than the surrounding landscape across three decades of large wildfires in the Pacific Northwest).
8- See Jack D. Cohen, Preventing Disaster: Home Ignitability in the Wildland-Urban Interface, 98 J. Forestry 15 (2000) (identifying home ignition zone conditions, not wildfire intensity, as the principal determinant of structure loss); see also Maryam Zamanialaei et al., Fire Risk to Structures in California's Wildland-Urban Interface, 16 Nature Commc'ns (2025) (finding that home hardening and defensible space together reduced structure loss by up to 52%).
9- Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Higgins, No. 24-1500 (9th Cir. July 16, 2026) (holding that it requires only an open process in which the agency solicits public feedback and iterates the project based on the feedback it receives in the aggregate — not a formal comment period, or any obligation to consider or respond to what any individual commenter raises).
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