Today Congress took a shortcut in its bid to erase the Roadless Rule, a longstanding conservation policy that safeguards around 45 million acres of national forest land from development. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and an ardent proponent of transferring our public lands, led this effort by tacking on a last-minute amendment to the Wildfire Prevention Act, a formerly bipartisan bill that was introduced by Sen. Barrasso (R-Wyoming) in January. Lee’s amendment, filed late Tuesday night, seeks to nullify the 2001 Roadless Rule. It would also prohibit the Forest Service from issuing similar roadless protections in the future.
Lee’s amendment passed the committee by a simple majority vote of 11-9 on Wednesday. The amended bill will now head to the full Senate for a vote. The votes fell strictly along party lines, with every Republican member supported the nullification of a landmark conservation policy that 99 percent of Americans wanted to keep. (This is according to an analysis performed last summer, when the Trump Administration first signaled its intentions to ditch the Roadless Rule.) Democratic members of the committee who spoke during Wednesday’s meeting were clear about what Lee’s amendment would do and how it was strategically slipped into the existing bill.
“We had a very bipartisan wildfire focused bill here. And now we have a very partisan bill,” ranking member Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) said flatly during a discussion before the vote. “The biggest issue here, I think the elephant in the room, is that this wildfire legislation became a trojan horse for the Roadless repeal.”
Other Democratic senators, John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado) and Alex Padilla (D-California), shared similar opinions regarding Lee’s last-minute amendment, calling it a “poison pill” that undermines the goodwill that Congress owes to the American public.
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The Trump Administration has been working toward this rollback since June 2025, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced its plans to rescind the Roadless Rule. This led to immediate pushback from the hunters, anglers, and conservation groups, who have continued to point to the overwhelming amount of public support for a policy that helps protect some of the best hunting and fishing found in our national forest system.
“With the support of ten fellow Republicans on his powerful Senate Committee, Senator Mike Lee just launched another sneak attack on our public lands,” Land Tawney, the co-chair of American Hunters and Anglers, said in a statement immediately following Wednesday’s committee hearing. “He used a last-minute, poison pill amendment to wipe out the 2021 Roadless Rule, politicizing what should have been a bipartisan plan to address wildfire. Yet again, so much for nature being nonpartisan.”
As we’ve previously reported, keeping wildlands roadless is actually an effective tactic to mitigate wildfire risk. USDA’s own data indicates that nearly 85 percent of wildfires are human caused, and 90 percent of those begin within a half-mile of a road. Meanwhile, a 2007 study found that wildfires are overwhelmingly correlated with roads. Fewer than 3 percent of all wildfires start in wilderness or backcountry areas. Also, wildfire fuel mitigation still takes place in Roadless areas.
Wednesday’s committee vote means that the amended version of the Wildfire Prevention Act will now head to the full Senate for a vote.
“So we have another bite at this apple,” Tawney tells Outdoor Life. He says he believes the threshold for passage is 60 votes. “The accountability that has to happen right now is huge, especially on the committee … It’s time to call or tag [your congressional members], or do whatever you can to get in front of them.”
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