Why It Matters: The U.S. Forest Service faces several issues going into 2025, including, among others, a workforce challenge, a budget shortfall, and more than 117 million acres of fire-prone forests in need of restoration. The withdrawal of the National Old-Growth Amendment, which the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF) strongly supports, avoids further distracting the agency from prioritizing forest health, wildlife habitat, and wildfire resilience work across the National Forest System. CSF is hopeful that the U.S. Forest Service will now focus its limited resources on increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration to improve wildlife habitat and support the outdoor sporting traditions of the millions of sportsmen and women that recreate on federal public lands.
Highlights:
- On January 7, the U.S. Forest Service announced that it will be withdrawing the notice of intent to prepare a National Old-Growth Amendment environmental impact statement. On January 10, the U.S. Forest Service formally published the withdrawal solidifying that the agency will not be publishing a final environmental impact statement.
- This decision comes after the U.S. Forest Service received over 300,000 comments in 2024, including numerous comments that expressed serious concerns with the effort to amend more than 120 land management plans, on their Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for Amendments to Land Management Plans to Address Old-Growth Forests Across the National Forest System.
- Wildlife, insects, and disease are the leading threats to old-growth forests, not timber management, as the U.S. Forest Service reported in the Mature and Old-Growth Forests: Analysis of Threats on Lands Managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.
The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation submitted detailed comments on the DEIS in September. CSF supported the no action alternative and expressed concerns about further straining the U.S. Forest Service’s limited staff and funding resources, the prioritization of managing for old-growth forests over other habitat needs, specifically the need to manage for a diversity of forests age classes to support diverse and robust wildlife populations, and the U.S. Forest Service’s continued failure to meet early successional habitat goals laid out in forest plans. CSF also expressed concerns about inviting litigation on approved habitat improvement projects waiting to be implemented, inconsistency with the 2012 Planning Rule local collaborative input intent, and undermining stakeholder trust and investment in recently revised forest plans.
Additionally, CSF signed on to a letter with forest conservation partners, that also supported the no action alternative and detailed numerous shortcomings, procedurally and substantively, in the DEIS. Previously, in response to the U.S. Forest Service’s and Bureau of Land Management’s efforts to define and inventory old growth and mature forests following President Biden’s issuance of Executive Order 14072, “Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities, and Local Economies,” CSF submitted comments with others in the sporting-conservation community expressing support for using active management to promote forest diversity across the landscape.
CSF is thankful that the National Old-Growth Amendment process is not moving forward and looks forward to working with the U.S. Forest Service, the incoming Administration, and the 119th Congress to advance federal forest management policy reforms to improve the health of our nation’s forests for wildlife and sportsmen and women.
