Trump administration wants to Make Oregon Logged Again, revving up decades‑old battles over big timber

By GOSIA WOZNIACKA/The Oregonian/OregonLive

In western Oregon, public forests that once fueled rural prosperity — and later came under strict habitat protections that sharply reduced logging and local revenues — are again at the center of a political and economic storm.

The Trump administration is proposing to quadruple logging on federal lands in 18 Oregon counties, raising timber harvests to levels not seen since before spotted owl protections reshaped forest management in the 1990s.

The plan has stirred a mix of hope and dread across the state.

In cash-hungry rural counties hollowed out by decades of dwindling timber receipts — places where mills and libraries shuttered and sheriff’s patrols thinned to almost nothing — the proposal looks like a long‑awaited lifeline that could stabilize county budgets and create new jobs.

“It would be a godsend,” said John Sweet, a commissioner in Coos County, once one of the West Coast’s largest timber exporters that saw the loss of hundreds of mill and logging jobs and a decades-long economic stagnation.

But in forested watersheds and old growth reserves, a sweeping expansion of logging would undermine hard-won conservation protections and threaten the recovery of the northern spotted owls, marbled murrelets and coho salmon — iconic species whose decline drove the logging restrictions in the first place.

Environmental advocates say ramping up clear-cuts and removing older trees would decimate their habitat but also degrade popular recreation areas, increase wildfire risks in a warming climate and jeopardize drinking‑water supplies.

“I don’t think that Oregonians are going to sit back and quietly let this happen to them. We love our public lands and these acres are often some of the closest to our communities,” said John Persell, an attorney with Oregon Wild, a statewide nonprofit focused on wilderness protection and wildlife conservation.

The administration’s proposal, published last month in the Federal Register, would revise management plans for the Oregon & California Railroad and Coos Bay Wagon Road forestlands — a checkerboard of federal parcels across 18 western Oregon counties — to pursue timber harvest levels “aligned with historically higher levels of production.”

The two forest systems, roughly 2.4 million and 93,000 acres respectively, have been federally managed for more than a century and are now overseen by the Bureau of Land Management; their management plans were last updated in 2016.

Bureau of Land Management officials say the logging expansion is needed to shore up revenue for counties and the U.S. Treasury as well as to allow the federal government to reduce the risks of wildfires by thinning trees and clearing dead brush and vegetation.

“Bringing timber production back to historic levels is essential for reviving local economies and reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires,” bureau Director Bill Groffy said in a statement. “President Trump has made it clear — enhanced domestic timber production is vital for our national security, economic prosperity and effective wildfire management.”

The proposal, which for the first time lays out the scale of BLM’s planned logging expansion in western Oregon, is the latest in a series of Trump administration actions aimed at rolling back environmental protections, weakening key environmental laws and policies and reducing funding for conservation and wildlife programs and staff.

These include President Donald Trump’s executive order in March to ramp up logging across the national forest system and BLM-managed lands, proposed changes to enforcement of the Endangered Species Act and the proposed elimination of the roadless rule, which applies only to national forest lands.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump’s signature budget and policy overhaul bill, also mandates increased logging on both BLM and Forest Service lands and slashes funding for conservation, wildfire resilience and ecosystem protection.

Economies upended

If the logging proposal goes through, it could amount to a financial bonanza for the counties.

Some county officials said they welcomed the plan but remained cautious about whether the promised increase in harvests and payments will materialize.

“We don’t know what’s going to result from this so it’s really inappropriate to start talking about increases in revenue just yet,” said Doug Robertson, a former Douglas County commissioner who now serves as executive director of an association that represents 15 of the 18 timber counties.

Ron Smith, a commissioner in Josephine County, said his county would greatly appreciate any increase in timber harvests as would other financially strapped counties.

“I’m hoping it means some positives for our budget,” he said.

Smith said it’s unlikely logging will return to “historic levels” but he’d like it to return to levels “spelled out in the law” that governs the federal lands in the 18 counties, he said.

“There was a promise made to us a long time ago,” Smith said. “We’d like to see them just live up to the act.”

The Oregon and California Revested Lands Sustained Yield Management Act of 1937 initially required that no less than 500 million board feet be harvested and sold annually in western Oregon. Many county officials and timber industry advocates continue to argue this level should be the annual minimum.

The average logging levels on the lands over the past decade have produced about 250 million board feet of timber. That compares to historic logging levels from the 1960s through the late 1980s that often surpassed 1 billion board feet, the BLM proposal notes.

But, according to the statute and to court interpretations, the original mandate applied only until the Bureau of Land Management determined a scientifically based sustained‑yield level. That level has shifted over time – and environmental advocates argue harvest levels must reflect current science and species protections, not historical logging volumes.

And experts say more logging on federal lands is unlikely to translate into many new jobs in the counties due to mill automation and consolidation.

Today, about 72% of all timber harvested in Oregon comes from private timberlands, mostly owned by large industrial timber companies and investment firms that typically rely on short‑rotation clear-cuts followed by rapid replanting.

In the past, it was public forests that supplied a larger share of the state’s timber and underpinned county budgets, local economies and community identity.

Historic levels

From the end of World War II through 1989, trees fell in staggering quantities across western Oregon, where hundreds of mills ran around the clock and tens of thousands of loggers, truck drivers, mill hands, longshore workers and others – often members of multigenerational families – relied on timber for their livelihoods.

Their work cemented Oregon’s status as one of the nation’s top timber‑producing regions, with Coos Bay hailed as the “Lumber Capital of the World.”

BLM managed the timber sales, running federal auctions where private logging companies bid for the rights to cut specific areas. The federal government then distributed half the timber receipts to counties, based on annual harvest revenue, timber prices and the amount of public forestland within each county.

Those payments funded core county services, from roads and schools to law enforcement. In Josephine County, for example, timber receipts paid for the sheriff’s office and much of county government for nearly a century, Smith said.

Harvests collapsed after the northern spotted owl listing under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 and the court orders and litigation that followed. The mills closed, thousands of people lost their jobs and county services deteriorated as timber receipts for the 18 counties plunged from over $109 million in 1989 to just $21 million by 1995.

Sweet, the Coos County commissioner, watched friends, neighbors and former classmates lose their livelihoods. Entire families slid into unemployment and generational poverty, he said.

“They had a wife, a baby and all of a sudden they didn’t have a job. There were no jobs to be had. They weren’t educated to go on to other places. And pretty soon families disintegrated and drinking and drugs took place. And that baby never saw his dad get up and go to work,” said Sweet, who is now 86 and spent his early career working in the forest and barging Oregon lumber from Coos County to California and Hawaii.

Today, that cycle has repeated several times, Sweet said. The average family income in Coos County is about 75% of the state average and the county’s high school graduation rate is far below the state average.

Meantime, the county government workforce was reduced from 550 to about 300 employees, with county offices open only part of the day. Jail capacity and the number of sheriff’s deputies were also slashed in half as multiple public‑safety tax levies failed to pass.

Similarly, in Josephine County, dozens of mills that employed thousands closed, leading to widespread unemployment, and the sheriff’s office patrols and other county public services dwindled. Rough & Ready Lumber, the last sawmill in Josephine County, closed in 2013. The average family income in Josephine County is now about 66% of the state average.

Though Congress adopted stopgap measures to keep timber‑dependent counties from financial collapse — including the repeatedly reauthorized Secure Rural Schools Act which provided federal funding for schools, roads, public safety and other needs — the payments steadily diminished over time. Counties must now choose whether to receive their share of timber receipts or the schools act payments.

The counties — many of which have some of the lowest property tax rates in the state — have struggled to pass local tax levies. Their finances have been further constrained by Oregon’s property tax limits under Measures 5 and 50, which restrict how fast local governments can increase revenue.

Last year, the federal government distributed about $28 million in direct timber revenue payments to the 18 counties — roughly a quarter of what they received in timber’s heyday. The highest amount, nearly $7 million, went to Douglas County, followed by over $4 million each to Jackson and Lane counties.

This year, the amount could be higher — in January, a new federal law altered how timber revenues are shared: Counties will now get 75% rather than half of the receipts.

Species, recreation under threat

Environmental advocates and some other Oregonians have little sympathy for counties’ financial woes or their desire to increase harvests and payments.

“Many of these counties have not taken steps to modernize their own revenue generating systems,” said Persell, the Oregon Wild attorney. “They’re exclusively reliant for so much of the funding on the federal government.”

Ramping up logging to 1960s levels would mean cutting into mature and older forests that provide habitat for protected species, he said, taking Oregon back to an era when aggressive timber cutting pushed the species toward collapse and reshaped watersheds in ways scientists are still trying to repair.

The owls have yet to recover, Persell said, partly because old-growth habitat is now even more scarce and climate change has added pressures. The federal lands are critical to their survival because they sit at lower elevations and offer some of the most biologically productive forests in the Pacific Northwest. They also provide habitat connectivity between the Cascade Range and the Coast Range, he said.

Many of the parcels that could be logged are also beloved recreation sites – including land along the Sandy River not far outside Portland, the Valley of the Giants west of Corvallis, parts of the Molalla River, Alsea Falls and the Rogue River, among others.

The logging proposal suggests the Trump administration wants to eliminate or severely reduce protections for older trees, rivers and streams, Persell said.

The plan doesn’t explain how increasing logging to “historic levels” would pass muster with the Endangered Species Act, which still requires the federal government to show that its actions won’t put protected species at risk.

That, Persell said, suggests the administration could soon finalize its plan to weaken the law — including eliminating the long‑standing rule that treats damaging a species’ habitat as harming the species itself — a change that could make it easier to approve more logging.

Trump’s logging executive order also directed the administration to reactivate the Endangered Species Committee — widely known as the “God Squad” — to waive species protections that stand in the way of expanded logging, he said.

It’s unclear if it will work the way that Trump seems to hope: The committee, created in the 1970s, has sweeping authority but to date has only twice exempted projects from protections.

Persell said environmental groups are mounting a campaign to stop the logging increase.

“We know that this administration wants to fully exploit our forest. That’s what Trump said in the executive order last year, ‘to fully exploit.’ We encourage everyone to use their voices and push back against this because this is not what Oregonians want for our public lands,” he said.

What’s next

Sweet said he hopes the logging increase comes through to help Coos County and the other counties. But it should be done via extended‑rotation harvests – letting trees grow much longer before cutting them – not the short‑rotation clear-cuts common on private forests, he said.

Longer rotations, he said, could support local economies, offer more habitat to species and help reduce the cost of building new homes.

“We still have mills that are running and they could easily add a couple of shifts,” Sweet said.

Environmental groups don’t support extended harvests on public lands. Mature trees should be left standing for hundreds of years to store carbon and develop into old growth habitats, Persell said.

“We do not believe our forests should be managed like a crop of corn,” he said. “So many of our forested lands in Oregon have already been converted into industrial tree farms. We need to protect remaining intact old-growth forests and recruit more of them on our public lands.”

The public can comment on the logging increase proposal until March 23.

BLM anticipates publishing a draft environmental impact statement this summer and making a final decision in early 2027, an agency spokesperson said.

Environmental groups are likely to sue and the lawsuits could delay increased logging for years – though the administration may try to ramp up timber production in Oregon regardless, relying on Trump’s logging executive order and the One Big Beautiful Bill.

This story was originally published on March 10, 2026 by The Oregonian/OregonLive.