In 2001, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) asserted the power to prohibit road maintenance, road construction, and timber harvest across the national forests, locking away 85.5 million acres of American forests—an area twice the size of California—without congressional authorization. That assertion of power became the “Roadless Rule.”
Over the following 25 years, the Rule has been repeatedly challenged, halted, and forced back onto the national forests. Its constant seesawing has forced everyone who lives or works in the affected areas, particularly Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, to live in regulatory purgatory. When the Rule is being enforced, no one can maintain access roads or make use of the resources within those forests. It remains in effect while it’s challenged in court. And even when it has been temporarily lifted in the Tongass, government agencies refuse to authorize new projects, confident that a new court order or the next administration will revive the Rule and lock everyone back out.
The Rule has prevented Inside Passage Electric Cooperative (IPEC)—a nonprofit Alaska electric utility, which serves native populations dispersed across remote portions of the Tongass—from pursuing hydroelectric and geothermal projects that could make their energy sources more reliable and affordable for the rural communities they serve. Under the Rule, IPEC can’t maintain existing roads or build new ones. Instead, they must rely on helicopters to transport materials for any projects they hope to pursue. But that isn’t financially feasible for the nonprofit. In 2010, for example, that forced dependency ballooned the cost of just one project from $17.5 million to $65 million.
IPEC partnered with Pacific Legal Foundation to file a federal lawsuit challenging the Roadless Rule in 2023. In October 2026, after the USDA proposed rescinding the Roadless Rule, IPEC joined PLF again to support the rescission.
They filed a comment supporting the USDA’s proposal while also warning that the rescission needs the right legal foundation to be permanent, rather than just another temporary reversal in the Rule’s 25-year history. The Rule must be struck down because the Department of Agriculture never had the authority to enact it in the first place.
The people with the greatest motivation to care for the areas impacted by the Roadless Rule are the communities and businesses that live and work there. Bureaucrats should not be able to unilaterally prohibit them from accessing land that could otherwise provide opportunity, employment, and key resources to millions of Americans—particularly when that prohibition has no legal basis.
What’s At Stake?
- Sound natural resources policy recognizes that conservation and the productive use of our resources go hand in hand.
- Bureaucrats and agency officials should not be able to unilaterally prohibit local communities and businesses from accessing land that could otherwise provide opportunity, employment, and key resources to millions of Americans.
- Government agencies can only exercise the power Congress gives them. Because the Department of Agriculture never had the authority to enact the Roadless Rule, it is invalid and should be struck down permanently.
