[Updated: Sun., June 29, 2025, 9:37am]
Conservationists can’t catch a break.
On Monday, June 23, Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough blocked Republican Senator Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands — a move celebrated by environmental groups like Los Padres ForestWatch.
But the same day, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced her intent to roll back the 2001 Roadless Rule, stripping protections from 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest lands, including more than 600,000 acres of some of the most remote and ecologically intact landscapes in the Los Padres National Forest, according to ForestWatch.
Los Padres contains 35 “inventoried roadless areas,” spanning much of Santa Barbara and other nearby counties, that would become open to commercial logging, vegetation management, and possible infrastructure development.
In her announcement, Rollins called the rule “outdated” and “overly restrictive” and said that rolling it back will allow for fire prevention, “responsible timber production,” and economic development in the forestry sector.
However, ForestWatch argues that roadless areas provide vital habitat for endangered species, safeguard watersheds, support forests that regulate the climate, and offer opportunities for backcountry recreation — including 349 miles of trails for hiking and other activities.
They claim that eliminating the rule will not actually benefit wildfire prevention. Rather, they suggest it’s a disguise for clear-cutting land and lining the pockets of the timber industry.
“President Trump’s rollback of the Roadless Rule is a dangerous handout to the timber industry and a direct attack on some of our wildest public lands,” said Bryant Baker, director of conservation and research at ForestWatch.
With support from ForestWatch and other environmental organizations, Central Coast lawmakers, including Senator Alex Padilla, are co-sponsoring a bill — called the Roadless Area Conservation Act — to make the Roadless Rule permanent and codify its protections into law.
On the other side of the aisle, Republican Senator Mike Lee had said he was revising his plan to sell-off public land before announcing on June 28 that he was pulling the proposal altogether from Trump’s mega tax bill. The Utah representative had suggested new language that removed the sale of any land in National Forests and instead would have limited the sales to land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, encompassing 1.2 million acres of public land in 11 western states, including California. Land would have been limited to areas “within five miles of a population center,” but Lee did not make it clear what constitutes a population center.
However, following intense intraparty opposition, Lee announced on Saturday that he would be pulling his proposal from the bill. In a post on the social media site X, Lee said it was because he was “unable to secure clear, enforceable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families — not to China, not to BlackRock, and not to any foreign interests” due to the strict rules governing the budgetary process being used by Republicans to pass the bill.
According to a ForestWatch analysis of public land data, some 281,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land in Kern, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties would have met the new criteria Senator Lee suggested.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect Senator Mike Lee’s Saturday announcement that he has pulled his proposed public land selloff altogether from Trump’s tax bill.
