This is a series on Roadless Rule misinformation. Read: Part 1 Here | Part 3 Here
On September 2, 2025, the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia rules that the Trump Administration could pull back $20 billion in funds that were awarded to non-profits to fight Climate Change. The EPA Inspector General reports that at least one of these organizations went from generating $100 in revenue to receiving $2 billion dollars. The “grant agreement provided 90 days to complete ‘How to Develop a Budget’ training even though the organization was instructed to start spending down the balance in the first 21 days of that timeframe.”
With a federal government that spends money like this, we have to roll our eyes any time we hear the argument that the reason we should keep the Roadless Rule in place is because the US Forest Service doesn’t have enough funds to maintain the roads on the land it manages. It’s widely reported that the USFS currently faces a $5 billion maintenance backlog on the 380,000 miles of roads that it manages.
This is a significant backlog, but we reject the claim that this is a reason to retain the Roadless Rule for several reasons:
There is money in the budget that can be allocated towards this.
While it’s easy to say the impounded climate grants could be repurposed for something like addressing the USFS road maintenance backlog, that is just the lowest hanging fruit. And let’s be clear, steering $2 billion in taxpayer funds to an organization with only $100 in revenue is insanity. If all we do is choose not to flush public funds down the Big Green toilet, we would have adequate funding to maintain basic public lands infrastructure like roads for several years.
Another source of misallocated funding is the nearly $1 billion per year that is dedicated to the Land Water and Conservation Fund, which has primarily been used to create perverse incentives to dispossess private landowners of their land in order to launder the land into the public estate. A few days ago Interior Secretary Burgum released new guidance for these funds, which allows these funds to be used for a broader range of purposes – including maintaining recreation access infrastructure. While it remains to be seen how this guidance might apply to USFS lands, it demonstrates that the current Administration is willing to be creative in utilizing federal dollars for maintaining infrastructure.
More Management Leads to More Resources, Which Enables More Management, Which Leads to More Resources…
Historically, USFS roads were built and maintained by private companies who purchased timber sales or other forest users like grazing permittees. It is still common for the agency to require its private sector contractors to post bonds prior to completing any project that will cover the costs of things like building, maintaining, or decommissioning roads. In the 1990s the litigation related to the Northern Spotted Owl, and a flood of subsequent legal actions have essentially driven the commercial timber production companies off of our national forests. The entire industry collapsed, and to no one’s surprise, the fleets of privately owned logging operations that used to do the lions share of maintaining the USFS road system went out of business. Now those who played key roles in driving this industry out of business are lamenting the lack of funds within the agency to do this work at the same time they consistently block all active management projects through litigation and their support of policies like the Roadless Rule. We comment on hundreds USFS of projects a year to ensure that recreation access is analyzed and protected in these projects, and many of them get held up in court by litigation from anti-access groups. It is these same anti-access groups that are trying to convince everyone that the maintenance backlog is a justifiable reason to set aside 45 million acres of our national forests for non-management.
Road Maintenance and Construction Costs Are Likely Inflated
We recently had a conversation with a BRC member in Washington State who had attended a meeting to explore alternatives with the state transportation department to restore public access to Evans Creek OHV Area in the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest. A major bridge has been closed, and so the main state highway that accesses this OHV area and an entrance point to Mt. Rainier National Park is inaccessible. In the meeting there was a proposal to create a new route across privately owned timber lands. We were told the timber companies would allow public use of their roads, but in order to be exempt from liability the roads would need to be graded and maintained to specific state standards. We were told this would have resulted in 14 miles of necessary maintenance on an already constructed gravel road. This alternative was rejected because the state agency representatives said that it would cost $160 million to maintain the road to the necessary state standards. The contact who relayed this experience to us happens to be a contractor that has experience building and maintaining roads, so he knew what the material and labor costs would be to do the necessary work. He said he could do the work and the agency could drop one of the zeros off of the end of the $160 million number. The agency said that wouldn’t be possible. He said they could drop two zeros off the end. He told me he still would have made more money from that price than any job he had ever done. The agency said that wouldn’t be possible, and ultimately the idea was rejected.
We just ran the following prompt into ChatGPT: “What would be a fair bid for a contractor in Washington to resurface and maintain a 10 mile gravel road that is already constructed in mountainous terrain. I mostly just need to see what material costs would be and the cost to contract the heavy machinery to get it done. Assume that the property that contains the road has gravel that could be extracted for the road base.”
Take into consideration that it is common for the to USFS operate its own gravel crushing pits to improve the economics of maintaining its roads.
Here are the three scenarios from the AI prompt:
A. Delivered material, medium contractor (typical western WA delivered price)
- Material mid ($68/yd³): $532,000.
- Equipment & labor (typical): $120,000 (10 × $12k/mile).
- Total ≈ $652,000. pacifictopsoils.com+1
B. Best case with on-site material + mobile crush (if pit is ideal, easy access)
- On-site processing mid: $70,000.
- Equipment & labor (low/typical): $60,000.
- Total ≈ $130,000. Powerscreen of Washington+1
C. High complexity (delivered high quality stone, long hauls, heavy drainage work)
- Material high: $587,000.
- Equipment & labor (high): $250,000.
- Total ≈ $837,000. pacifictopsoils.com+1
So—realistic Washington range: about $130k (best/onsite) to $800k+ (delivered & complex). Per-mile: ~$13k–$80k+ / mile depending on material source and terrain.
The contact we had this conversation with believed he could source the materials cheaply and do the road maintenance work for a cost that would be in the 6 figures, which is confirmed by the estimates from ChatGPT, yet the agency was telling the public it would cost 9 figures to do the work.
So in this case, either the agency was completely lying about the cost of the road to dissuade the public from supporting that option. Or, it is actually true that the government pays these inflated prices, and rent-seeking opportunists are making out like bandits with our tax dollars. We have to assume it is likely a combination of both scenarios, and there is probably also significant cost inflation to cover onerous regulatory compliance and litigation costs when it comes to dealing with the USFS.
Regulations like the Roadless Rule are designed to inflate these costs. Then Roadless Rule supporters complain that the roads are too expensive to maintain. When we hear Roadless Rule supporters claim we can’t afford to build and maintain the roads in our forests, what we hear is that the public land system we’ve engineered is too incompetent and/or corrupt. We need to get this system out of the way of the American people who know how to build things and let them get to work. We can start by eliminating unnecessary road blocks – like the Roadless Rule.
Read more…
More to come— so stay tuned! But don’t delay letting your representatives and the USDA know that you support rescinding the Roadless Rule. You can do both via the form below. Comments are due September 19th!
