Ruling Shows Court’s Eagerness to Scrutinize Trump Logging Plans

A recent federal court ruling tossing out a streamlined environmental review for three Oregon timber projects will point the way for conservation groups to challenge the Trump administration’s nationwide logging agenda, natural resources attorneys say.

Judge Michael McShane of the US District Court for the District of Oregon in his Jan. 13 ruling set aside a categorical exclusion under the National Environmental Policy Act called “CE-6.” The 1992 exclusion allowed for quick approval of logging projects designed to thin forests to reduce wildfire hazards.

Fast-tracking an expansion of logging on federal land is among President Donald Trump’s top priorities in order to cut lumber imports and grow domestic timber industry jobs. The administration is loosening public notice and environmental review requirements for logging and other projects under NEPA, and it’s rolling back protections for roadless areas in national forests in order to open them to possible logging projects.

This latest ruling “may serve as a beacon for other public interest groups as they confront efforts by the Trump administration to ramp up logging and limit public participation,” said Chris Winter, a law professor and executive director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and Environment at the University of Colorado Law School.

“It will likely serve as an important roadmap for other federal courts as they consider these cases,” he said.

The US Forest Service used the exclusion in 2021 and 2022 to approve three logging projects on about 91,000 acres in Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest without conducting a public environmental review. McShane remanded and set aside all three projects.

“This decision demonstrates how federal courts will scrutinize efforts to cut corners and bypass public engagement and careful environmental review,” Winter said.

Three environmental groups led by Oregon Wild filed suit against the logging projects in 2022. Their lawsuit is one of at least 30 cases nationwide filed by environmental and timber industry groups challenging some aspect of federal timber or vegetation management programs on Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land and their environmental impacts.

McShane ruled that the Forest Service arbitrarily and capriciously used CE-6 to allow for “unlimited commercial thinning.” The Forest Service failed to show that it considered the impacts of logging “at any scale, commercial or otherwise,” and there’s no evidence the agency used a “reasoned decision,” to permit the projects, he said.

The US Forest Service declined to comment Thursday.

‘Timber Dominance’

The three projects were planned for forests that are at high risk of catastrophic wildfire, and litigation stopping logging there imperils both forests and communities, said Nick Smith, spokesman for the American Forest Resource Council, an Oregon wood products industry group.

“The suggestion that these treatments are somehow illegitimate because some of the removed material is commercial misses the point entirely,” Smith said. “Whether trees have commercial value is irrelevant to the underlying purpose of these projects, which is reducing hazardous fuels and restoring forest conditions.”

CE-6 was never intended to be used for large-scale logging projects involving tens of thousands of acres, Winter said.

The plaintiff groups, including WildEarth Guardians and the GO Alliance, called CE-6 a logging “loophole” that allows the Forest Service to bypass environmental review to permit large-scale tree-cutting on federal lands.

The Forest Service “will no longer be able to use this bureaucratic loophole to hide the impacts of massive commercial logging projects or exclude the public from having a voice on how our public lands are managed,” John Persell, staff attorney for Oregon Wild, said in a statement.

Still, CE-6 was just one of dozens of categorical exclusions the Forest Service can use to assert “timber dominance” over national forests, said Susan Jane Brown, principal attorney at Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm in Oregon.

“There remains other tools to expedite timber harvest such as the emergency situation determination authorities, emergency NEPA compliance, or even regular NEPA procedures such as environmental assessments with limited analysis and public engagement,” she said.

“I don’t think the loss of CE-6 is going to slow or stop the Forest Service’s newly-rediscovered logging agenda, but I do think this case presages more litigation to come,” Brown said.

The case is Oregon Wild v. US Forest Service, D. Or., No. 1:22-cv-01007, 1/13/26.