Joe submitted this as a comment, but I thought it was worthy of its own post. Joe is a guest, so please remember our guidelines. Whatever is in Project 2025 seems to be the druthers of the chosen authors or their delegatees. Later we’ll look at the Interior section and be able to compare. When you think about it, Project 2025 is often evoked as a Uniquely Bad Thing, but if you look under the hood (as with so many other documents!) there are a variety of items, which individually we could agree or disagree with. It seems to depend on who was selected to author that particular section and their unique philosophies, history and points of irritation. People can wield the term “Project 2025” as a kind of apotropaic magic, but I think it’s worth discussing the relevant individual elements.
Back to Joe:
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Origins of the Mandate
The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise was the organization’s attempt to provide reforms to the whole of the federal government for a new administration—or a retained one—in 2024. Heritage has been providing this service for presidential election years since 1979, predictably offering its agenda to both parties, though only Republicans have employed it over the years.
We know this because we are the two authors of “Reform Forest Service Wildfire Management,” as it appears on Page 308 in Section 3: The General Welfare, #10, The Department of Agriculture, edited by Daren Bakst. My vast network of contacts in Washington led to an invitation in late 2023 to contribute to the document, and what followed was a rigorous process of distilling decades of frustration and analysis into a constrained format.
It was not at all clear at the time that President Trump would win. Along with perhaps every other organization and department, people across the policy landscape were preparing for the transition to whoever came next by documenting aspirational changes and improvements to policies and practices across the government. Our effort was, as far as we knew, a forlorn hope—a chance to register our own and a much broader disaffection with Forest Service management of our shared natural resources in the first quarter of the new century.
Why Fire?
Editor Bakst was allotted approximately twenty pages to succinctly characterize the sprawling Department of Agriculture, in which “nutrition assistance” transfer payment programs account for 79 percent ($161 billion) of all department expenditures, excluding the Forest Service. He was further allocated roughly six and a half pages for references. With a constrained budget of 700 words to characterize the most urgent reform for the Forest Service, we chose the most divergent practice and program: FIRE.
The key point of contention was the dramatic increase in the use of wildfire—or managed fire—as the agency’s principal natural resource management tool following three decades of increasingly onerous lawsuit settlements. The net result since 1996, in our opinion, was that the Office of General Counsel abandoned the forest planning process, leaving the Forest Service defenseless and unsupported against the rising tide of increasingly vociferous environmentalist preferences for public land management. Wildfire, however imperfect a tool, became the Forest Service’s last active management tool, one it could apply without any interference—or input—from anyone.
We identified two themes: wildfire policy, specifically the “managed fire” aspect of fire policy since Chief Tom Tidwell signed the Chevron Deference memo in 2009, and the Forest Service’s transition from multiple-use management to the “all fire is good fire” paradigm being introduced throughout the agency to address the backlog of fire in so-called “fire-depleted ecosystems.”
The Law and Its Abandonment
Since the publication in 2014 of the National Cohesive Strategy, which states the vision for this century as “to safely and effectively extinguish fire, when needed; use fire where allowable; manage our natural resources; and as a Nation, live with wildland fire,” the Forest Service has abandoned its congressionally authorized mission to “make provisions for the protection against destruction by fire.” The abandonment of fidelity to the law—the Organic Administration Act of 1897—by the premier conservation agency of the United States in creating, using, exacerbating, and wreaking havoc and destruction in the forested and grassland ecosystems of the Nation identified itself as the primary reform the Forest Service required.
We called for the agency to abandon its outlaw infatuation with pyro-silviculture and return to the basics of sound forest management on its jurisdictional lands. In invoking the mission statement, a clear contrast emerged with the wanton destructive practices of pyro-silviculture, which left both National Forest System lands and adjoining private lands blackened, denuded, and unable to support human requirements for life, liberty, and property. We know of no one who has ever forfeited their life or home to an “escaped timber sale.”
New Mexico and the Catalyst for Reform
Our drafting of “Reform Forest Service Wildfire Management” occurred in 2023, about one year after the nadir of the Forest Service and its arsonist role in the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon, Cerro Pelado, and Black Fire conflagrations in New Mexico. Spending time on-the-ground and with people in the vast post-fire environment causes an individual to think hard about whether embracing and employing a “stone-age” mentality to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation’s forest and grasslands for present and future generations” is something that should be happening in the twenty-first century.
Frank and I discussed our aspirational outcomes should the opportunity ever arise to see real reform. We wrote our wish list and various thoughts about what could and should happen in the best of all worlds. Our contact at the Foundation was a merciless editor. The end result is the half-page of our thoughts that you find in the Project 2025 document.
What We Did Not Address
We did not address reorganization, the agency’s almost suicidal countenancing of a “resistance” to the Trump administration, the terrified institutional response to COVID, the embrace of work-from-home as a “safety” measure until staff were forced back in early 2025—long after the rest of the world had returned to work—the failure of multiple-use management over forty years, the failure of agency attorneys to back agency decisions rather than settle everything, or the disastrous decisions to “let burn” (wildfire use, managed fire, reintroducing fire, applied wildfire) across millions of acres of the West. All of this deserved scrutiny, but 700 words impose their own discipline.
The Whirlwind
While Project 2025 – Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise was exceptionally limited in scope, the other changes now being implemented at the Forest Service are long overdue and quite deserving. The wholesale abandonment by the Forest Service of bedrock conservation laws and the embrace of destructive, uncontrollable physical forces to manage public natural resources have now reaped the whirlwind of reform.
If the Forest Service would like to take an honest look at how it, and many other departments and agencies, arrived at this appalling point in history, the first clue is the mirror. The opportunity for reform arose, for better or worse, and it did so because the agency’s hubris made it inevitable.
Here is the post in Project 2025 verbatim:
Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise
Reform Forest Service Wildfire Management. The United States Forest Service is one of four federal government land management agencies that administer 606 million acres, or 95 percent of the 640 million acres of surface land area managed by the federal government.115 Located within the USDA, the Forest Service manages the National Forest System, which is comprised of 193 million acres.116 As explained by the USDA, “The USDA Forest Service’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.”117
The Forest Service should focus on proactive management of the forests and grasslands that does not depend heavily on burning. There should be resilient forests and grasslands in the wake of management actions. Wildfires have become a primary vegetation management regime for national forests and grasslands.118 Recognizing the need for vegetation management, the Forest Service has adopted “pyro-silviculture” using “unplanned” fire,119 such as unplanned human-caused fires, to otherwise accomplish vegetation management.120
The Forest Service should instead be focusing on addressing the precipitous annual amassing of biomass in the national forests that drive the behavior of wildfires. By thinning trees, removing live fuels and deadwood, and taking other preventive steps, the Forest Service can help to minimize the consequences of wildfires.
Increasing timber sales could also play an important role in the effort to change the behavior of wildfire because there would be less biomass. Timber sales and timber harvested in public forests dropped precipitously in the early 1990s and still remain very low. For example, in 1988, the volume of timber sold and harvested by volume was about 11 billion and 12.6 billion board feet (BBF), respectively.121 In 2021, timber sold was 2.8 BBF and timber harvested was 2.4 BBF.
In 2018, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13855 to, among other things, promote active management of forests and reduce wildfire risks.122 The executive order stated, “Active management of vegetation is needed to treat these dangerous conditions on Federal lands but is often delayed due to challenges associated with regulatory analysis and current consultation requirements.”123 It further explained the need to reduce regulatory obstacles to fuel reduction in forests created by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.124
The next Administration should:
Champion executive action, consistent with law, and proactive legislation to reduce wildfires. This would involve embracing Executive Order 13855, building upon it, and working with lawmakers to promote active management of vegetation, reduce regulatory obstacles to reducing fuel buildup, and increase timber sales.
— 308 —
Signed: Joe Reddan, Chief Forester Flexilis Forestry LLC & Frank Carroll, Chief Forester Wildfire Pros., authors of Reform the Forest Service, Project 2025 – Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise [our names appear on pages under contributors on pages XXVI (F. Carroll ProfessionaL Forest Management) and page XXIX (J.Reddan Flexilis Forestry LLC)]
Thanks, Sharon!
Sharon,
From someone periodically looking in from the outside, I found Mr. Reddan’s “comment” rather refreshing and timely. Thank you for posting it.
Reddan mentioned the 2014 National Cohesive Strategy’s vision for this century. These visions come and go with each administration, but it did ring a bell.
Relative to “The Law and Its Abandonment” and recycling some 70+-years-worth of family doings (pencil and paper) with government entities and USFS in particular through 2018, I ran across a GAO/RCED-99-65, B-281890, April 2, 1999, report: A Cohesive Strategy is Needed to Address Catastrophic Wildfire Threats.
Here is an excerpt from the authors of the 1999, report’s conclusion:
“We also believe that the activities planned by the Forest Service may not be sufficient and may not be completed during the estimated 10- to 25-year “window of opportunity” remaining for effective action before damage from uncontrollable wildfires becomes widespread. The tinderbox that is now the interior West likely cannot wait that long for a cohesive strategy to be implemented. Simply allowing nature to take its inevitable course may cost more – not only for fire suppression, but also in human lives and damage to natural resources, human health, property, and infrastructure – than would undertaking strategic actions now.”
I think that, that 1999, “window of opportunity”, in whichever form people today wish to recognize it as, has long since expired.
In 2002, a young new FS employee remarked to me how excited she was to be a part of the “new” FS. When traveling through burned out forest, rangeland and homes I often wonder if her initial excitement has carried over the past 24 years.
Randy,
The 2014 National Cohesive Strategy is not a passing fancy, as was the April 1999 GAO Report commissioned by the late Congresswoman. The National Cohesive Strategy is authorized by the Federal Land Assistance Management Act (FLAME P.L. 111-140), a failed budget gimmick by the late Raul Grijalva in 2010 for the Fiscal Year 2011 “Continuing Resolution” to eliminate “fire borrowing.”
Section 3 of the FLAME Act requires a “Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy,” including, among other things, a notice to inform neighbors of the National Forest System, a notice of prescribed fire. A failing of Congress is to repeal ineffective laws, and the FLAME Act is in the neighborhood of the Logan Act and countless other non-enforceable laws. The thing is, our latent bureaucracy has reviewed the FLAME Act through the National Cohesive Strategy only once since 2014, in 2023.
Yet, in the Federal District for Utah, a district Court Judge, Jill N. Parish, used a wildly confused rationale for rejecting the claim of the Strawberry Water Users Association (SWUA) under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) because the “National Cohesive Strategy” requires fuel management, while cajoling federal agency personnel to “use fire where allowable” (on the terms of the Forest Service Uinta/Wasatch-Cache NF) to immolate tens of thousands of acres in The Bald Mountain and Pole Creek Fire of 2018. But that was all fine with the justice, while the citizens were left “holding the bag” for property damage and financial ruin caused by the United State’s interpretation of a failed and useless act.
Thank you Joe for the explanation. Neighboring ANF among other follow the same suit.
“There should be resilient forests and grasslands in the wake of management actions.”
If this statement were categorically true, perhaps public support for “active management” would be stronger. The key word used here is “should” and the fact that this word is used tells me that the typical outcome of management actions is contrary to that expressed intent.
Huh?
A quibble with the author’s criticism of the Office of General Counsel “settling too many cases.” I don’t think it is deserved. I am a lawyer and former policy maker at DOI as a political appointee. In the private sector, I have intervened on behalf of companies in support of FS decisions in environmental NGO litigation against the FS. As Assistant Secretary of Land and Minerals I worked closely with my counterpart, Under Secretary at USDA, on President Bush’s Healthy Forest Initiative. First, in litigation, it is not the agency lawyers driving the bus on settlement- it is DOJ. Even as a high ranking political appointee I could not tell DOJ how to resolve litigation. They will consider the agency’s policy perspective but they decide whether to settle a case based on other overarching values- risk, precedent, etc. Second, it is a rare General Counsel’s office or DOI Solicitors Office that describes its role as policymaking. Most don’t do policymaking but advise policymakers on the confines or opportunities in existing law. Finally, settlement is what the court’s favor- it is a value widely upheld by courts to resolve matters rather than litigate them.
Thanks for that clarification, Rebecca! For this post in 2011, I copied these from Chief Thomas’s book..
And
Federal law requires DOJ to represent federal agencies in the vast majority of instances; agencies are generally prohibited from using their own attorneys to represent them in court – or to hire outside counsel. (The main exception to this rule involves independent commissions like FERC.)
The tension between DOJ and the agencies is probably inevitable. Agency personnel have often invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in crafting their positions and do not take kindly to a DOJ reaction along the lines of “we can’t (or won’t) defend this in court,” ocassionally accompanied by the implicit addition: “you agency people didn’t do a very good job.” The same dynamic is often present between local police (who want an indictment) and the relevant prosceutor (who believes the cops have been sloppy).
I don’t know to what extent, if at all, the ongoing turmoil in the federal government, and within DOJ in particular, is affecting this long-standing dynamic.
This comment was just posted from the “Cowboy Site” on Facebook. This was my experience beginning in 1993 when the OGC began rejecting our decision documents and settling lawsuits in the environmentalists’ favor, leading to the end of active management and the rise of “management by wildfire use,” IMO.
Elko, Nevada. 1978. Margaret Byfield and her family buy a ranch in central Nevada. It is a combination of private land and federal grazing allotments — the same arrangement that has allowed ranching families to operate across the American West for over a century.
They work the land. They build the fences. They manage the water. They raise the cattle.
Then the lawsuits begin.
The story of how environmental litigation became a primary weapon against American ranching is one of the most consequential and least-covered stories in rural America. It does not happen in a single dramatic moment. It happens the way water erodes stone — slowly, persistently, until the ground beneath a ranching family’s feet simply gives way.
The mechanism is called “sue and settle.” An environmental organization files a lawsuit against a federal agency — the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service — alleging that the agency has failed to protect a species, a watershed, or a habitat. The agency, rather than fighting the lawsuit through the courts at public expense, negotiates a settlement. The settlement contains new restrictions. Grazing allotments are reduced. Water access is limited. Land that a ranching family has worked for generations becomes inaccessible by legal decree, and no rancher was ever a party to the proceedings.
The family finds out when the paperwork arrives.
Margaret Byfield eventually became the executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, an organization dedicated to fighting what she calls federal and state land grabs executed through environmental law. She testified before Congress about what she watched happen to her family and to families like hers across the West. Her testimony described something that most Americans outside of ranch country do not understand: that environmental organizations receive millions of dollars in federal funding each year, that they use that funding to file lawsuits against the same federal agencies that fund them, that settlements reached behind closed doors reshape land use policy for entire regions, and that the ranching families most directly affected have no seat at the table.
The congressional hearing that received Byfield’s testimony was convened by the House Oversight Committee in 2026, examining how burdensome regulations have harmed farmers and ranchers. It was not a small hearing. Multiple witnesses testified about overlapping networks of environmental groups, government agencies, and universities that Byfield described as “a closed loop of influence that drives policy, messaging, and enforcement.”
The World Wildlife Fund has explicitly stated that cattle are destroying the planet. The Nature Conservancy has partnered with agricultural trade associations to shape policy from the inside. These are not fringe positions. They are the public positions of organizations with budgets larger than most state agriculture departments.
On February 11, 2026, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins stood before cameras in Washington flanked by country music artist John Rich, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, Representative James Comer, and several farming families who had personally been targets of what the USDA now calls “agricultural lawfare.” She announced the Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework — a formal initiative to defend agricultural producers from politically motivated legal action targeting their operations and their land.
The framing of the announcement was deliberate. This was not a regulatory adjustment or a quiet policy memo. It was a declaration. The United States was built by people who work the land, Rollins said, and the ability to work, protect, and own that land is the American dream made tangible.
The response from ranching communities was immediate and emotional. Not because they were naive about the political theater involved in a Washington press conference. But because for many of them, it was the first time in a long time that someone in a position of federal authority had named what was happening to them and called it by its right name.
They had watched their grazing allotments shrink through paperwork. They had watched their water rights challenged by organizations that had never set foot on their land. They had watched neighbors who had ranched for four generations walk away not because they failed at ranching, but because they could not afford to fight a lawsuit filed by an organization with a legal team, a communications department, and a federal grant.
The scale of what has been lost is difficult to quantify. Ranching operations are not factories that can be restarted. A breeding herd takes years to build. Grazing land that goes unworked does not simply wait for the rancher to return — it changes. Invasive species move in. Fire fuel loads build up. Water infrastructure falls apart. The land that a family managed as a working ecosystem for generations reverts to something that serves neither ranching nor the wildlife the lawsuits claimed to protect.
The House Oversight hearing documented this pattern across multiple states. Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon — the same story repeated with different names, different agencies, different organizations, and the same outcome. A ranching family that built something over generations loses it to a process they cannot access, cannot afford to fight, and were never invited to participate in.
The Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework is a start. It does not restore what has already been lost. It does not unwind decades of sue-and-settle agreements that have already reshaped land use across the West. It does not return the allotments that were quietly removed while ranching families were busy working.
What it does is put a name on a practice that has operated largely in the shadows of administrative law. It signals, at least at the federal level, that the next lawsuit filed against a ranching family for using land their family has worked for a century may face a different kind of opponent than a tired family alone with a stack of legal bills.
Whether that signal translates into durable protection is the question that ranching communities across the West are watching very carefully.
Margaret Byfield bought that Nevada ranch in 1978. She is still fighting for it.
How many families like hers have already been pushed out — and who is counting? 👇
—Sources—
USDA Press Release — “USDA Announces Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework to End Agricultural Lawfare,” February 11, 2026
House Oversight Committee — “Wrap Up: Burdensome Regulations Harm Farmers and Ranchers,” April 2026
American Stewards of Liberty congressional testimony, 2026
This in particular caught my attention, “…that environmental organizations receive millions of dollars in federal funding each year, that they use that funding to file lawsuits against the same federal agencies that fund them,…”
I tried doing a search to find evidence of environmental organizations using federal funds to file lawsuits against the federal government, but came up with nothing. Can you direct me to where I can find such information?
The reference is to the Equal Access to Justice Act, which requires the government to pay successful plaintiffs’ attorneys fees under certain circumstances. It is axiomatic on the right that the act is in effect a federal subsidy for environmental group lawsuits, although some have noted that the act was originally passed at the behest of business interests, who continue to oppose its repeal.
A cynic might argue that the best way for the government to reduce its EAJA payments is to lose fewer lawsuits. I will leave it to readers to judge the merits of that assertion.
Ahhh, I didn’t read it that way. I always called that process “reloading the gun.” Correct me if I’m wrong (I have taken exactly one law class), this can happen in lawsuits that don’t involve the government too, so it isn’t necessarily any kind of special deal.
Unlike other countries, the American Rule does not provide for the recovery of attorneys fees from the losing parties. You can provide for that by contract or some federal statutes provide for fee shifting in the case of litigation. Civil rights enforcement is one example. EJUS is used by prevailing environmental groups to recover fees from DOJ. DOJ typically engages in an internal process and negotiations with the NGO before paying these fees. Hourly rate, how successful was the NGO, was the time charged reasonable etc. These fees can also result in litigation. The losing agency can be “charged” for these fees by DOJ ( shifting agency dollars to DOJ’s judgment fund).
Thanks, Rebecca. I wonder wehther we could FOIA what agency dollars have been tapped over the last 5 years or so? If DOJ is spending its own money if they lose, wouldn’t that make them always want to settle? I wish we had a retired DOJ person who would explain how it all looks from their perspective.
“The agency, rather than fighting the lawsuit through the courts at public expense, negotiates a settlement. The settlement contains new restrictions.”
I’m not remembering many (any?) cases that I was involved in or reviewed where new restrictions were imposed by a settlement. What I have seen is cases identified by attorneys as weak, and the agency agrees to redo the decision process and maybe the decision. That is done with full public participation including any affected private parties.
The apparent misstatements and exaggerations in this comment diminish the credibility of the commenter. It would be interesting to look at a specific example.
While the Byfield family’s story can illicit many “that’s just wrong” feelings and this current administration’s actions, it is important to keep in mind that the Byfield’s federal grazing allotments are not theirs to do as they see fit. Those allotments are not like the family’s private land holdings, nor should those allotments be managed similarly. The family is authorized by permit to manage those allotments on behalf of the American public who are the true owners of those federal grazing allotments. If a permittee is not willing to manage those federal grazing allotments on behalf of the American public, then the permittee should not be authorized to use those allotments.
This is the key question: to what extent do grazing permits constitute property interests? Under the Taylor Grazing Act the answer is clear: None. They are licenses, nothing more.
But reality is, as always, a bit more complex. The TGA only authorized ranchers to receive permits (rather, for the most part, than leases) because the act also established advisory bodies largely comprised of ranchers to administer the act at the local level. So in the act’s early implementation, the question of whether a grazing permit created a property interest was for practical purposes irrelevant.
As the comments in this thread indicate, that is probably no longer true.
In 2022 the Texas group calling itself “American Stewards of Liberty” with ties to the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion presented anti-Earth resolutions to a receptive Otero County Commission and the San Juan County Commission heard two resolutions dealing with land use issues after watching ASL’s Margaret Byfield’s dog and pony show. Byfield lobbyied the Yankton, South Dakota County Commission appearing for a second time in the mostly Democratic district near the Yankton Sioux Nation.
https://www.yankton.net/opinion/editorials/article_72582214-e3db-11ed-8d90-0f3e3d9164b9.html