The administration announced this week the evisceration of the publicly popular rule that since 2001 has saved taxpayers millions of dollars in subsidies by preventing road building on 58.5 million acres of national forest land. Although Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman claimed that she was saving the old policy from several pending lawsuits, this new rule is really nothing more than a phat giveaway for the timber industry.

At issue is the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, or Roadless Rule, which President Clinton created in 2001 to prevent road building and logging on about one-third of national forest lands. This rule has saved taxpayers millions of dollars a year by reducing taxpayer subsidies for logging roads. From 1998-2002 (the most recent available data), taxpayers paid $140 million to build logging roads in national forests.

Over the past century, taxpayers have subsidized the construction of a 380,000-mile road system that crisscrosses our national forests. This is like cramming a road system twice as long as the nation’s highway system into an area the size of Texas! Our forest road infrastructure is now so big that the Forest Service can’t afford to properly maintain it and has amassed a maintenance backlog of more than $10 billion.

Building more roads does not make sense for taxpayers, but the timber industry cannot get enough of them because they provide nearly free access to the most profitable timber. Once we pave the way to the trees, the Forest Service practically gives the timber away in a corporate-subsidy orgy. From 1992 to 1997, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates the Forest Service timber program lost a staggering $2 billion, an average annual loss of $333 million. TCS conducted a review of Forest Service documents for fiscal year 1998 and estimated the loss at $407 million for that year alone. By using accounting gimmicks that spread the losses over a number of years, the Forest Service admitted to losses of “only” $126 million. Sadly, no one knows how much the timber program has cost us in the past 6 years because the Forest Service has never replaced the faulty accounting system that it abandoned in 1998.

Under the Bush administration’s new rule, the old rule is abandoned and management of roadless areas will again be determined on a forest-by-forest basis, leaving at least 34 million acres of roadless open to road building, based on current forest management plans. In addition, governors of states with roadless areas will have the option to petition Secretary Veneman to create a statewide roadless management plan. This process is not required, discretion is left to the Secretary, and there is nothing to stop a governor from petitioning for weaker rules on roadless areas that exist under current forest management plans.

The forest lobby has done very well for itself under the current administration. It secured enormous subsidy windfalls under the guise of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act and wildfire management, and after waiting more than three years to see the roadless rule overturned, the timber industry can now put another notch in its tree stump.