Every one of them anchored to the agency’s own words: its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, its fire data, its water analysis, its economics, the alternatives it built and refused to study. This is the record a public comment can demand answers from.
Build your comment from this recordFrom the DEIS’s own Table 2. Under both action alternatives, the Tongass National Forest keeps nothing.
| Alt 1 · No action | Alt 2 · Rescission | Alt 3 · Modified | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acres under national prohibitions | 44.7M | 0 | 13M |
| Acres removed from protection | — | 44.7M | 31.7M |
| Tongass roadless acres protected | 9.3M | 0 | 0 |
| Potentially affected environment | — | 40.1M acres | 27.2M acres |
Human-caused ignition density is 22.4 fires per million acres per year on roaded National Forest System land against 3.0 inside the affected roadless areas (DEIS Table 21, 2014–2024), and the DEIS states that human-caused ignitions increase in abundance with proximity to roads.
The effects analysis itself concedes that road access could increase the number and frequency of wildfires.
The demand: That the agency quantify the expected increase in human-caused ignitions from new road access and weigh it against the claimed reduction in wildfire hazard.
The DEIS records millions of acres of fuels reduction inside inventoried roadless areas under the existing rule, while about 60 miles of permanent road were built inside them since 2013.
The record does not show the road prohibition preventing treatment.
The demand: That the agency state how many acres of treatment were prevented by the roadless prohibition specifically, as distinct from budget limits.
Road appropriations fell from $234 million in 2004 to $73 million in 2024, against a deferred maintenance backlog of $6.9 billion for roads and bridges, with supplemental funding expiring.
The DEIS states that road mileage, deferred maintenance and management costs are likely to increase under the proposal.
The demand: That the agency name the funding source for new road construction and maintenance and state the projected change in the backlog.
“Lack of maintenance commonly has detrimental effects on water quality. Insufficient maintenance funding is a key reason for the lack of adequate road maintenance.”
The same document proposes adding road mileage against a maintenance shortfall it identifies as a cause of water quality damage.
The demand: That the agency reconcile the proposed increase in road mileage with the maintenance shortfall its own analysis identifies as a water quality cause.
The Cost Benefit Analysis: “the net present value discounted at 3 percent over 15 years is estimated to be -$92 to $199 million (-$70 to $152 million discounted at 7 percent) and uses maximum potential costs and benefits that do not account for uncertainty.” The cost column excludes the road construction ($80,000 to $100,000 per mile, roughly $500,000 per mile in Alaska), maintenance and fuel treatment costs the same document quantifies, and the upper bound assumes maximum potential harvest the analysis itself calls uncertain.
An economically significant rule whose own analysis spans from a $92 million loss to a $199 million gain has not shown a benefit; the analysis was published in an agency file folder rather than on the docket, and the rule’s claim that impacts “could exceed $100 million” (91 FR 53830) appears with no arithmetic anywhere, though every quantified annual line item is under $22 million.
The demand: That the agency place the Cost Benefit Analysis on the docket, restate the net present value with its own quantified road and fuels costs included in the cost column, and show the arithmetic behind the statement that impacts could exceed $100 million.
Executive Order 14154, Unleashing American Energy, is a stated basis for the action, while the minerals analysis finds no net change in oil, gas or coal production and the rule itself certifies under Executive Order 13211 that it is not a significant energy action.
The agency says three separate times that this action has no energy effect, and cites an energy order as a reason for it anyway.
The demand: That the agency explain why the order is cited as a basis when its own analysis finds no energy effect.
The purpose and need is to reduce regulatory burden and return decisionmaking to local officials. Overlap with the wildland-urban interface as defined by HFRA is 9.8 million acres, 24 percent of the affected area, and and the DEIS says the benefits of added fuel-management access “would likely be modest and localized.”
The agency built and rejected a WUI-targeted alternative that would answer the fire rationale without nationwide rescission.
The demand: That the agency explain why nationwide rescission was chosen over the WUI-targeted alternative it constructed and rejected.
Alternatives with more protection were dismissed as not responsive to the deregulatory executive orders, and the keep-boundaries option was cut because it “would continue to restrict local decision-making discretion” and because analysing roadless values is “an administrative and legal burden for the agency.”
A purpose written as deregulation forecloses the comparison NEPA requires.
The demand: That the agency restate the purpose and need in terms of forest conditions and analyse at least one protective alternative in full.
The Forest Service received 64 requests for Tribal consultation; 29 consultations have been held and 5 more scheduled, with the published Tribal Summary Impact Statement records that the majority sentiment among consulted Tribal governments is opposition, viewing the rescission as a threat to inherent rights, Tribal sovereignty, cultural survival and the ecological health of ancestral homelands; the final Tribal Impact Summary Statement is deferred to the final rule.
Tribal governments proposed alternatives, including a strengthened roadless rule and a Traditional Homelands Conservation Rule, and none was analysed; the final impact statement arrives only when comment is closed.
The demand: That the agency complete all 64 requested consultations and publish the Tribal Impact Summary Statement for public comment before any final rule.
The proposal asserts that local land management planning now adequately protects roadless values; in adopting the 2001 rule (66 FR 3244) the agency found the opposite, that local planning had allowed those values to be reduced piece by piece and that their national significance required a national rule.
An agency reversing its own factual finding owes a reasoned explanation for the change.
The demand: That the agency identify the evidence for the reversal and respond to its own prior finding.
The proposal solicits “any reliance interests in the current rule that could be affected by this proposal” (91 FR 53830-31), and the Cost Benefit Analysis weighs none.
Under Encino Motorcars and Regents, an agency changing course must assess the reliance interests its prior policy created. This comment is such an interest.
The demand: That the agency identify and weigh the reliance interests described in the comments it receives, including this one.
The 2001 rule’s exceptions were expected to be infrequent by design; their infrequent use is now offered as evidence of failure, in a document that concedes “the rule’s intent for infrequent use.”
A design working as intended is not a defect.
The demand: That the agency publish the counts of exception requests, approvals, denials and processing times.
The proposed rule certifies no significant impact on small entities while the DEIS names outfitters, guides and tour operators as affected and its own Cost Benefit Analysis books lost recreation benefit at a minimum of $6.1 million a year.
The supporting regulatory flexibility analysis reaches its no-impact conclusion by spreading the $9 million annual expenditure loss across every small firm in the sector nationally, rather than assessing the outfitters and guides actually holding permits in the affected areas, and concedes some firms may lose these receipts.
The demand: That the agency withdraw the certification and assess the impact on the small entities actually operating in the potentially affected roadless areas, not the national average firm.
The proposed rule concedes that subsequent land management plan amendments and revisions “could increase the area where timber harvest and road construction would be allowed,” declares changes to plans beyond the scope of the proposal, and then requests public comment on them (91 FR 53830).
The agency is asking commenters to perform the analysis it declared out of scope.
The demand: That the agency analyse the foreseeable plan-amendment scenario, including expanded timber harvest area, as part of this action.
Approximately 24 million people use water originating within the potentially affected roadless areas, through more than 7,000 municipal intakes, and less than 12 percent of these watersheds are currently impaired.
The DEIS says forest plans address sources of public drinking water without identifying one enforceable provision.
The demand: That the agency identify, forest by forest, which plan provisions are equivalent to 36 CFR 294.12 and 294.13 for municipal watersheds.
The DEIS: skid roads, trails, log landings and similar disturbances within timber sale areas are the main cause of soil erosion and “can contribute up to 90 percent of the sediment generated by timber sale activity.”
The number appears in the document; no projection of sediment delivery follows it.
The demand: That the agency quantify projected sediment delivery to the more than 7,000 municipal intakes downstream of these areas.
The DEIS cites the finding that elk survival rates increased during a road closure and decreased when the gates were removed (Cole 1997), and that elk avoid roads and select unroaded habitat.
No population-level effect on big game is projected anywhere in the document.
The demand: That the agency project the effects on big game populations and hunter opportunity.
The DEIS cites the finding that habitat fragmentation reduces biodiversity by 13 to 75 percent.
The number appears; no projection across the 40.1 million affected acres follows.
The demand: That the agency apply the cited fragmentation range to the 40.1 million acres of potentially affected environment.
The DEIS cites the estimate that these inventoried roadless areas contain about 5 percent of the stored forest carbon in the coterminous United States, roughly 0.9 billion metric tons.
The DEIS concludes these lands will continue to sequester and store carbon, with no analysis of harvest and roading.
The demand: That the agency quantify the change in carbon storage and sequestration under each alternative.
By the agency’s own count, over 220,000 comment letters were received, representing over 625,000 submissions, and approximately 99 percent were generally opposed to the rescission. The DEIS says the comments helped inform the alternatives and identifies no issue that changed anything.
Counting comments is not responding to them.
The demand: That the agency state which substantive issues from the first comment period altered the proposal, and which were rejected and why.
The agency’s 428-page draft biological assessment closes: “Rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule will increase the likelihood of road construction and timber harvests occurring in locations previously considered inventoried roadless areas. In many cases the Forest Service anticipates this increased activity to adversely affect some ESA-listed species and their designated critical habitats.” The DEIS tallies the determinations: “may affect, likely to adversely affect” for 327 ESA-listed species and 71 designated critical habitats.
Not may: will increase the likelihood, and the agency anticipates the harm. The phrase “likely to adversely affect” appears more than 150 times across the USFWS assessment alone, and the proposal identifies mitigation for none of it.
The demand: That the agency disclose, species by species, how the likely adverse effects its own biological assessments identify will be avoided or mitigated, and that ESA consultation be completed and published before any final rule.
Cost Benefit Analysis Table 4 (p. 30), qualitative unquantified costs of the proposal: “Degraded recreation quality; ecological and water impacts; increased ignition risk; agency road maintenance burden.” In the benefits column, “reduced wildfire risk” sits among the benefits the agency says it cannot quantify.
The rescission is being sold as wildfire protection, and the agency’s own accounting books increased ignition risk as a cost while the promised fire benefit is unquantifiable, beside DEIS Table 21’s finding of seven and a half times the human-caused ignition density on roaded land.
The demand: That the agency quantify the net wildfire effect of this action in either direction before relying on wildfire as a justification for it.