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u.s. senate
The Fix Our Forests Act Is a Logging Bill Disguised as a Firefighting Bill
If passed, it would open millions of acres of forests to logging without scientific review or citizen input. A better name for this legislations would be the Fix It So We Can Log Without Citizen Oversight Act.
Feb 10, 2025
It comes in a box with a picture of a fire extinguisher on the front. Below it the words: Guaranteed to stop wildfires. But when you open it up there’s a chainsaw inside. Tucked beside it is a piece a piece of paper saying, “Now without citizen overview!”
That’s the Fix Our Forests Act, a logging bill disguised as a firefighting bill. The tell is in the numerous and creative ways it would obstruct citizen input, from delaying citizen review until after the trees are cut to reducing the statute of limitations for filing lawsuits from six months to 120 days, seriously straining the ability of small citizen groups to apply legal restraint. It waives National Environmental Policy Act protections on fire-sheds as large as 250,000 square acres and allows loggings to proceed even if courts find the logging plan violates the law. There are no limits on the size and age of trees that can be cut, and the language is so vague that even clear cuts could qualify as “fuels treatment.” If passed, it would open millions of acres of forests to logging without scientific review or citizen input. A better name for this legislations would be the Fix It So We Can Log Without Citizen Oversight Act.
Introduced by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), and having passed in the House, it’s now being rushed through the Senate in an attempt to capitalize on the heightened fire concern surrounding the tragic LA fires. A vote is expected any day now.
If our forests are broken, might it be the successive rounds of logging trucks and roads, chainsaws and feller bunchers, herbicidal treatments and industrial replanting of greenhouse-grown monocrops that did the breaking?
The bill claims to “protect communities by expediting environmental analyses, reducing frivolous lawsuits, and increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration projects.” But if protecting communities were really the goal, this bill would pour resources into the only methods proven to do that: hardening homes and defending immediate space.
Most homes don’t catch fire directly from flames themselves, but from embers blown ahead of a fire. Simple measures like screening vents, covering gutters, and pruning vegetation directly around buildings dramatically improve their fire resilience. Thinning vegetation in the immediate surroundings, within 100 feet or so of the dwelling, can also help. These were among the recommendations of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. But rather than heed those recommendations by investing in boots on the ground to harden homes and educate communities, the bill diverts resources to backcountry logging.
The U.S. Forest Service has spent years making the argument that “mechanical treatment” of forests reduces wildfire. Independent research, however, comes to different conclusions, that thinning harms the forest and actually increases the very conditions that favor fire—heat, dryness, and wind. The reasons are fairly obvious. For instance, removing trees makes it harder for forests to slow wind, increasing the wind speeds of potential fires and thus the speed of spread. It also allows more sunlight to reach the forest floor, heating up the ground. Even more importantly, trees don’t just stand around soaking up sunlight, they also cool and hydrate their surroundings. It’s called transpiration, and can be understood as a kind of sweating, just like we do to keep cool in the sun. A single tree can have the cooling power of up to 10 air conditioners.
But that really is just the beginning. Those trees also help make rain. By sweating water vapor they not only cool the air, they deliver water vapor to the sky, feeding the formation of clouds. Even more remarkable, they seed that vapor with biochemicals such as terpenes (the forest scent) and other bits of biota that provide the grains for eventual rain drops to condense around. Forests make clouds. Those clouds then rain down, watering other forests, hydrating soil and vegetation, and increasing resilience to wildfire.
In other words, what the Fix our Forests Act calls dangerous fuels are also air conditioners and humidifiers, rain makers and rain catchers, as their needles gather and slow the falling of rain, allowing it to seep into the ground and make its way to aquifers, which will prove critical during the dry season. Of course, older, deeply rooted trees are best able to tap this water, but there are no protections for them in the Fix Our Forests Act.
Given that the concern is fire, it’s remarkable how little this legislation ever mentions water, its antidote. Though I did find, in section 119, under “Watershed Condition Framework Technical Corrections,” calls to strike the word “protection” from watershed provisions in a previous, similar bill, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, under George W. Bush. (To see a short, simple demonstration of how plant moisture effects flammability, watch this.)
Perhaps the problems with this bill are explained by the first word of the bill’s title: “Fix.” You can fix a car. You can fix a broken plate. But can you “fix” a forest? Can you “fix” a living ecosystem of infinite complexity? Such language represents an outdated way of thinking about the living world around us, and marks the very kind of thinking that’s gotten into this mess in the first place. And one needs to ask: If our forests are broken, might it be the successive rounds of logging trucks and roads, chainsaws and feller bunchers, herbicidal treatments and industrial replanting of greenhouse-grown monocrops that did the breaking?
Yes, there are instances where careful thinning of small trees and undergrowth is indicated, such as right around built communities or in industrial plantations planted too densely. But such measured action doesn’t need this bill, and this bill isn’t about such measured action. Rather, as put by Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations with Defenders of Wildlife, the bill “will do little of anything to combat fires and instead plays favorites with the timber industry which is hungry to consume more of our forests—removing large fire-resilient trees and devastating the lands and species which call them home.”
As mentioned, the bill is moving quickly. Last minute citizen outcry is the only thing standing in its way.
The following Senators have been identified as key votes: John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Angus King ((-Maine), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), and John Fetterman (D-Pa.)
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Head of Largest Federal Worker Union Urges Senate to Block Russell Vought
Meanwhile, leading Democratic senators held the upper chamber floor in opposition to his nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
Feb 05, 2025
The head of the largest federal employees' union is urging U.S. senators to vote against confirming Russell Vought as Office of Management and Budget director, as the Senate's top Democrat delivered a scathing floor speech Wednesday highlighting Vought's "role as the chief architect of Project 2025 and the devastating impact his policies would have on working families across the country."
American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) national president Everett Kelley said in a letter distributed to media outlets this week that "Russell Vought's agenda in the previous Trump administration is clearly alive and well as the current Trump administration has already taken steps to reimplement an even more expansive Schedule F and to purportedly override collective bargaining agreements in various contexts."
Schedule F refers to an executive order issued by Republican President Donald Trump at the end of his first term that would have stripped employment protections from career civil servants had former President Joe Biden not rescinded it within days of taking office in 2021. AFGE and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees last week filed a lawsuit arguing that Trump "illegally exceeded his authority" by attempting to weaken Biden-era worker protections.
"Of all people Donald Trump could have picked to lead White House policy, he chose the godfather of the ultraright."
"As OMB director during President Trump's first term, Vought pursued an agenda to effectively nullify the nonpartisan civil service system by attempting to convert tens of thousands of career employees to political appointments, gut their collective bargaining rights, and prevent unions from providing fair and effective representation to all workers," AFGE explained in an email Wednesday. "Vought has also made deeply disturbing comments about the civil service, including portraying them as villains and saying he wants to put federal workers in trauma."
Also on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) held the Senate floor in opposition to Vought's nomination.
"Of all the harmful nominees, of all the extremists that Donald Trump has elevated, of all the hard-right ideologues who have come before the Senate, none of them hold a candle to Russell Vought," Schumer said. "He is far and away the most dangerous to the American people."
"Most people have never heard of Russell Vought before, but make no mistake about it, my fellow Americans: He is the most important piece of the puzzle in Donald Trump's second term," the senator continued. "He will be the quarterback of White House policy. For all intents and purposes, he will run the command center of the Trump administration. His decisions will reverberate from one end of America to the other, in every city, in every town, every household, and every rural area."
"And of all people Donald Trump could have picked to lead White House policy, he chose the godfather of the ultraright," Schumer added. "Make no mistake, Russell Vought is Project 2025 incarnate."
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said Wednesday that he would lead a Thursday filibuster against Vought.
Vought currently leads the think tank Center for Renewing America, whose motto is: "For God. For Country. For Community."
A defender of Christian nationalism, Vought co-authored the policy portion of Project 2025, a blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government. Vought's Project 2025 proposals include dramatic cuts to critical public programs, abolishing or gutting essential government agencies, a national abortion ban, and other right-wing wish list items.
While Trump has attempted to distance himself from the deeply unpopular initiative led by the Heritage Foundation, at least 140 people who worked in his first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
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Why the US Senate Must Reject RFK Jr.—A Lethal Broken Clock
As over 700 health professionals recently warned, "the unfounded, fringe beliefs" of Trump's pick to run HHS "could significantly undermine public health practices across the country and around the world."
Feb 05, 2025
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should not be confirmed as U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services. because he is ideologically committed to falsehoods and positions that threaten people’s health and health equity. He is the lethal broken clock who tells the right time for two seconds a day—in his case, about how corporate profiteering can harm health—while poised to wreak havoc and harm the other 23.999999 hours.
As a critical scientist and advocate for health justice, I know that systematically asking who gains from or is harmed by the status quo is one thing, but treating scientific knowledge as a matter of mere opinion and ideology, as if facts and hidden conflicts of interest don’t matter, is another. As aptly stated in a public letter from the new coalition Defend Public Health, signed by over 700 health professionals and scientists, RFK Jr.’s “unfounded, fringe beliefs could significantly undermine public health practices across the country and around the world.”
RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy.
Kennedy’s confirmation hearing January 29 didn’t ease those concerns. Confronted with the wilder conspiracy theories he’s embraced—like the claim that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain groups—he mostly soft-peddled or danced around them, rarely giving direct answers. He dodged questions about the Trump administration’s freeze on federal health funding and seemed to have no idea what Federally Qualified Health Centers are (they’re community health centers that provide care to underserved populations, regardless of ability to pay). He made vaguely reassuring statements like, “I am supportive of vaccines,” but waffled when, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) confronted him with a child’s onesie sold by Children’s Health Defense, the group Kennedy founded, that reads, “No Vax, No Problem.”
RFK Jr.’s opposition to profiteering companies is highly selective. In his own words, he’s rooting for “psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” His statement, however, ignores the myriad companies and investors aggressively trying to cash in on this list—which includes products repeatedly shown to be either harmful or ineffective, like ivermectin. The key study advocating its use was retracted in December. RFK Jr. also has invited the U.S.’ largest producer of raw milk to be in charge of raw milk policy, despite multiple recalls of this company’s products, most recently because of contamination by bird flu virus. For RFK Jr., opportunistic profiting off of unsafe products is apparently fine, as is having plutocrat supporters keen to slash environmental protections, the social safety net, and of course their own income tax.
RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy. One rare success in reducing unfair differences in rates of disease across social groups—by income, by race or ethnicity, by rural or urban location—has been for vaccine-preventable childhood illness thanks to school vaccination mandates plus such federal programs as Vaccines for Children. Weakening these programs won’t “Make America Healthy Again.”
RFK Jr. falsely pits “infectious” disease against “chronic” diseases without understanding many diseases are both infectious and chronic, including numerous types of cancer (e.g., cervical cancer, liver cancer) and ulcers—and many infectious diseases lead to chronic disease (e.g., HIV/AIDS, long Covid). Yet, Kennedy famously declared that the National Institutes of Health should “take a break” from “infectious diseases,” and pivot to “chronic diseases.” He apparently is unaware that 85% of the current NIH budget already goes to research on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, drug addiction, mental health, aging, child health, and the like.
RFK Jr. should never be given power to implement his fallacious health-harming agendas.
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