in effect
This is Executive Order 14225, signed March 1, 2025, and published in the Federal Register on March 6, 2025. It directs federal agencies — mainly the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce — to increase the amount of timber, lumber, and related wood products harvested from federal lands and to speed up the government approvals required to do so.
The order sets a series of deadlines: within 30 days, Interior and Agriculture must issue new guidance to boost timber production; within 60 days, wildlife and fisheries officials must produce a strategy to speed up Endangered Species Act reviews of forestry projects; within 90 days, the two departments must give the President a plan setting an annual timber sale target (measured in millions of board feet) for federal lands over the next four years; within 120 days, they must finish a specific Endangered Species Act review for the whitebark pine; within 180 days, they must consider adopting existing “categorical exclusions” that shorten environmental review under NEPA; and within 280 days, Interior must consider creating a new fast-track exclusion for timber thinning and reviving one for salvage logging. It also directs all relevant agencies to remove permitting delays and to suspend, revise, or rescind rules and policies seen as burdening timber production, and it tells agencies to make greater use of the Endangered Species Act’s emergency consultation procedures and the Endangered Species Committee’s exemption process.
The order directly tasks federal agencies and officials — the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service — who must meet the deadlines and change their procedures. It is aimed at increasing activity in the timber, lumber, paper, and bioenergy industries that harvest from federal lands, and it affects how endangered-species and environmental reviews are applied to those lands. The order states it creates no legal rights that any person or party can enforce in court, and that it must be carried out consistent with existing law and available funding.