The U.S. House of Representatives voted 218-214 on Thursday to pass President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, greenlighting deep cuts to America’s social safety net and the decimation of the country’s only federal climate strategy. Democrats uniformly opposed the bill, while all but two House Republicans supported it.

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“This bill will leave America a far crueler and weaker place,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, in a statement. It “races the United States and the world toward climate catastrophe, ending support for renewable energy that is absolutely vital to avert worst-case climate scenarios.”

The so-called Big Beautiful Bill has now been approved by both chambers of Congress; all it needs now is Trump’s signature before it can become law. Trump is expected to sign it during an evening ceremony on July 4, Independence Day, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

One of Republicans’ biggest victories in the bill is the extension of deep tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, which are estimated to cost the country more than $4 trillion over 10 years. The legislation also directs roughly $325 billion to the military and to border security, while cutting nearly $1 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the joint state and federal program that covers medical costs for lower-income people.

To pay for the tax breaks, the bill sunsets clean energy tax credits that were put in place by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, making wind and solar projects ineligible unless they start construction before July 2026 or are placed in service by 2027. It also imposes an expedited phaseout of consumer tax credits for new and used electric vehicles — by September 30 this year instead of by 2032. Green groups described the legislation as “historically ruinous” and “a self-inflicted tragedy for our country.”

The IRA’s tax credits and additional incentives for green energy from the bipartisan infrastructure act, also passed under former president Joe Biden, were projected to reduce the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2030. Combined with additional action from states, cities, and private companies, they could have put the U.S. on track to meet the country’s emissions reduction target under the United Nations Paris Agreement.

Once Trump signs the megabill, however, the U.S. will have no federal plan to address the climate crisis.

“Every lawmaker who voted for this cynical measure chose tax cuts for the wealthiest over Americans’ health, pocketbooks, public lands, and waters — and a safe climate. They should be ashamed,” said Manish Bapna, president of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

Agriculture experts have also objected to Trump’s policy bill, which removes the requirement that unobligated climate-targeted funds from the IRA be funneled toward climate-specific projects — in part so they can be directed toward programs under the current farm bill, an omnibus bill for food and agriculture that the federal government renews every five to six years. The Trump megabill seeks to increase subsidies to commodity farms by about $50 billion.

The final version of the bill doesn’t include a proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands; this was dropped following outcry from the public and some conservation-minded GOP lawmakers. It also lacks stringent limits on the use of Chinese components in renewable energy projects that were proposed in an earlier version of the bill. Some Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate voted for the legislation in exchange for carveouts in their states, like reduced work requirements for food stamps and less severe health care cuts.

In the Thursday House vote, only two Republicans broke with their party to vote against Trump’s megabill: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes measures that would increase the federal deficit, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who had hesitated to support cuts to Medicaid.

All Democrats voted against the bill. Immediately preceding the House vote, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York railed against the policy in a record-breaking 8-hour-and-45-minute House floor speech invoking scripture: “Our job is to stand up for the poor, the sick, and the afflicted,” he said.

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have promised to hold Republicans accountable. More than three dozen of its members have said they’ll hold “Accountability Summer” events lambasting Republican lawmakers who supported the bill. “As Democrats, we must make sure they never live that down,” the group’s chair, Greg Casar, a Democrat of Texas, said in a statement.

Similarly, Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat for Hawaiʻi, told The New York Times that his party should use the megabill’s spending cuts as a cudgel against Republicans ahead of next year’s midterm elections: “Our job is to point out, when kids get less to eat, when rural hospitals shutter, when the price of electricity goes up, that this is because of what your Republican elected official did,” he said.

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This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/a-self-inflicted-tragedy-congress-approves-reversal-of-us-climate-policy/.

The Trump administration announced its intention earlier this week to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Policy, also known as the “Roadless Rule,” which restricts road-building, logging, and mining across 58 million acres of the country’s national forests.

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The administration’s rationale was that the “outdated” Roadless Rule has exacerbated wildfire risks. In a statement announcing the policy change, U.S. Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins said that “properly managing our forests preserves them from devastating fires and allows future generations of Americans to enjoy and reap the benefits of this great land.”

Fire ecologists agree that the U.S. needs to step up land management efforts to reduce the likelihood of dangerous conflagrations. But experts don’t think more roads penetrating the country’s protected national forests is the best way to do that. Most fires — especially those that significantly affect communities — start on private lands that aren’t affected by the Roadless Rule, and remote areas can usually be managed for fire risk using flown-in firefighters.

Rescinding the Roadless Rule “does not change our current federal land management capacity to improve management and stop wildfires,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, interim director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute and an associate professor of forest management and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University. “What opening up currently roadless areas really does is allow for timber extraction.”

Before the Forest Service — an agency of the USDA — finalized the Roadless Rule at the very end of the Clinton administration in 2001, the agency struggled to pay for the maintenance of existing roads in national forests, let alone the construction of new ones.

But the policy has been controversial, facing multiple challenges from states, private companies, and GOP lawmakers who saw the rule as an impediment to commercial logging. It was repealed in 2005 by the administration of then-president George W. Bush, but reinstated the following year by a federal district court. Lawsuits from states including Alaska and Idaho have attempted to carve out exemptions for their forests, and some Republican lawmakers have facilitated land transfers from federal ownership in order to circumvent Roadless Rule protections.

Most recently, in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Forest Service rolled back the Roadless Rule for the 9 million-acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Republican Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska praised the repeal “fostering opportunities for Alaskans to make a living.” But that decision was reversed in 2023 under then-president Joe Biden.

This time around, the Trump administration is deemphasizing logging as a rationale for nixing the Roadless Rule. The USDA press release on the decision only briefly touches on the industry, saying that the Roadless Rule “hurts jobs and economic development” and that repealing it will allow for “responsible timber production.” The communication devotes more attention to the supposed wildfire risk that the rule creates, pointing out that 28 million acres of land covered by the rule are at high risk of wildfire, and arguing that repealing it will “reduce wildfire risk and help protect surrounding communities and infrastructure.”

Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, in a column posted to the Forest Service website, said the amount of land lost to wildfire in roadless areas each year has “more than doubled” since the Roadless Rule’s inception, though he does not provide evidence that this is because of the Roadless Rule and not other factors like climate change and the hotter, drier conditions associated with it. Schultz did not respond to a request for comment.

The implication of the USDA and Forest Service’s statements is that roads can help get firefighters and equipment to remote forests to reduce their risk of fires, or fight fires when they break out. It’s true that land managers sometimes need access to densely forested areas to get rid of overgrown plants and dead wood that could fuel a small blaze and turn it into an out-of-control fire. They do this with practices known as tree-thinning, which involves the removal of small shrubs and trees, and prescribed burns — intentionally set, carefully managed fires.

But five experts told Grist that the relationship between roads and forest fires is not as simple as the USDA’s announcement implies. Although roads can help transport firefighters and their gear to the wilderness — whether to fight existing wildfires or to conduct prescribed burns — they also increase the risk of unintentional fires from vehicles and campfires.

“If we’re gonna say which one leads to a greater risk” — roads or no roads — “I don’t think we have the full picture to assess that,” said Chris Dunn, an assistant professor of forest engineering, resources, and management at Oregon State University. “Those two components might counteract each other.”

In a 2022 research paper looking at cross-boundary wildfires — meaning those that move between private lands and lands managed by the Forest Service, including roadless areas — Dunn and his co-authors found that the vast majority of wildfires start on private lands, with ignitions rising as a function of an area’s road density. In other words, more roads are associated with more fires. This research also showed that most fires that destroy 50 buildings or more are started by humans on private lands.

Another study, this one from 2021, focused on roads and roadless areas within 11 Western states’ national forests. Dunn and his co-authors found that most wildfires between 1984 and 2018 started near roads, not in roadless areas, and that there was no connection between roadlessness and the “severity” of a fire — the amount of vegetation it killed. However, fires in roadless areas were more likely to escape initial suppression efforts, and they tended to burn a larger area.

Dunn noted that not all big, severe, remote fires are bad. Some ecosystems depend on occasional burning, and his research suggests that the greater size of fires in roadless areas can make landscapes more resilient to climate change. A problem arises when forest managers look at forests exclusively “through the lens of timber and dollar signs on trees,” he said, which can create a bias against tree mortality — even if it’s ecologically healthy for trees to burn or get thinned out by workers. That economic perspective seems to match that of the Trump administration, which has repeatedly referred to public lands and waters in terms of their “resource potential.”

Steve Pyne, a fire expert and emeritus professor at Arizona State University’s Center for Biology and Society, agreed with other experts Grist spoke with that rescinding the Roadless Rule “is not about fire protection; it’s about logging.” In April, USDA Secretary Rollins directed regional Forest Service offices to increase timber extraction by 25 percent, in line with an executive order Trump signed in March ordering federal agencies to “immediately increase domestic timber production.”

In response to Grist’s request for comment, a USDA spokesperson said that, “while some research indicates that roads can increase the likelihood of human-caused fires, they also improve access for forest management to reduce fuels and for fire suppression efforts.” They declined to respond to a question about opening up public lands for logging interests, except to say that the agency is “using all strategies available to reduce wildfire risk,” including timber harvesting.

Even if it were certain that more roads mitigate fire risk, it’s not clear that rescinding the Roadless Rule will lead to more of them being constructed. James Johnston, an assistant research professor at the University of Oregon’s Institute for Resilient Organizations, Communities, and Environments, said the Forest Service lacks the personnel and funding to maintain the road system it already has, and building new ones is likely to be a challenge. The Trump administration has only exacerbated the problem by firing 10 percent of the agency’s workers since taking office.

“Nobody is going to next week, next month, or any time in the future build roads across an area the size of the state of Idaho,” he said, referring to the 58 million acres covered by the Roadless Rule. Private companies that want to build new roads on public lands also face barriers to road construction because they need to obtain environmental permits, he added. New roads on Forest Service land would have to comply with statutes like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. Johnston also noted that many roadless areas are unsuitable to roads because they are too steep or rocky.

Ryan Talbott, Pacific Northwest conservation advocate for the nonprofit WildEarth Guardians, noted that it will take time for the USDA to legally rescind the Roadless Rule. “There’s a process,” he said. “In ordinary times they would put a notice in the Federal Register announcing that they intend to rescind the Roadless Rule, and then there would be a public comment process and then eventually they would get to a final decision.” The USDA spokesperson told Grist that a formal notice would be published in the Federal Register, the government’s daily journal that publishes newly enacted and proposed federal rules, “in the coming weeks.”

Stevens-Rumann, at Colorado State University, said that if the Trump administration were serious about mitigating wildfire risk, it would make more sense to increase Forest Service funding and personnel, and, critically, to conduct tree-thinning and prescribed burns in areas that already have roads. “We have a ton of work that we could be doing in roaded areas before we even go to roadless areas,” she said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/wildfires/wildfire-prevention-roads-trump-repeal-roadless-rule-usda-forest-service/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Among the several controversial proposals emerging from the U.S. Senate this week as it considers the tax and spending bill that President Donald Trump has promoted as “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is one that would make parts of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state, the Buffalo Hills Wilderness Study Area in Nevada, and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona eligible for sale to housing developers.

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The proposal, laid out in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s draft portion of the bill, would force the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, over the next five years, to identify and sell between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres across 11 Western states for “the development of housing or to address associated infrastructure to support local housing needs.” In total, 250 million acres of land would be eligible for those mandatory sales — including campgrounds and other recreation sites, roadless areas, and important wildlife habitat. The bill excludes protected areas like national parks and designated national recreation areas.

In a statement, Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, called the proposal “a complete betrayal of future generations.” Conservation groups have likewise pilloried it as “a shameless ploy to sell off pristine public lands for trophy homes and gated communities” in order to pay for “tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.”

The proposal expands on a failed attempt in the House version of the spending bill to sell 500,000 acres of federal lands in Nevada and Utah. That proposal was nixed due to opposition from Representative Ryan Zinke, a Republican from Montana and the former interior secretary. The new, dramatically expanded proposal came from Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, who said in a YouTube video that federal land ownership is “not fair.”

“We’re opening underused federal land to expand housing, support local development, and get Washington, D.C. out of the way of communities that are just trying to grow,” he said. “We’re turning federal liabilities into taxpayer value.“ The states wherein the land sales are being proposed are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Zinke’s state of Montana is notably not on the list.

Many Indigenous and environmental advocates have noted that the idea of “public lands” disguises the ways that the territories were stolen from tribes. Beginning in the 16th century, white European settlers swept across North America, expelling Native Americans in order to build homesteads, railroads, and other infrastructure.

After the founding of the country, the U.S. government extended that dispossession, often by force or coercion, and to this day land holders such as universities profit from stolen tribal lands. The federal government now claims up to 63 percent of some Western states, with high concentrations in Idaho and Utah. While a faction of the Republican party has spent more than 50 years advocating against “federal colonialism” in the West, some Republicans are intensifying their efforts to impose expropriation of the same land in a new way.

From his first day in office, Trump has promised to turn over federal lands to private interests — including logging interests and oil and gas companies, as well as housing developers. In March, the Trump administration launched a task force to identify “underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development,” an ostensible effort to address the U.S.’s affordable housing crisis.

Critics say home affordability is a product of multiple factors like migration trends and construction costs, exacerbated by cities not prioritizing building new housing within their limits to account for new demand. But opening up remote areas far from existing infrastructure is, they say, a misguided approach to bringing down housing costs.

“The housing argument is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Jordan Schreiber, government relations director for the nonprofit The Wilderness Society. “It doesn’t even pass the laugh test.”

Some advocacy groups and experts have also noted that Lee’s proposal in the spending bill, which he reportedly declined to share with most other lawmakers for weeks before unveiling it on June 11, does not include any affordability requirements, leaving room for profit-motivated developers to build large ranch houses, second homes for wealthy urbanites, or short-term rentals to be listed on Airbnb. In some cases, land sales have already yielded the creation of luxury real estate clubs.

”There would be no significant guardrails to prevent valued public lands from being sold for trophy homes, pricey vacation spots, exclusive golf communities, or other developments,” the think tank Center for American Progress wrote in an analysis of the proposed bill.

Democrats, conservation groups, and representatives from the outdoor industry opposing Lee’s proposal have emphasized the irreplaceable nature of the land in question. “Our public lands are not disposable assets,” Patrick Berry, CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a group that seeks to preserve undeveloped land for hunting and fishing, told Colorado Public Radio.

Schreiber, of The Wilderness Society, said the bill is “hugely problematic from a tribal perspective” because it fails to give tribes the right of first refusal to bid on lands that are part of their ancestral homelands. (It’s also arguable that even the idea of giving tribes the option to buy back lands that were stolen from them is a low bar for justice.) Schreiber also criticized the bill for making land sales possible “at breakneck speed” without public hearings or input.

In a Colorado College poll released this January, only 14 percent of registered voters across eight Western states said they supported selling “some limited areas of national public lands to developing housing on natural areas.” Nearly 90 percent said they visited federally owned lands at least once in the past year.

Even among Republican policymakers, Lee’s proposal is controversial. A spokesperson for Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho told The Spokesman-Review, a newspaper in Spokane, Washington, that the senator is still reviewing the proposal but that he “does not support transferring public lands to private ownership.” A spokesperson for Senator Jim Risch, a Republican from Idaho, said that once federal land is sold, “we’ll never get it back.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/public-land-sale-republican-senate-bill-mike-lee-trump/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org