In a remarkable letter to employees, Tom Schultz boasts about selling more timber from America’s national forests than at any point in nearly three decades. The real numbers tell a disgracefully different story.
By Will Pattiz with More Than Just Parks
The Chief of the United States Forest Service recently sent a letter to his employees that every American ought to read. Its contents deserve serious examination and its author deserves to be held accountable for them.
But first, consider how we might react if the director of the Smithsonian had written the same letter.
Imagine the director sending a jubilant announcement to his employees celebrating the largest selloff of America’s national collection in a generation.
Priceless works of art, rare historical artifacts, irreplaceable treasures entrusted to the institution for safekeeping, all carefully catalogued, prepared for sale, and transferred into private hands. The director congratulates the curators and museum staff responsible for this extraordinary achievement and encourages everyone to take a moment to reflect and feel proud of their work.
To illustrate the enormous economic benefits of the selloff, he cites the hundreds of billions of dollars generated annually by the global art market and the hundreds of thousands of jobs it supports. The Smithsonian’s sales account for a tiny fraction of that industry, of course. The actual proceeds amount to little more than pocket change, and taxpayers are covering the costs of arranging sales that have historically lost enormous sums of money. The director, himself a former executive in the art trade, assures everyone that this extraordinary effort will preserve America’s cultural heritage for future generations.
If the public uproar over the Kennedy Center is any indication, you can imagine the reaction. Outrage. Congressional hearings. Demands for resignations, criminal investigations, prison sentences. Accountability.
And rightly so. The American people don’t entrust their national treasures to public institutions so that some industry insider can auction them off to his former colleagues and congratulate himself for it.
Yet at the U.S. Forest Service, where the national collection happens to be alive, hundreds or even thousands of years old, and growing on public land, the man in charge apparently sees all of this as cause for celebration.
On October 20, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz published a triumphant message announcing that his agency had sold 3.3 billion board feet of timber from America’s national forests in fiscal year 2026, the largest volume since 1997, according to Schultz.
He congratulated his employees and celebrated the accomplishment as an economic victory, boasting that the American forest products industry generates $288 billion annually and employs approximately 950,000 people.
There’s just one rather enormous problem with those numbers.
Almost none of that timber comes from our national forests.
According to the Forest Service’s own statistics, private forests supply more than 90% of America’s domestically produced forest products. Our national forests account for roughly 4% of the nation’s timber harvest.
Schultz has taken the economic output of an enormous private industry and wrapped it around his record national forest timber sales, creating the impression that selling off our public forests is some great American economic success story.
So let’s dispense with the borrowed statistics and look at what the American people actually receive.
As we documented in our investigation, the entire federal timber program generated approximately $135 million in receipts in fiscal year 2025.
That’s the revenue from timber harvested across the Forest Service’s entire 193-million-acre estate.
Less than the annual sales of two average Home Depot stores.
And that’s before accounting for the considerable public expense of preparing and administering timber sales, constructing logging roads, and subsidizing the industry that purchases our trees.
The financial history is appalling.
In the Tongass National Forest alone, the nonpartisan watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense calculated that four decades of timber sales generated just $227 million in revenue while costing taxpayers $1.96 billion.
That’s $1.7 billion in public losses to help private companies cut down and sell trees that belonged to the American people.
Eight dollars spent for every dollar received.
It’s theft dressed up as some sort of patriotic act in a manufactured timber crisis.
And Schultz, in the very same celebratory memo, proudly announces another $105 million in government grants to advance the wood products industry.
These are people who recoil at the word socialism until the beneficiary happens to own a sawmill. Public money to prepare the timber sales. Public money to build and maintain the infrastructure. Public money to stimulate the industry. Private companies collect the benefits, and taxpayers shoulder the costs.
Apparently this becomes sound economic policy when the welfare recipient comes with a logging truck.
But even this grotesque financial arrangement barely begins to capture the obscenity of what Schultz is celebrating.
Because our national forests contain treasures that no amount of money can replace.
As you’ve probably read, this summer, Jim and I traveled to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and stood beneath ancient Sitka spruce and cedar trees that have been growing for centuries. We documented extraordinary wildlife habitat, including seven denning structures, within and around a grove the Forest Service calls Unit 346.
Some of those trees may be more than 800 years old. Their trunks are immense. Their roots shelter generations of wildlife. The forest around them has been shaped by centuries of storms, decay, renewal, and life.
Today, under Schultz’s leadership, the Forest Service is advancing a proposal to clearcut that grove, part of a project that would make approximately 1,738 acres of old-growth forest available for logging.
The final decision hasn’t been signed. These trees are still standing, and we’re fighting to keep them that way.
The Forest Service estimates that the larger timber sale could supply local mills for two or three years.
Two or three years.
In exchange for forests that took five hundred years to grow.
There is no replanting program that can undo that loss. You can grow another tree, certainly. You cannot recreate a thousand-year-old forest within any meaningful human timeline. The Americans alive today, their children, their grandchildren, and generations beyond them will never see that forest restored to what it was.
And there’s something profoundly sickening about a man entrusted with stewardship of these treasures boasting about how many board feet of our forests he’s managed to sell.
Help us defend America’s public lands for the cost of a bundle of firewood/month.
No wonder we get these results when Big Timber installs itself as Chief of the Forest Service.
We warned what would happen when Schultz was appointed. His career representing the timber industry was hardly a secret, and his priorities have been made abundantly clear ever since. We’ve been documenting the consequences and fighting these destructive projects every step of the way.
But I want to make something else abundantly clear. Our outrage is directed at the man leading the Forest Service and the political leadership enabling him, rather than the thousands of dedicated public servants who have devoted their careers to protecting America’s forests.
Those employees deserve better. The agency deserves better. And the American people deserve a Chief who understands the difference between stewarding a national inheritance and liquidating it.
The Forest Service has a proud albeit complicated history, built by generations of Americans who understood that some things are worth protecting precisely because their value cannot be captured on a balance sheet.
Schultz is dragging that legacy through the mud, and Congress should be demanding answers.
How much old-growth forest is being put up for sale? How much are taxpayers spending to subsidize these sales? Who is profiting? What protections are being stripped away to increase timber production? And why is the country’s chief federal forester celebrating the removal of more trees as though that is the highest measure of successful stewardship?
Every member of Congress with oversight responsibility should be asking these questions.
And every American should be asking their representatives why they aren’t.
The encouraging news is that we’re already demonstrating how public pressure can change these outcomes.
Through our Public Lands Action Network, we’ve been mobilizing people to challenge destructive projects across the country. We’ve already helped substantially reduce major logging proposals, including the Akawa Butte project in Oregon, where 103 members of this community submitted comments in just seven days.
Those comments represented nearly one-third of the entire public record. The final decision reduced commercial salvage logging by 56% and temporary road construction by 90%, leaving approximately four million additional board feet of trees standing.
We can do more. We must do more.
Every public comment, every phone call to a congressional office, every demand for transparency makes it harder for people like Schultz to carry out this agenda without scrutiny.
And we have to vote.
The politicians who appoint these people and the members of Congress who enable them must be held accountable at the ballot box. Americans who care about their public lands should make it clear that the destruction of our national inheritance carries political consequences.
We’ve made it easy to track and see which members are supporting our public lands and which are harming them via our Congressional Public Lands Score.
These forests belong to all of us. They belong to the generations that came before us and the generations that will follow.
The ancient forests we still have are survivors of an extraordinary history of destruction. What remains is precious beyond calculation.
And here we are in 2026, watching the man entrusted with their protection congratulate himself for selling more of them. For destroying more of them.
It’s an outrage. It’s a disgrace. And every American ought to be furious.
Schultz wants his employees to take a moment to reflect and feel proud.
I hope Americans will take a moment to reflect, too.
And then do something about it. Vote.
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