The Fox Guarding the Forest: Forest Service Chief Doubles Timber Sales to His Former Employer 10 Months After Appointment
How a former timber company VP became Forest Service Chief and immediately signed agreements benefiting his ex-employer.
I was driving through southwest Washington a few weeks ago on my way to visit Mount Saint Helens National Monument when I noticed recent logging scars and current logging activity. Upon seeing miles and miles of recent clear cut land, I wondered if this was privately owned land or if this was public land within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and how the whole process worked.
I made a note of my questions and started the research by submitting FOIA request to USFS and BLM and diving deeper into the 21st centruy timber barons and how they intersect with this current adminstration.
The Corruption is Coming from Inside the House
On December 5, 2025, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz signed an agreement with Idaho Governor Brad Little to double federal timber sales from Idaho’s national forests over the next four years. This doesn’t sound so bad until you remember that Schultz was the Vice President of Resources and Government Affairs at Idaho Forest Group before becoming the Forest Service Chief in February 2025. Idaho Forest Group is also one of the country’s largest lumber producers and a major purchaser of federal timber. His job? Procuring timber from the very forests he now controls.
Within ten months of taking office, he doubled the timber available to companies like his former employer.
And it gets worse.
The Setup: An Industry Takeover
Tom Schultz isn’t the only timber industry insider now controlling federal forests. He reports to Michael Boren, the billionaire Idaho rancher confirmed as USDA Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment in October 2025.
After reading Boren’s qualifications for overseeing 193 million acres of public forest, you start to notice the pattern. Boren has zero forestry or public lands management experience, and has had multiple violations of Forest Service regulations.
The man now overseeing the Forest Service has been repeatedly cited by the Forest Service itself. Here is a list of some of the things he was cited for: building an unauthorized cabin on Forest Service land, illegally diverting a hot-spring-fed stream from public land onto his private ranch, building a private airstrip on national recreation land, and allegedly buzzing a Forest Service trail crew with his helicopter at low altitude (officials sought a restraining order).
When neighbors and local officials tried to block his illegal airstrip, Boren sued them for defamation. The lawsuits were dismissed as “frivolous” violations of First Amendment rights.
This is the man now in charge of enforcing Forest Service regulations.
Both Schultz and Boren report to USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who previously worked at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank bankrolled by Tim Dunn, former CEO of an oil company. Together, these three amigos have spent the past year dismantling environmental protections and ramping up timber production at a pace not seen in decades.
The Policy Assault
On March 1, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14225: “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The order directs federal agencies to: increase timber sales by 25% over four years, streamline environmental review (read: gut NEPA requirements), fast-track Endangered Species Act consultations, adopt “categorical exclusions” to bypass environmental analysis, and set annual timber sale targets.
One month later, on April 4, 2025, Secretary Rollins issued an “Emergency Situation Determination” covering 112.6 million acres of National Forest System land. This emergency declaration, which legal experts say doesn’t meet the statutory definition of an emergency, allows the Forest Service to: roll back environmental protections, expedite logging without standard reviews, and fast-track projects that would normally require years of analysis.
There’s no wildfire. No natural disasters. No “unacceptable hazard to life” or “immediate, unforeseen economic hardship” which is the legal standard for emergency declarations.
The “emergency”? The timber industry wants more profit.
The Conflict of Interest Everyone Should Be Talking About
Now back to Tom Schultz’s December agreement with Idaho.Idaho Forest Group operates extensively in Idaho. The company’s business model depends on a steady supply of timber from federal lands.
As VP of Resources and Government Affairs, Schultz’s job was to lead timber procurement operations, manage strategic relationships with government officials, serve as key advisor on organizational priorities Translation: He lobbied government officials to sell more federal timber to his company. Now he is that government official. And his first major policy action? Double the timber supply in the state where his former employer operates.
From the Public Citizen investigation:
“Within months of taking office, Schultz began implementing policies that align with positions he advocated as a timber industry representative. In December 2025, he personally signed an agreement with Idaho Governor Brad Little to double federal timber sales from Idaho’s national forests, directly benefiting his former employer.”
This isn’t subtle. This isn’t a gradual policy shift. This is a former industry lobbyist using government power to directly benefit the company that employed him less than a year ago.
The System Already Sucked
And it’s not like the federal timber program hasn’t been broken for a long time. It has been losing taxpayer money for decades. This isn’t a Trump, Biden, or hell, an Obama problem. This is a structural problem that has been allowed to continue across administrations for over forty years.
The Government Accountability Office reports from the last four decades all document the same exact thing. Below-cost timber sales, taxpayer subsidies to corporations, weak compliance monitoring, and roads built at the public’s expense.
The Congressional Research Service has been sounding the alarms about timber program losses since the Reagen era and has included multiple oversight hearings, reform proposals, and promises to fix it. And it never gets fixed.
Because of course it doesn’t.
State forests managing identical resources consistently turn profits while federal forests consistently lose money. This has been true through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. So what’s different now? The difference is that the people who profit from the subsidies are now running the agency.
The separation between industry and regulator was always thin. Now it’s translucent. The conflicts of interest that used to be hidden are now sitting in the Chief’s office. Before, you had career Forest Service officials implementing a flawed system. Now you have former timber industry executives doubling down on the parts that benefit their former employers.
Before, there was at least the pretense of environmental review and public input. Now there are emergency declarations to bypass those processes. So, at least now we can see it for what it is. But that is the problem. The lack of accountability this administration has to the public is a moral failing of our elected officials. They are not trying to hide it because they no longer have to.
The Pattern
The federal timber program has been a corporate welfare scheme for over a century.
From 2013-2017 alone, taxpayers lost $1.6 to $1.8 billion per year subsidizing timber sales from public lands. The same companies winning these subsidized contracts, companies like Weyerhaeuser, Sierra Pacific Industries, and yes, Idaho Forest Group, have dominated federal timber sales for generations.
And these companies built their empires on land stolen, first from the Indigenous peoples and then the American public. Weyerhaeuser’s 10.4 million acre empire began with a 900,000-acre purchase from James J. Hill in 1900. This was land that Hill got from a federal railroad land grant. The broader timber industry systematically used “dummy entrymen” to fraudulently claim millions of acres of public land under homestead laws in the late 1800s. The Oregon Land Fraud Trials led to the conviction of a sitting U.S. Senator.
And that business model hasn’t changed in 125 years:
Acquire public resources through government giveaways (then) or subsidies (now)
Privatize the profits
Socialize the costs
Use political connections to maintain access
What’s different now is the brazenness. At least in the past, there was the appearance of separation between industry and regulators. There were ethics rules. There were withdrawals and minimal effort to avoid conflict of interest.
Now? The timber industry is the regulator.
The Revolving Door
Tom Schultz is the 21st Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and the first Chief without prior experience inside the agency. Every previous chief put the work in, rising through the ranks of the Forest Service. They understood the agency’s mission: to manage forests for multiple uses and sustained yield. Not just timber extraction.
Schultz spent his career working for timber companies and state agencies that prioritize timber revenue. He told Congress his goal is to “return to fundamentals” and “cut through regulation.” We have seen in real time what he means by cutting regulations for the industries and companies he used to work for all while doubling their harvest rates.
Meanwhile, Michael Boren, who built unauthorized structures on Forest Service land and allegedly harassed Forest Service employees with a helicopter, now oversees the entire Forest Service.
The agency that cited him for violations now reports to him.
That is not a conflict of interest. It’s a government failure, in real time, on public display.
A Wildfire and Rural Communities Scapegoat
The Trump administration is framing this as wildfire prevention (more logging = less fuel), economic revival (rural jobs, timber industry growth), national security (reduce reliance on Canadian lumber), and forest health (active management). This is the same framing this adminsitration uses for everything else it seems.
We all know increased logging does not prevent catastrophic wildfires.Experts at Washington State University and Resources for the Future have pointed out that Trump’s orders don’t address the actual causes of timber industry decline. As Assistant Professor Austin Himes told Oregon Public Broadcasting: logging economies need a steady supply of timber over several decades, not a temporary jolt in production.
The forests at highest fire risk are often in terrain too steep and remote to log economically. The timber industry wants accessible, valuable trees, not the fire-prone undergrowth in the wildland-urban interface where most fire risk exists.
Politicians love to frame every policy as “helping rural Americans” but rural Americans are not the ones who benefit. When the Forest Service ramped up logging in the 1980s-90s, rural timber communities boomed, then crashed when the unsustainable harvest rates couldn’t be maintained. Mills closed. Jobs disappeared. Communities were left devastated.
It is a basic principle of economics. Industry needs predictable, long-term supply. Emergency declarations and production spikes create market volatility that ultimately hurts local economies with corporate welfare on full display. Those $1.6-1.8 billion annual losses I mentioned? They’re about to get worse. Below-cost sales, where the Forest Service spends more to prepare and administer sales than it receives in revenue, have plagued the timber program for decades.
State forests managing identical resources turn a profit. Montana’s state forests averaged $2.16 in revenue for every dollar spent. Nine out of ten Montana national forests returned between $0.09 and $0.73 per dollar spent on the same land. Why? State forests aren’t designed to subsidize corporations. Federal forests are.
If forest health was an actual reason they would not be actively dismantling the policies in place that help make them healthy. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Endangered Species Act (ESA) consultations aren’t bureaucratic red tape. They’re how the government does not repeat its own mistakes. They’re how we discovered that certain logging practices destroy salmon habitat, degrade water quality, and fragment critical wildlife corridors.
Streamlining is just another word for skipping. The rural communities and ecosystems are the ones that suffer when processes are streamlined while corporations continue to increase shareholder payouts.
Why You Should Care
This isn’t just about trees or timber companies. It’s about a fundamental question I ask myself everytime:
Who do public lands belong to? The law says they belong to the American people. Management decisions should serve the public interest. But when former timber industry executives take control of federal agencies and immediately implement policies that benefit their former employers, whose interest is being served?
When a billionaire who repeatedly violated Forest Service rules becomes the boss of the Forest Service, who’s enforcing the rules? When emergency declarations bypass environmental review to fast-track logging, who’s protecting public resources? The timber industry would tell you this is about jobs, rural communities, and responsible forest management.
I would tell you that is bullshit because the math is not mathing.
$1.6-1.8 billion in annual taxpayer losses (2013-2017)
Below-cost sales that subsidize corporate profits
State forests turn profits managing identical resources
Oligopolistic market concentration preventing real competition
Foundations built on stolen public land (railroad grants, homestead fraud)
Honor-system enforcement of export restrictions
Self-reported compliance with no independent verification
And now, the clearest conflict of interest in modern public lands management: A former timber industry VP doubling sales to benefit his ex-employer within 10 months of taking office.
What Comes Next
This is just one article in a series of articles on this topic. The deeper I digged the more questions I had and soon realized this is not going to fit into one Substack piece. So this is Part 1 of me answering my own questions. Thanks for following along.
I am currently working on part 2 of this series. An Empire Built on Stolen Land: How Weyerhaeuser and the timber industry built their empires on the largest land heist in American history.
What You Can Do
Demand transparency from your representatives. Contact your U.S. Senators and Representatives:
Ask why contract winner data isn’t publicly available.
Demand investigation into Schultz’s conflicts of interest.
Question the legal basis for the “emergency” declaration.
Request oversight hearings on federal timber program costs.
File your own FOIA requests. You have the same right to public records that I do. Request timber sale data for your local national forest. Force transparency.
Follow my investigation. Subscribe to receive updates as FOIA responses arrive. This story is just beginning and if you enojyed this, please restack this.
The timber industry hopes you’ll never connect these dots. Let’s prove them wrong.
SOURCES:
All claims sourced from: Executive Order 14225 (March 1, 2025), USDA Secretarial Memo on Emergency Situation Determination (April 4, 2025), Public Citizen: “Uprooting the Forest Service” (April 2026), Government Accountability Office reports (1990-2025), Congressional testimony and confirmation hearings, News reports (E&E News, ABC News, Idaho Capital Sun, Sierra Club, MeatEater), Idaho-Forest Service agreement (December 5, 2025)
Full source documentation available upon request.