If President Donald J. Trump has his way, the Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest, will experience more logging. His administration’s motto is log, baby, log.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service is revising the land management plan for the Tongass National Forest that would include harvesting and selling old-growth timber. Twin Mountain II is a proposed logging project for the Tongass. Located on Prince of Wales Island within the Tongass National Forest, the project, if approved, would make about 1,655 acres of old-growth timber (26.8 million board feet) available for logging and would build or reconstruct roads in two areas. It would take five to 10 years.
The project would include three miles of new roads, 11 miles of temporary road construction, and the reconstruction of 35 miles of existing roads. A total of 185,000 acres of forest lands on the Prince of Wales Island are within the project area. The island is the third-largest U.S. island and contains two million acres of temperate rainforest.
Harvesting the Tongass
The U.S. Forest Service holds lease sales for timber harvesting in the Tongass, and the sales have generated less revenue than the USFS spends to hold them. From 1999 to 2019, Tongass timber sales brought in about $34 million total — covering just 5 percent of the roughly $632 million the Forest Service spent running them — leaving taxpayers about $600 million in the hole, roughly $30 million a year. And timber jobs are less than one percent of the region’s jobs.
In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order to increase American timber production, citing an “inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply.” The order describes federal forest policies as “onerous.”
However, repaying campaign donors is likely the real reason for the push to log our national forests. The timber industry gave $2 million to candidates in 2024. While Democrats received $691,450, Republicans received $1.28 million. Trump received $252,435.
The World’s Largest Temperate Rainforest
The Tongass is the largest national forest, with 16.8 million acres, around the size of West Virginia. It is the largest temperate rainforest in the United States, filled with cedar, spruce, and hemlock. Together with the adjacent Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, it forms the largest coastal temperate rainforest on Earth — a rare ecosystem found in only a handful of places worldwide.
The Tongass is also a carbon sink, storing 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Every year, the old-growth and mature forests in the Tongass remove 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Around 40 percent of the carbon in U.S. national forests is in the Tongass. Carbon density in unmanaged forests is more than in managed forests, so leaving the Tongass alone means more stored carbon within its forests.
A 2019 Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the proposed Alaska Roadless Rulemaking pointed out that unlogged forests “store much more carbon.” Temperate rainforests like the Tongass can store vast amounts of carbon. The Tongass stores much more carbon than other national forests.
The math doesn’t favor the chainsaws. A timber program that has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in a region where logging accounts for less than 1% of jobs is not an economic argument; it’s a political one. What the Tongass offers instead, for free, is a carbon store the country cannot easily replace. Leaving its old growth standing isn’t just the greener choice; it’s the cheaper one. “Log, baby, log” may repay a few campaign donors, but the rest of us would be paying the bill for generations.
Image by Keith Burton on Flickr under a Creative Commons License
