The rulebooks that decide how your national forests get run, who gets a grazing permit, how a timber sale gets reviewed for damage to water and wildlife, what deadline you have to object before a decision goes final, aren’t written by Congress. They’re written inside the Forest Service, in a system of manuals and handbooks most people never see. And for decades, the law has treated the important parts of that system as public business, something the agency can’t change without telling you and taking your comment first.
The Forest Service just proposed a rule that would start cutting the public out of those decisions. It landed on July 1, under the same corner of federal regulation that guarantees the public a say over agency directives, and it arrives as part of the administration’s broader February 2025 deregulation order.
Picture the system as two shelves. One holds the Manual, the binding direction the agency’s people have to follow. The other holds the Handbooks, the detailed guides that spell out how the work actually gets done. How permits get issued and renewed. How a logging project gets analyzed. What windows you get to weigh in. The Handbooks are where the real limits live.
Here’s the part the agency is counting on you to forget. In 2018, the Forest Service looked hard at those Handbooks and admitted, in writing, that they contain real standards shaping public life, not mere internal housekeeping. It rewrote the rule to require public notice and comment on directive changes “regardless of whether they are published in the Forest Service Manual or Handbook.” That was the agency’s own conclusion, reached after three decades of treating the Handbooks as too technical to bother the public with. It expanded your voice on purpose.
Now it wants to walk that back. The 2018 expansion is exactly the kind of rule the deregulation order told every agency to hunt down and repeal, and the Forest Service has been the most aggressive land agency in government about answering that call. Narrow what counts as a directive subject to comment, and you narrow the public’s hold on everything those Handbooks govern.
The guides on the line are the ones that touch people directly. Grazing Permit Administration is FSH 2209.13, the rulebook behind a grazing program that already runs as a giveaway: cattle on your land for the price of a gas station coffee. There are handbooks for land management planning, for special uses, and for the environmental analysis behind the logging projects that reshape a forest. Weaken the public’s grip on the directive system and you weaken it across all of them at once.
This isn’t hypothetical. In March, the Forest Service pulled its entire NEPA Handbook out of the directive system in a single line of a monthly policy report, the guide that told the agency how to study the environmental damage of its own projects. It’s the same swap we’ve documented at the national level, binding rules built through public comment traded for guidance the agency can change on its own. And it’s happening inside an agency now run by a former logging executive, where we’ve traced how capture works once the people who spent careers fighting the rules are the ones writing them.
Here’s what to do about it. The comment window is open now, and this is the rare fight where a single comment carries real weight, because the agency has to read and respond to substantive comments on the record. Read the proposal and file your comment through the Federal Register page. Then use the draft below as a starting point.
A comment you can adapt and send
Swap the opening for your own words. Name the forest you use and why you care. That one detail does more than anything else in the comment.
I’m writing to oppose this proposal to narrow the public’s right to comment on Forest Service directives. I hunt, hike, and camp on national forest land, and the decisions buried in these rulebooks shape every acre of it.
In 2018, the Forest Service concluded that its Handbooks contain standards and guidelines that directly affect the public, and it expanded public comment to cover them. That conclusion was correct. The Handbooks govern grazing permits, timber sale analysis, land management planning, and special-use decisions that shape these lands for everyone who depends on them. Changes to those guides deserve more public notice and comment, not less.
Public participation is how management of 193 million acres of public land stays accountable to the people who own it. That accountability is worth protecting. I urge the Forest Service to withdraw this proposal and preserve the public’s right to comment on directive changes, whether they appear in the Manual or the Handbooks.
Then share this with someone who’d want a say before it’s gone and leave a comment letting folks know you commented and how you feel about this. And if you want to see how your representatives vote when public lands are on the line, our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard keeps the record.
Speaking out is important on every one of these issues. Silence is permission.
