Unlocking Rural America's Potential
Floor Speech
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Mr. BENTZ. Madam Speaker, outdated and complicated permitting processes, excess paperwork, environmental impact statements, and years-long litigation processes have delayed or prevented projects all across Oregon, especially in my district, which covers more than two- thirds of the State.
Federal permitting involves too many agencies and too many bureaucrats. As far as Federal agencies are concerned, there are no consequences for time lost or money spent. Nowhere is this problem more pronounced than in forest management.
For decades, Congress has stacked process upon process, creating more and more red tape for agencies to deal with. Of course we want to know what the impact of a project will be. However, when the processes of determining that impact stall action for up to 20 years, the system is obviously broken.
With over 70 million acres of our national forest at high or moderate risk of wildfire, there is an urgent need to reduce the amount of unneeded and dangerous fuel. We have seen the tragic results of inaction as millions of acres of our beautiful forests burn each year, including over 10 million acres in 2020 alone and over 7 million acres in 2021.
In my home State of Oregon, over a million acres burned last year in the Labor Day fires. Last summer, smoke from the massive Oregon Bootleg Fire spread across the entire United States, visibly fouling the air and poisoning people even here in Washington, D.C.
The Biden administration issued a 10-year plan acknowledging the wildfire and forest health crisis and calling for treatment of an additional 20 million acres of the National Forest System, a fraction of what is actually necessary. Congress recently provided the Forest Service with over $6 billion in the bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act to increase hazardous fuels reduction and forest restoration activities. The agency, however, remains buried in red tape, endless analysis, and frivolous litigation.
A 2014 GAO report found that the United States Forest Service did more of the most costly and time-consuming NEPA reviews than any other Federal agency. These National Environmental Policy Act reviews often require the Forest Service to spend over $1 million to complete paperwork, and then they take an average of almost 5 years to merely authorize small and inconsequential forest thinning projects intended to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire to our forests and communities.
While precious time is wasted, massive wildfires rage on, dumping billions of tons of toxic, cancer-causing pollution into our air. This is an environmental disaster rapidly becoming a nightmare.
Congress must take action to give the Forest Service additional tools to reduce the time, cost, and litigation that delay the agency from authorizing and implementing these critical projects. I am proud to be a cosponsor of the Resilient Federal Forests Act, which would do just that.
Earlier this year, I expressed my concern on this very floor about the so-called River Democracy Act currently pending in the Senate. It would place new management restrictions on some 3 million acres of Federal land in Oregon by establishing a 1-mile wild and scenic buffer along some 4,700 miles of creeks and, in some areas, dry gulches.
The Forest Service recently reported that over half of the 2 million Forest Service acres of land impacted by this act is at high risk for wildfire. Treating these acres only becomes more difficult, if not impossible, with these types of designations.
It is time to overhaul our Nation's permitting and NEPA process. Current laws and agency rules hand far too much power to litigation groups that use sue and settle tactics to profit off our tax dollars by delaying and, in some cases, preventing important restoration projects.
We need serious, thoughtful reform to put an end to this abuse. I am glad my colleagues share my determination to make that happen, and hopefully it will be a bipartisan process.
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