A last-minute amendment to a bipartisan wildfire bill ignited a fiery spat in the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Wednesday before advancing along party lines.
The addition getting rid of the 25-year-old Roadless Rule was a "poison pill" for the Democratic minority, including New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich.
"One of the frustrating things about [Wednesday] is that we took a relatively bipartisan, uncontroversial wildfire management and prevention bill and just turned it into a partisan lightning rod," Heinrich said at a Thursday news conference about the bill.
The goal of the Roadless Rule, adopted in 2001 during the waning days of President Bill Clinton's administration, is to protect undeveloped areas from excessive road construction and timber harvesting while still allowing for some access for recreation and other purposes.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, started the committee meeting by defending his record of compromise as chair, saying that under his leadership, the committee had advanced a roughly equal number of Republican- and Democratic-sponsored bills. But Democrats accused Lee of injecting conflict into a benign, bipartisan bill.
Lee said the Roadless Rule had restricted various uses of roughly 59 million acres of land.
"The Roadless Rule was a bad idea in 2001, and it remains a bad idea today, a quarter of a century later," said Lee, who introduced the amendment. "The rule has wreaked havoc on a lot of Western communities, including a lot of communities in my state."
Nationwide, the rule is popular. A recent survey sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 76% of respondents supported the rule compared to 13% who opposed it.
"Seventy-five percent rarely support anything, [and] they support the Roadless Rule," said Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo.
But there's some nuance, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The rule hasn't been a good fit for her state, the Alaska Republican said, and has stymied a transmission line project and caused uncertainty in the management of the Tongass National Forest as federal administrations change.
"The Roadless Rule has been a real challenge for us for decades," Murkowski said. "Most Alaskans maintain that the Roadless Rule should never have applied to Alaska. We didn't ask for it; we consistently opposed it. It's never been a good fit for us."
There is an ongoing administrative effort to undo the Roadless Rule.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced in Santa Fe in June 2025 that the Trump administration would seek to repeal the rule, saying it had limited economic development and failed at protecting the nation's forests from wildfire.
But Heinrich and others don't think removing the rule would prevent wildfire, and he added the rule hasn't prevented fuel reduction treatments in forested areas.
"Most wildfires are human-caused," Heinrich said Thursday. "So most fires start next to a road, and if you put more roads in roadless areas, you will have more fires in roadless areas. That is just a simple fact."
Heinrich said the rule is "flexible" and allows for temporary road building for certain projects. He cast the repeal effort as a ploy to turn lands over for industrial development and said he believed the amendment had "dimmed the prospect" of the underlying wildfire bill being passed.
A comment period last fall on the proposal to rescind the rule received more than 600,000 comments. A 2025 analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that almost all the comments were against repealing the rule.
Hundreds of the comments mentioned New Mexico, which has 1.6 million acres of inventoried roadless areas including areas near Wheeler Peak and the Pecos Wilderness. Different areas have different levels of restrictions.
According to a May filing in U.S. District Court in Alaska, the Agriculture Department plans to release a proposed rule and draft environmental impact statement by the summer.
Two states — Colorado and Idaho — have their own state versions of the rule that apply to inventoried roadless areas on National Forest System lands and thus would not be impacted by a repeal.
But senators from each state had different opinions on the amendment.
Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, urged states to adopt their own version of the Roadless Rule. He detailed how his state pulled together stakeholders to draft a set of rules, which Risch said successfully prevented litigation over the state's roadless areas.
"We wrestled [the roadless areas] away from the federal government, wrote our own rule for it, and it is managed today by a committee of Idahoans," Risch said. "This can be done."
Hickenlooper, who voted against the bill, said he planned to stand with his Democratic colleagues even though Colorado would not be affected.
"We have a roadless rule, so this doesn't affect us," Hickenlooper said. "But the random cancellation of that is not a constructive idea. … I know how important the protections of the Roadless Rule are for ecosystems, for watersheds, for Western lands we all love."