The BLM Oregon logging plan represents the most significant proposed change to federal timber policy in the Pacific Northwest in decades. On February 19, 2026, the Bureau of Land Management filed a Notice of Intent to revise its resource management plans for nearly 2.5 million acres of O&C Lands in western Oregon — and the proposed target is a harvest level four times what BLM is currently pulling from those acres. For Oregon’s forest industry, the revision has the potential to transform the federal timber supply picture. Whether it does depends on what happens next in the Environmental Impact Statement process.
What the BLM Is Proposing
The BLM’s notice proposes revising resource management plans for O&C Lands — the Oregon and California Railroad Lands — spread across 17 to 18 counties in western Oregon in a checkerboard ownership pattern. The target: increase the sustained annual timber harvest from approximately 250 million board feet to approximately 1 billion board feet.
That fourfold increase would return harvest to levels last seen before the conservation restrictions of the 1990s reshaped federal land management across the region. The proposal is driven in part by an executive order from President Trump directing federal agencies to increase domestic timber production, along with the BLM’s stated concerns about accumulated wildfire fuels and the need to manage habitat for the barred owl.
The public comment period for the Notice of Intent closed on March 23, 2026. The BLM has set a timeline that calls for a draft plan by June 12 and a final plan by November 6 — an ambitious schedule for a revision of this scope.
The O&C Lands: Why the Baseline Is So Low
To understand the scale of what the BLM is proposing, it helps to understand why 250 million board feet is the current floor — not a deliberate target, but the diminished output of a land base that Congress originally intended to be a permanent timber reserve.
The O&C Lands were granted to the Oregon and California Railroad in the 19th century, then revested to the federal government in 1916 after the railroad failed to meet settlement obligations. The O&C Act of 1937 established the framework still nominally in effect today: the lands would be managed for permanent forest production, with timber receipts shared between the federal government and the 18 counties in the planning area.
That arrangement held through the mid-20th century. Then the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in the 1990s in response to spotted owl litigation, restructured harvest across millions of acres of federal timberland in Oregon, Washington, and northern California. Harvests on O&C Lands dropped sharply. The BLM withdrew from the Northwest Forest Plan in 2016, but harvest levels remained suppressed — currently running at roughly 20% of annual timber growth on the O&C Lands.
The BLM’s Notice of Intent frames the revision as a correction to that trajectory, citing both the economic impact on rural Oregon counties and the accumulation of fuels on lands managed well below their productive capacity.
What Quadrupling the Harvest Means for Oregon’s Forest Industry
The timber industry’s response to the proposal has been direct.
“It would mean thousands of more private sector jobs. It would mean millions of dollars of revenue for county governments to support mental health services, roads, schools.”
— Travis Joseph, President, American Forest Resource Council
Douglas County Commissioner Tim Freeman, whose county is among those most dependent on O&C timber receipts, put it in starker terms: “It is the lifeline, and it’s the only thing big enough to solve this problem.”
Those economic stakes are real. County governments across western Oregon have faced structural revenue shortfalls since O&C receipts declined, with consequences for rural roads, public health, and schools in areas with limited alternative revenue sources.
But the industry itself has nuances worth noting. Amanda Sullivan-Astor, Forest Policy Manager for Associated Oregon Loggers, observed that “our technology, our operating configurations, our equipment has shifted away from large logs to a small and moderately sized material.” The logging industry that would harvest a billion board feet from O&C Lands today is not the same industry that last operated at those levels in the 1980s and 1990s. A significant portion of the proposed increase would likely come from younger, smaller-diameter stands — not old-growth.
That distinction matters because old-growth inclusion is the most contested element of the proposal. The Valley of the Giants, a 51-acre preserve of 400- to 500-year-old trees within the planning area, has become a focal point for conservation concerns — though local officials have noted that designated Outstanding Natural Areas are unlikely candidates for harvest under any final plan. Broader habitat concerns for spotted owls, salmon streams, and drinking water supplies remain central to opposition filings ahead of the EIS process.
What Comes Next: The EIS Timeline
The Notice of Intent is the opening move in a multi-year administrative process. The Environmental Impact Statement will analyze the full range of alternatives across the 2.5 million acres, and the gap between what the BLM proposes and what a final plan authorizes could be substantial.
The BLM’s stated timeline — draft plan June 12, final plan November 6 — is aggressive by federal standards for an EIS of this complexity. Litigation is a near-certainty at some stage of the process; past O&C resource management plan revisions have spent years in federal court after finalization.
For private forest management in Oregon and for contractors who depend on federal timber sales, the practical question is not whether the BLM can propose 1 billion board feet — it clearly can — but how much of that target survives the EIS, any subsequent legal challenges, and the operational timeline of converting approved harvest levels into actual sales. The distance between a Notice of Intent and a felling permit is long, and historically, that distance has defined the outcomes of every major O&C revision.
What the proposal does signal clearly is a federal policy direction: the BLM is positioning O&C Lands for a level of timber production not seen in Oregon in a generation. The EIS process will define whether that direction translates into supply.