Trump officials wrongly awarded Alaska grant in bid to open Tongass forest to logging: watchdog

The Trump administration wrongly tweaked a grant process when forwarding $2 million in funds to the state of Alaska as officials pushed to open the state’s Tongass National Forest up to more logging, a government watchdog found.

In September of last year, the U.S. Forest Service gave $2 million to Alaska to help it prepare an environmental analysis of proposed logging in one of the nation’s largest old-growth forests.

The problem, Democratic lawmakers argued, is that pot of money was designed to help communities prevent and suppress wildfires. 

A new report from the Office of the Inspector General that reviewed Forest Service actions found the process “used to award the $2 million grant to Alaska did not comply with federal laws and regulations.”

The Forest Service “should not issue funding to Alaska under the August 2018 grant agreement,” the report concluded.

Since the grant was approved, the Trump administration has since finalized a plan to reverse the long-standing Roadless Rule, which blocked building additional roads on 9.4 million acres on Tongass land in an effort to limit logging.

“According to this nonpartisan report, the Trump Forest Service violated the law in a rush to build the case for rolling back critical protections for our largest National Forest,” Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who requested the review, said in the statement. 

The inspector general report notes the Forest Service “needed to quickly award this grant” — a nod to Democrats’ concerns that the Trump administration was eager to distribute funds to bolster backing for opening the forest to logging.

“The inspector general’s findings validate the concerns we had about this process from the start. By illegally modifying this grant agreement, the Forest Service intended to provide an unfair advantage to the State of Alaska at the expense of other stakeholders, especially the tribes participating as cooperating agencies,” House Natural Resources Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said in a statement.

“This process was rushed toward a predetermined outcome that threatens the Tongass National Forest’s role as a partial solution to climate change. The report bolsters the case that the Department of Agriculture should reverse the Alaska Roadless Exemption starting on day one,” he said.

The Forest Service responded to the report saying it “generally concurs with the findings and recommendations.”