Sponsors
The bill speeds wildfire, hazard-tree, and utility vegetation work and enables larger restoration projects—improving safety, infrastructure reliability, and project certainty—but it does so by narrowing environmental, cultural, and public-review safeguards and creating fiscal and tribal-inclusion risks that could lead to ecological harm, disputes, and future costs.
Residents, homeowners, firefighters, and nearby communities will get faster hazardous-tree removal and vegetation management that reduces wildfire and power-outage risk and improves grid reliability.
Land managers and local communities can implement larger, landscape-scale fuel-reduction and restoration projects (up to 10,000 acres), enabling broader wildfire-risk reduction across connected ecosystems.
Faster administrative approvals and categorical exclusions reduce delays for utilities, landowners, and agencies, lowering project interruption risk and improving regulatory certainty for energy and restoration work.
People and ecosystems face higher risk because removal of NEPA/ESA/NHPA reviews and expanded categorical exclusions weakens environmental and cultural safeguards that protect species, habitat, and historic sites.
Local residents, stakeholders, and governments will have reduced transparency and fewer opportunities for public comment or legal challenge as faster approvals and categorical exclusions limit public input.
Allowing projects up to 10,000 acres and easing review increases the potential scale of habitat loss, erosion, landscape change, and long-term ecological impacts from vegetation removal.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Expands NEPA categorical exclusions and acreage caps for hazard-tree and vegetation management, limits some ESA/NHPA reviews, and eases timber disposal and grazing rules to speed hazard-reduction and restoration.
Introduced February 13, 2026 by Mike Kennedy · Last progress February 13, 2026
Creates new and expanded NEPA categorical exclusions for “high-priority hazard tree” work and certain vegetation-management plans on National Forest and public lands, raises several categorical-exclusion acreage limits from 3,000 to 10,000 acres, and narrows when federal agencies must reinitiate ESA consultation for land management plans. It also authorizes easier disposal of removed trees/forest products without appraisal in high-risk areas, directs the Forest Service to expand targeted livestock grazing for wildfire risk reduction, and revises rules for Good Neighbor Agreements and utility vegetation removal to speed hazard-reduction and restoration work.