A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that 99.0 percent of the 134,312 public comments posted on the U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) proposed revision of the Travel Management Rule oppose the Trump administration’s plan.
The 30-day comment period closed September 23.
USFS manages more than 380,000 miles of roads and 165,000 miles of trails. The 2005 Travel Management Rule requires national forests to designate the roads, trails, and areas open to motor vehicles and keeps other routes closed.
The proposed revision to the rule would reverse that, presuming existing roads, trails, airfields, and other access routes are open to motorized vehicles by default unless a closure is required by law or justified by documented resource, safety, use-conflict, or maintenance concerns.
It would also require annual review of every closed or highly restricted route, and allow aerial imagery to serve as evidence that a route existed. It also proposes new rules for e-bike use and off-route motor vehicle use for big-game retrieval, firewood collection, and dispersed camping.
Key findings:
99.0 percent of posted comments opposed the revision
0.4 percent supported it
0.6 percent were neutral or off-topic
Of the 0.4 percent of comments supporting the revision, nearly a third supported it solely because of the proposal to reclassify Class 1 e-bikes as non-motorized vehicles
The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein, who performed the analysis:
Once again, Americans have shown up in overwhelming numbers to oppose reckless actions on public lands. The Trump administration asked the public whether every road and trail in our national forests should be open to motorized vehicles by default, and the answer was a resounding no.
There are places where motorized vehicles belong and places they don’t. The American public clearly gets it. But the Trump administration either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care.
The results align with earlier CWP analyses that found universal opposition to the Trump administration’s public lands rollbacks. In September 2025, more than 99 percent of approximately 183,000 comments opposed repealing the Roadless Rule. In November 2025, 98 percent of comments opposed rescinding the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule. The Forest Service is currently accepting public comments on the proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which protects the more than 44 million acres of national forest land outside of Colorado and Idaho, where state-specific roadless rules apply. The agency extended that comment period deadline to October 6. Comments can be submitted on regulations.gov.
Methodology
CWP downloaded all 134,312 comments posted to docket FS-2026-0100 on regulations.gov as of September 24, 2026, 07:57 AM MT. Each comment was classified as supporting, opposing, or neutral/off-topic using a combination of keyword matching and a large language model. CWP staff manually audited the labels on a random sample of 300 comments, which oversampled for “support” and “neutral/off-topic” comments. The audit revealed a labeling accuracy rate estimated at 99.9 percent accurate.