America’s national forests are criss-crossed by dirt roads built to enable logging crews to reach secluded timber stands. Just 14 days before leaving office, the Bush administration is changing federal rules to allow those roads to be paved.
The change is expected to be finalized in the next week or so by Mark E. Rey, the U.S. Agriculture Department official in charge of the U.S. Forest Service. He’s also a former lobbyist for the timber industry. The the new rule — like many of the policies he has championed — chiefly benefits big timber.
In this case, that’s the Plum Creek Timber Company, which owns 1.2 million acres in the environmentally sensitive mountains of western Montana. Plum Creek wants to develop extravagant trophy homes. But much of its land is accessible only by dirt logging roads on public land.

The housing development would be a problem for local and county governments in western Montana, which have tried to cluster new housing developments around existing towns, in part to hold down the cost of providing services.
But local and county governments in the area weren’t consulted about or given a say in the change. Mr. Rey’s newly “clarified” rule on paving logging roads was developed after closed-door negotiations with Plum Creek. Congress wasn’t consulted, either. Montana’s two U.S. senators, Jon Tester and Jeff Bingaman, both Democrats, have objected to the change.
The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the new rule could have national implications: Other private landowners could ask the federal government to pave logging roads through other national forests so they could develop more land, even if paving those roads could damage public lands and threaten endangered species. The new rule could be a concern in Missouri, where the Bush administration twice proposed selling parts of the Mark Twain National Forest. Some forest service officials who are lower on the chain of command than Mr. Rey made just these sorts of arguments in opposing the rule.

Under the Bush administration, public policy often has been manipulated for the benefit of private companies. Perhaps nowhere has the trend been more apparent than in the Interior Department, which oversees America’s national forests and most of its public land.
Mr. Rey’s former boss at the Interior Department, another former industry lobbyist, J. Steven Griles, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to disgraced super lobbyist Jack Abramhoff. Griles bought a $980,000 vacation home with a lobbyist for an oil company that saved $525 million because Griles’ Interior Department allowed it to delay installing pollution-control equipment at its refineries.
Restoring the integrity of the Interior Department as the protector of public lands will be a huge job for Congress and the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama. Congress should block the new rule and investigate other last-minute changes that benefit politically connected insiders at the expense of the public interest.