Secretary Rollins Prioritizes American Energy on National Forest Lands

Aug 21, 2025

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today issued a memorandum announcing a new policy directive prioritizing land use efficiency when evaluating proposals for power generation projects on National Forest System lands. The Secretary’s Memorandum (PDF, 1.4 MB) underscores USDA’s commitment to strengthening American energy production and reducing reliance on foreign energy sources, like foreign adversary-manufactured solar panels, while protecting our lands for future generations.

The Memorandum instructs the U.S. Forest Service to develop new screening criteria that measure and prioritize the amount of energy produced per acre of land while ensuring projects are consistent with environmental stewardship, multiple-use principles, and economic benefits for rural communities. Projects demonstrating higher land use efficiency, producing more power with less land disturbance, will be prioritized.

“America has the resources and ingenuity to power our future without depending on foreign adversaries. For too long, misguided federal subsidies and policies have pushed unreliable energy projects that waste taxpayer dollars. Those days are over,” said Secretary Rollins. “Under this memorandum, we are putting America first, ensuring that every acre of federally managed land is used wisely, balancing the needs for energy security with our responsibility to safeguard natural resources. We will no longer allow foreign-made solar panels or inefficient energy projects to undermine our national security. We are prioritizing reliable power sources, reducing costs, and preserving more land for recreation, timber, and wildlife for future generations.”

Background

USDA manages approximately 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands in 43 states, much of which could play a vital role in expanding domestic energy production and transmission capacity. Policies that discouraged the use of these lands for power generation in the past increased reliance on intermittent energy sources and limited U.S. energy independence.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids