The U.S. Forest Service has a $10.8 billion road maintenance backlog across 370,000+ miles of forest roads, and only enough funding to maintain 20% of them

The National Forest System contains over 370,000 miles of roads — more than twice the length of the National Highway System. These roads exist primarily to provide access for timber harvesting, recreation, and fire suppression. The Forest Service currently receives enough funding to maintain only about 20% of these roads. The deferred maintenance backlog has grown to approximately $10.8 billion. Roads that are not maintained deteriorate: culverts fail and wash out, surfaces erode into streams, bridges become unsafe, and access is lost. The consequences hit forest management from every direction. When a road washes out, timber sale operators cannot reach the sale area, which means the sale is delayed or canceled. The Forest Service loses revenue from the sale and the stand does not get treated. When fire breaks out in an area with failed roads, suppression crews cannot get equipment to the fire line, which means the fire burns larger and costs more to fight. Fire suppression spending has consumed over 55% of the Forest Service budget, crowding out the road maintenance funding that would have prevented the access problems that made fire suppression more expensive. Degraded roads also cause direct environmental harm: eroding road surfaces are one of the largest sources of fine sediment in forest streams, degrading fish habitat and water quality for downstream communities. The structural cause is a budget death spiral. As wildfire seasons have grown longer and more severe, the Forest Service has shifted funds from road maintenance, timber management, and recreation to fire suppression. This means roads deteriorate further, timber sales become harder to execute (reducing revenue), and fuel treatments cannot be accessed (increasing future fire risk). The Great American Outdoors Act provided some relief, but the scale of the backlog — $10.8 billion — dwarfs the available annual appropriation. Without a dedicated, sustained funding mechanism decoupled from fire suppression spending, the backlog will continue to grow.