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WASHINGTON— The $1.3 trillion spending bill unveiled in Congress on Wednesday includes harmful provisions to ramp up logging on public lands, weaken protections for endangered species and fund portions of an environmental destructive border wall. The bill, however, does not include most of the anti-environment riders proposed by Republicans, including ending protections for wolves in the Great Lakes states, allowing a toxic mine in the Superior National Forest and undermining the National Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which would have allowed damaging road building in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. It also contains significant funding for conservation and spares the Santa Ana National Wildlife

Montana’s congressional delegation says reforms to forest management, including an end to “fire borrowing,” will be included in must-pass legislation this week. On a media call Wednesday, Republicans Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte detailed a forest reform package as part of an omnibus bill, which includes funding wildfires similarly to other natural disasters. The reform ends fire borrowing — the practice of using funds from other programs such as trail maintenance to pay for fires that exceed budgets. Under the changes, when fire budgets run dry, agencies may tap into natural disaster funding rather than their own budgets.

Reforms to improve forest management and how firefighting is funded are among the provisions important to Montana included in the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill making its way through Congress, according to Montana lawmakers. A bill protecting public land north of Yellowstone National Park from mining, however, did not make it into the omnibus bill, prompting one of the state’s senators to criticize the other for its failure to be included. U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., told reporters via telephone Wednesday that he was able to secure forest management and wildfire funding reforms in the bill. One provision reduces red tape and streamlines projects

Montana’s Republican delegation to Congress on Wednesday praised provisions included in the 2018 federal spending bill that address forest management, including a partial overturning of the Cottonwood decision and efforts to streamline timber projects. Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Greg Gianforte said the reforms, which will also fund the U.S. Forest Service’s firefighting expenses from a separate account, represent a start in improving the health of the nation’s forests. “What’s been going on has been called fire borrowing,” Gianforte said. “In bad fire years, most of the operating budget for the Forest Service gets consumed with fighting fires. Because we’re opening up

A draft bill proposing wide changes to public forest management includes a provision by Sen. Steve Daines overturning a federal court ruling on endangered species habitat. Daines, R-Mont., discussed the Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation Act of 2017 at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on Wednesday. The full bill, by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., hasn’t been formally introduced yet. “We have had one of the most devastating fire seasons this year across the West and in Montana,” Daines wrote in an email. “We need forest management reform now to reduce the severity and intensity of wildfires and create

Montana’s senators are trying to reverse a controversial federal court case out of Bozeman they say is partly to blame for the state’s devastating wildfires. But some environmentalists say it’s actually an assault on the Endangered Species Act. At a congressional hearing last week, Republican Senator Steve Daines said there’s a saying in Montana: “Either we’re going to manage the forests, or the forests are going to manage us.” And he says a recent 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling known as the Cottonwood decision means the forests are managing Montana. Daines testified alongside Democratic Senator Jon Tester in