A measure to renew critical funding for rural counties and schools, including many in Oregon and Washington, has won bipartisan approval in Congress.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 395-4 in favor of the Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization Act of 2025, which the Senate approved in June. It now heads to President Donald Trump for his signature.

For many rural counties with huge swaths of untaxable federal land in the Northwest, the bill will renew funding they’ve come to rely on to pay for sheriff’s departments and other essential needs. It also helps school budgets.

When Republicans omitted Secure Rural Schools funding from the federal spending bill they approved earlier this year, leaders of Klamath, Curry and other rural counties feared they could face local budget crises.

Last week, U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, both Oregon Democrats, joined dozens of other lawmakers from across the political aisle calling on House leadership to fast-track the bill and get funds back to rural counties.

On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Republican representing inland Northern California along the Oregon border, moved to fast-track the bill and send it to Trump’s desk without amendments.

That motion gained “yes” votes from Oregon’s congressional leaders, including Republican U.S. Rep Cliff Bentz and Democrat U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle.

Before Secure Rural Schools, rural counties largely relied on getting a share of the federal government’s logging revenues. After those revenues declined due to a host of economic and environmental factors, including new laws protecting forests from clearcutting, Wyden wrangled lawmakers to pass a bill that created the Secure Rural Schools program in 2000.

The program has been especially influential in Oregon, where half the land is managed by the federal government. More than two dozen counties in both Oregon and Washington typically receive Secure Rural Schools funding.

“This law and the funding it provides was designed to partially offset the massive decline in federal timber revenue,” Bentz said on the House floor. “It provides a modest amount of funding for critical services including infrastructure maintenance, search and rescue, fire prevention, and most importantly, money for children’s education.”

Bentz represents Oregon’s second congressional district, covering most of the state’s dry forests and sagebrush deserts. Oregon’s fourth congressional district, represented by Hoyle, includes many of the coastal temperate rainforests that have long supplied the nation with timber.

Those forests also provide critical old-growth habitat for vulnerable species, like spotted owls and marbled murrelets. Environmental policies in the 1990s aimed to protect those species by limiting clearcutting.

“Generations of families built their lives and livelihood around federal timber harvest, and counties relied on the revenue shares from those sales to fund public services,” Hoyle said. “When the timber industry collapsed, the revenue shares also disappeared.”

Counties’ individual payments from Secure Rural Schools are based on how much they would have received during the height of the logging industry in the 1980s, and the program’s funding has to be approved by Congress every couple of years.

When funding lapsed in 2023, counties defaulted back to getting federal logging revenue, which was a small fraction of what they had been receiving.

Then Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in June, which called for ramping up logging. But instead of sending a share of logging revenue to counties, the federal government would take it all, leaving rural counties worrying about how they would pay for sheriff’s patrols.

Those worries may be alleviated if Trump signs the bill to reauthorize funding. It’s not clear when that may happen.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/09/secure-rural-schools-funding-approved-congress-oregon-washington-counties/