by Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle
September 15, 2025
Oregon has lost out on more than $48.6 million in federal money for rural roads, public services and schools since 2023 as Congress failed in the last year to renew a federal act that has sent billions to western states in the last 20 years.
Most recently, Congressional Republicans failed to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act in the tax and spending cut megabill they passed in July. The money is meant to compensate counties with large swaths of federal land within their borders for the costs of providing critical services to people and industries using those lands for activities that generate revenue for the federal government — such as animal grazing and timber production.
Oregon, where more than half of the state consists of federal land, has experienced the biggest loss of any state since the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act expired at the end of 2023, according to a new report from the D.C.-based Center for American Progress, a liberal public policy and think tank.
During the 2023-24 fiscal year, Oregon counties and schools got more than $55 million through the act. But in the most recent fiscal year, Oregon has received roughly $8.4 million, an 85% decrease. Overall, states have lost out on more than $207 million in the two years since the act expired, the Center for American Progress found.
Oregon’s senior Democratic U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden co-authored the original Secure Rural Schools Act in 2000 and has tried since November 2024 to reauthorize it with bipartisan Senate support. He said Republicans’ inaction in the U.S. House of Representatives is “gutting rural Oregon counties.”
“I’ve worked on a bipartisan basis to get this vital legislation passed twice in the Senate, and this new report shows just how deeply the House Republican inaction is hurting communities in our state,” he said.
The Senate passed reauthorization bill in November 2024 on a bipartisan vote, but House Republicans’ failure to reach an agreement about how to fund it before the congressional term ended meant the measure died without a vote in December. The Senate passed a bill again in June on a voice vote.
The act’s Republican champion, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, “is still working behind the scenes to get this legislation moved in the House after the Senate’s now-twice unanimous passage of the reauthorization language. It remains a priority for him,” Crapo spokesperson Melanie Lawhorn said in an email.
Mark Haggerty, a senior fellow and researcher at the Center for American Progress who worked on the analysis, said for years the Secure Rural Schools Act had bipartisan support among western lawmakers. Their biggest battles were getting east-coast lawmakers, whose states don’t see much funding from the program, to agree to pass it. But that’s not the case anymore.
“I think the problem right now is that we’re taking an issue that has not been partisan in the past, that has had strong bipartisan support, but tough national support,” Haggerty said. “We’re taking that and we’re turning it into a partisan issue, and I think that’s really dangerous for counties and schools.”
In the West, the Secure Rural Schools money has largely helped keep county and school budgets whole following reduced logging and a reduction in timber revenue from federal forests in the 1990s to save imperiled species. The payments have equaled the average amount counties received from timber harvests from the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in the top three timber-producing years of the 1980s.
Oregon counties have received $4 billion in funding from the bill in the last 24 years. It’s declined by more than half in recent years due to reshifting of funds across eligible states and because it was meant to be transitional.
“You do have to reauthorize and fund it on a recurring basis, which means you always have to find an offset. You always need to find something else you’re not going to pay for if you are going to pay for this,” Haggerty said. “And you know, frankly, Congress, the people who are not in Oregon or Idaho or Montana — this comes up every two or three years — and they’re like: ‘Wait, why are we doing this? Why are we paying for that? Do we really need to be doing this?’”
Impact to Oregon schools
The Klamath County School District in southern Oregon has received the most funding from the act among the state’s school districts — between $800,000 and $1 million each year. Superintendent Glen Szymoniak said the money is crucial for small districts like his.
“Oregon’s the most affected state, and I think we’re the school district in Oregon that is most affected in the state,” he said. “That money is very valuable to us to be able to address whatever problems of the day there are, because without strings being tied to it, we can be innovative in addressing the most important issues facing the district.”
Szymoniak said new affordable housing developments in Klamath Falls have shifted the number of students at some of the district’s elementary schools. A few schools have lost students, but two of the elementary schools are now dealing with 200 more students this year than in previous years.
“We could be investing in building additional classrooms,” he said.
Oregon schools have received more than $368 million from the act since 2004, with an average of $9.7 million each year, according to Oregon Department of Education data. Oregon traditionally counted the Secure Rural Schools payments as local revenues for the sake of the statewide school funding equalization formula, so 165 of the state’s 197 school districts ended up seeing some money from the act. That included the two biggest districts, Portland Public Schools and the Salem-Keizer School District, despite the pair having little to no federal forest land within their boundaries.
This changed in 2023, when Oregon made updates to the distribution model and stopped counting Secure Rural Schools funding as local revenue. The Oregon Department of Education in 2024 agreed to provide retroactive payments to districts like Klamath County School District that should have received more direct funding from the Secure Rural Schools Act since 2018.
The agency has until Oct. 1 to make up for millions of dollars in underpayments to 82 school districts, including Klamath County School District, which is owed more than $2.5 million.
Despite these issues with funding distribution, districts in Eugene, Douglas County and Roseburg, Springfield and Albany were among the top recipients of funding in the last two decades. And districts near the Klamath National Forest, such as Klamath County School District, have ultimately received greater payments than most other districts in the last two decades.
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