Forest Service’s rural schools payout includes $4.5M for Wyoming

The federal government owns nearly half the land in Wyoming. That gives Wyomingites easy access to national forest and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, but it also means they miss out on the property taxes that would be paid by private landowners.

The federal Secure Rural Schools (SRS) program aims to rectify that.

Under the program, the U.S. Forest Service will be giving Wyoming $4.5 million this year to support rural schools and roads. That’s the state’s cut of this year’s $248 million total payout.

Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman touted the program on the House floor in December.

“With such a large percentage of Wyoming’s resources historically locked up in federal lands, including national forests, communities across my state have long weathered challenges associated with reduced flexibility and a decreased tax base,” she said. “Since [the program’s] creation, Wyoming communities have received vital funding to support infrastructure projects, public education, search and rescue operations and other critical emergency services.”

The program has been repeatedly reauthorized for decades with only a few lapses. A bill resuming the payments after its most recent lapse in 2024 advanced through Congress and was signed by Pres. Trump in December.

In April, the U.S. Forest Service announced that this year’s payout, which is determined by a complex calculation, would be $248 million across the country.

“Secure Rural Schools payments reflect our strong partnership with the counties and communities that surround national forests,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said in a news release. “These funds support critical infrastructure, while advancing active forest management and restoration that keep forests resilient and communities safer. We remain committed to deliver this support directly to rural communities that depend on these resources.”

The payments will be distributed to 19 of Wyoming’s 23 counties in roughly the following amounts:

• Albany: $328,000
• Big Horn: $320,000
• Carbon: $331,000
• Converse: $19,000
• Crook: $136,000
• Fremont: $715,000
• Hot Springs: $31,000
• Johnson: $179,000
• Lincoln: $370,000
• Natrona: $3,000
• Park: $664,000
• Platte: $1,000
• Sheridan: $166,000
• Sublette: $571,000
• Sweetwater: $69,000
• Teton: $550,000
• Uinta: $46,000
• Washakie: $29,000
• Weston: $5,000

The payments to Converse, Crook, Teton, and Weston Counties do not technically stem from the Secure Rural Schools program, though they are included in the forest service’s $248 million total and Wyoming’s $4.5 million.

For these four Wyoming counties, the payments are authorized by an older program, a 1908 act of Congress that gives counties 25% of the revenue generated on federal lands within their boundaries. Individual counties may choose to receive this revenue share instead of the SRS payment, and often do when the share is higher than their SRS payment would be.

For most counties in Wyoming, the SRS payment is more generous.

From timber sales to federal compensation

Legislation passed more than a century ago saw the federal government pay states some of the revenue it generated from logging activities in national forests. That was great for counties with federal forests in their backyards, but less so for counties with other less monetizable federal lands.

In 1976, the federal government started making Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) to these counties to address this disparity. A 2025 congressional overview of that program states:

“PILT was enacted in response to a shift in federal policy from one that prioritized disposal of federal lands — in which federal ownership was considered to be temporary — to one that prioritized retention of federal lands, in perpetuity, for public benefit … Along with this shift came the understanding that, because these lands were exempt from state and local taxation and were no longer likely to return to the tax base in the foreseeable future, some compensation should be provided to the impacted local governments.”

Logging revenue declined in the 1990s, so Congress stepped in with the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000. It provided for six years of payments to the counties that had historically shared in the federal government’s logging revenue.

“It was intended to be temporary,” said Mark Haggerty, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “The payments actually declined over those six years, and then they sunset. And the idea was that those counties would transition [so] they’re not going to be reliant on timber anymore. But they’ll become a recreation county, or they’ll become a remote work county, or they’ll be a retirement [county], like they’ll find another way to pay for their budgets.”

But “a lot of these rural counties have not transitioned,” Haggerty said. So the temporary program has become a semi-permanent one, with repeated reauthorizations throughout the years, often driven by the states with the most to lose if the funding went away completely.

“Wyoming is a classic case,” Haggerty said. “Wyoming pays for things with oil and gas money. It’s hard to develop a diversified tax structure around recreation in Wyoming, because you don’t have the taxes to pay for it, right? You don’t have an income tax. You have low sales taxes because you pay for things other ways.”

As the program has been renewed, its formula has been tweaked. Its overall payouts have fallen from a peak of more than $500 million when it was first reauthorized in 2008.

But some of the formula changes have benefited certain counties more than others. Now, in addition to a county’s historic timber sales, the SRS payout also takes into consideration federal land acreage and relative income levels.

“For some poor counties that have a lot of federal land but didn’t used to get a lot of timber receipts, all of a sudden their payments went up through the roof because those other formula factors really benefited them,” Haggerty said.

In Wyoming, that included Park County, which never saw Oregon-levels of logging but does have a lot of federal land.

Those same formula factors disadvantaged richer communities like Teton County, which left the program in 2008 when those changes took effect.

Center for American Progress

Today, all of these forces, as well as recent moves by the Trump administration, might be driving a wedge into the coalition of states that historically backed the SRS program.

A bipartisan coalition fractures

In the summer of 2025, SRS funding was removed from the One Big Beautiful Bill before the legislation’s passage. The Center for American Progress published an interactive map showing how the end of that funding would affect rural counties.

Each county has the option of receiving its SRS payment or taking its share of logging or other federal land revenues under the program that’s been going since 1908. When Teton County left the SRS program in 2008, it reverted to accepting revenue shares.

For many years, especially in the early years of the SRS program, it made more sense for counties to take SRS payments instead of the 1908 shares. That meant the SRS program usually had just enough support to be reauthorized. Haggerty said support came from Congress members of both parties, but only from those representing the states that benefited.

“It’s just really difficult politically,” he said. “It’s not a partisan issue, because both Republicans and Democrats in the states that get it support it. It’s a geographic problem. They just don’t have enough places that need it.”

Today, with SRS payments falling and a presidential administration pushing for more logging on national forests, Haggerty said some counties that once benefited from the SRS payments are eying a return to revenue-sharing.

“Either they think they can get more out of revenue-sharing than what a Secure Rural Schools payment might be, or they think by tying their budgets to activities on public lands, they can force the politics to open the public lands up again to more extraction,” Haggerty said. “That’s fragmented the coalition that already wasn’t big enough to consistently get it authorized. And so the future of Secure Rural Schools, I think, is probably less secure now than it has been in the past.”

The payments lapsed in 2016, and again in 2024, when Congress did not reauthorize them. The latest reauthorization also includes retroactive payments for 2024.