New roads would allow heavy machinery access to back country areas and make commercial logging feasible.

Prohibiting roads on about 30 percent of federal forests would protect habitat and wildlife and save taxpayers money, proponents of the roadless rule say.

"No public expression of dissent is allowed in the federal government now," Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility known as PEER, said.

The problem arose after the US Forest Service, an agency of the US Department of Agriculture, asked for comments on building roads in pristine national forests.

An EPA staffer wrote that building roads through swaths of land previously untouched would deteriorate the qualify of water in streams and have an impact on public drinking water.

Ruch said that EPA employees related that Steven Shimborg, a political appointee at the EPA, dismissed the staff draft as a "rant" and ordered the objections stricken from the EPA comments.

"I think that PEER is off the mark on this one," Cynthia Bergman, press secretary at the EPA said.

Bergman said she did not know if Shimborg had used the word rant. "His concerns were that the final report focus on EPA's area of expertise and not where we don't have jurisdiction," Bergman said.

The EPA comments also recommended that the Forest Service address its concerns about water quality. "And we volunteered to assist in this service," Bergman said.

The Clinton rule spawned a number of lawsuits from logging companies and several western states which were affected by the roadless rules.

According to Defenders of Wildlife, the Forest Service has built more than 360,000 miles (579,350 km) of roads in national forests -- or eight times the length of the US interstate highway system.