A recent executive order by President Donald Trump to streamline regulations and allow more timber to be harvested from U.S. Forest Service lands invites what possibly could be a trivia question: Under which U.S. department’s jurisdiction does the U.S. Forest Service fall?

If you answered the U.S. Department of the Interior, which supervises national parks and fulfills a mission of preserving natural areas and sites of note, you would be wrong.

If you answered the Environmental Protection Agency, which enforces environmental regulations to curtail pollution and limit environmental damage to America’s communities, you also would be wrong.

The U.S. Forest Service is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and its mission is to enable Americans to use domestic production to meet the needs of Americans and the American economy — Farming, ranching and, yes, even logging.

While we have observed the shortcomings and challenges executive orders pose in the past — in regards to the Biden administration’s pursuit of student debt relief and in other instances — we do not want to dwell on that today.

Because, in our view, our lawmakers should rise to the occasion and work with the White House to codify these steps through the legislative process.

We believe logging can be done responsibly in ways that balance natural conservation with the needs of American families and American businesses for wood products and for the jobs production of those wood products creates.

The Forest Service, the Associated Press reports, already sells the rights to harvest about 3 billion board feet of timber a year. Before the rise in influence of strident, uncompromising environmentalism, decades ago, the U.S. Forest Service saw about 12 billion board feet of timber harvested a year.

We don’t know that, in finding the right balance, the yield from federal lands will ever reach those heights again.

What we do know is that America needs wood products — particularly in housing construction, as many communities struggle with shortages of affordable housing and could greatly benefit from reasonably priced lumber to both build new housing and renovate existing buildings.

We know America needs jobs — even with our unemployment rate still thankfully low, the creation of jobs is a more effective measure to improve worker pay and benefits than any one-size-fits-all edict from Washington, D.C., Albany or Harrisburg.

And we know that, despite what some extremists say, we can achieve these goals while still preserving much of our wilderness.

We hope representatives and senators proactively work with the White House to achieve these goals.