In the first week of February 2026, Kelly Ayotte moved against her Department of Natural and Cultural Resources commissioner for failing to notify her that a federal agency had opened consultations with a state office. On February 3 her office called the department’s failure to share the information “entirely unacceptable.” On February 4 she referred the matter to the Attorney General. On February 9 she requested Sarah Stewart’s resignation and accepted it, effective the following day.

On April 15, Ayotte publicly defended an arrangement under which her Department of Health and Human Services had spent more than six months keeping its full membership in a 10-state public-health coalition out of public view — kept out in writing by the department’s own associate health commissioner in emails to peer states. She did not ask for anyone’s resignation. She did not refer the matter to the Attorney General. She called the arrangement “pretty typical.”

Same governor. Same principle at stake — agencies keeping the governor and the public informed about significant activity inside state government. Two opposite responses, 65 days apart. The variable that moved is not who made the mistake or how serious the mistake was. The variable that moved is whether disclaiming the conduct helped Ayotte politically or hurt her. That is not accountability. It is accountability theater, staged whenever the script calls for it.

The Warehouse

The Merrimack ICE warehouse story ran from Christmas Eve to late February. On December 24, 2025, the Washington Post reported that the Department of Homeland Security planned to convert a 324,000-square-foot warehouse at 50 Robert Milligan Parkway into an immigration detention facility. Contemporaneous accounts of those documents described a processing site for 500 to 1,500 people; documents released in February 2026 described 400 to 600 beds. Ayotte’s office said the governor had not been notified or consulted. For the next five weeks, her team maintained she was in the dark.

On February 3, the ACLU of New Hampshire made public a set of documents obtained through a Right-to-Know request. The records showed that DHS had sent a letter to the state’s Division of Historical Resources on January 9, formally initiating consultation under the National Historic Preservation Act about the warehouse purchase. By January 21, a career employee at DHR had issued a routine finding that no historic properties would be affected. The inquiry was one of 1,300 such reviews the division handles in a typical year.

None of that detail saved Sarah Stewart. Her department had processed a federal communication without flagging it to the governor’s office. That was enough. At a Feb. 4 Executive Council meeting, Stewart testified that she had not known about the ICE communication either; Ben Wilson, director of the Division of Historical Resources, told councilors the same. Ayotte called the episode “a serious lapse of communication” and requested a review by the Attorney General and the Division of Personnel. Stewart resigned at the governor’s request on February 9, effective February 10. The Executive Council confirmed Adam Crepeau as interim commissioner shortly afterward. Councilors pressed the department for accountability and transparency across the executive branch.

The politics were clean. ICE detention polls badly with New Hampshire independents, and the state voted for Harris by under three points in 2024. Disclaiming knowledge and forcing a resignation positioned Ayotte against a federal action her base would have accepted — at zero cost to her standing on the right, because the sacrifice was a departing commissioner most voters could not name. Two weeks later, after a meeting with Secretary Noem, Ayotte announced DHS was backing away from the Merrimack plan. She took credit for the cancellation.

The Collaborative

The Northeast Public Health Collaborative story runs on a different vector. In September 2025, ten Northeastern states plus New York City publicly formed a bloc to issue independent vaccine guidance and coordinate emergency preparedness — a backfill for the damage Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the CDC through mass firings and vaccine-skeptic appointments. New Hampshire, alone in New England, declined to join publicly.

Except it did not actually decline. On September 15, 2025, NH Associate Health Commissioner Patricia Tilley wrote to peer officials on the collaborative: “For now, please do not include New Hampshire.” She drafted the media-deflection language other states would use about New Hampshire’s participation and coordinated on whether the state should be named in public announcements. All the while, NH officials stayed on the leadership calls.

The same FOIA’d emails show Tilley, State Epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan, and NH Director of Public Health Iain Watt all served on the collaborative’s formal leadership group. Tilley personally proposed collaborative workgroups on tuberculosis in jails and prisons, arboviral diseases, rural health, and homestead food policies. For more than six months, the state got the substantive benefit of the collaborative’s work while refusing to let its name appear on the collaborative’s press releases.

New Hampshire Bulletin reporter William Skipworth exposed the arrangement on March 30 with more than a thousand pages of FOIA’d emails across multiple states. On April 15, Ayotte told reporters the arrangement was “pretty typical” and “pretty traditional,” and said the state would “keep doing what we’re doing.”

Tilley, who personally wrote the emails keeping New Hampshire’s name off the announcements, remains Associate Health Commissioner. Lori Weaver remains Commissioner. There has been no Attorney General referral and no Executive Council hearing on the collaborative. The Attorney General’s office did complete its review of the Merrimack matter: in a report released May 4, 2026, it found that DHR Director Ben Wilson failed to properly notify state officials, found no nefarious intent on his part, criticized Stewart’s hands-off approach to leadership, found that Stewart had no prior knowledge of the ICE consultation, and recommended no additional discipline. No comparable review of the department that drafted the collaborative’s deflection language has been announced.

The politics here also explain the silence. Vaccine guidance independent of RFK Jr.’s CDC is unpopular with Ayotte’s Republican base. Owning the collaborative publicly would cost her on the right. Keeping it quiet and defending that choice protects her there. On April 15, Ayotte pointed reporters to Dr. Chan as the decision-maker she relies on. The emails show Dr. Chan was on the collaborative’s leadership group himself. The epidemiologist she cited as her firewall was the person running the arrangement from the epidemiology side.

The Method

The pattern across both episodes is a governor who measures accountability by political outcome rather than by agency conduct.

In Merrimack, Stewart’s department processed a federal letter through a routine preservation review and failed to loop in the governor’s office. That was the offense. The breakdown occurred at the staff level, inside a division that handles more than a thousand such reviews a year. Stewart herself told the Executive Council that she had not been informed, and the Attorney General’s May 4 report reached the same conclusion. Ayotte requested her resignation anyway, because the political story required a resignation.

Tilley drafted the deflection emails herself and coordinated the press strategy across state lines with New York. Her conduct is more direct and more documented than anything in the Merrimack record. The Merrimack story cost a career public servant her job for an oversight the Attorney General later found she had no knowledge of. The collaborative story has cost nobody anything, because the political calculation runs in the opposite direction.

The governor’s defense in both cases runs on the same principle: the damage to the governor determines the consequence for the subordinate. When disclaiming the conduct protects Ayotte, she sacrifices the subordinate. When defending the conduct protects Ayotte, she shields them. Agency behavior is a lagging variable. Politics is the leading variable.

This is a governance standard that tells every commissioner in Concord their employment depends not on their adherence to procedure but on the governor’s political exposure in any given week. It is also a standard under which the subordinates best protected are the ones whose discretion helps the governor, and the ones most at risk are the ones who failed to predict what she would want disclaimed later. That is how you get an agency culture in which staff either try to guess the governor’s coming electoral needs or act without telling her at all and hope for the best.

Stewart resigned. Tilley did not. Nothing else needs to be said about what kind of accountability Kelly Ayotte practices. Stewart’s conduct required a resignation. Tilley’s conduct required a press-conference adjective. The difference between them was not what they did. It was what the governor needed the public to believe about what she knew. That is the method.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report.