Saved by Seniority

The Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research stations nationwide, including dozens that produced science the world relies on. New Hampshire saved its two White Mountain labs because one senator sits on Senate Appropriations and one governor had the USDA secretary on the phone — a lineup most of the country does not have.

On May 11, Gov. Kelly Ayotte and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen put out a joint press release announcing that the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains would not be closed under the Trump administration’s reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service. The plan to shutter Bartlett Experimental Forest, six miles down the road, was being “reexamined.” The release also noted that Ayotte had spoken with USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins about further investment in Bartlett’s facilities — specifically, improvements to its bunkhouse.

The bunkhouse detail is what gives the announcement away. It is not the kind of thing a federal agency closing 57 research stations writes into a press release unless a senator made it write that.

Two weeks later, the Hubbard Brook reprieve is real and the Bartlett one is provisional. Both were saved by the same mechanism: a Democratic senator with seniority on Senate Appropriations placed a call to the Republican USDA secretary; a Republican governor placed her own; the secretary made an exception. That mechanism is not available in most of the country. Fifty-seven of the Forest Service’s 77 research facilities, across 31 states, are scheduled to close. The two that produced the science behind the Clean Air Act survived because New Hampshire happens to send Jeanne Shaheen to Washington.

The state should be relieved. It should also be paying attention to what the rest of the country just lost.

What the Reorganization Actually Does

The USDA press release on March 31 framed the restructuring as modernization. Headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City. Five regional research stations consolidated into a single hub in Fort Collins, Colorado. Six service centers replacing the regional offices. The pitch was efficiency.

The number the press release did not lead with: 57 of 77 research facilities scheduled to close. Three-quarters of the agency’s research footprint, eliminated. The agency’s own clarification, posted after scientists objected publicly, insisted the move “does not eliminate scientific positions, cancel research programs, or reduce our national research footprint.” The math does not survive a glance. Closing 57 of 77 facilities reduces the footprint by definition. The agency is asserting that consolidating physical sites preserves the work done at those sites. The researchers at those sites disagree.

The closures include the Pineville, Louisiana, Southern Research Station; six Mountain West labs; two stations in Minnesota; and dozens more in states whose senators do not sit on Senate Appropriations and whose governors do not have an open line to Brooke Rollins. They get the press release. They do not get the bunkhouse.

The Lab That Cleaned the Air

Hubbard Brook is, by most measurements, the single most consequential ecological research site in North America. In 1963, two years after Gene Likens and his colleagues began the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study, a rainfall sample at the White Mountains site came in at a pH of 3.7, roughly 100 times more acidic than expected. That sample, and the decades of measurements that followed, became the documentary record of acid rain in North America.

Layered with atmospheric modeling that traced the sulfate back to Midwestern coal plants, the Hubbard Brook data became the scientific case President George H.W. Bush signed into the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Acidity in Hubbard Brook’s rainfall has since fallen roughly 80 percent from its 1963 level. The Likens framing, paired-watershed monitoring with continuous decadal chemistry, became the template for ecological research worldwide. Hubbard Brook anchors the National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research Network and is a foundational node in its international counterpart. More than 1,500 peer-reviewed papers have come out of its archive. Nearly 30,000 individual water samples sit in its library.

That archive is what the Forest Service was, until May 11, prepared to put “under evaluation.” The agency’s own website listed every research site as under review — Hubbard Brook included. Anthea Lavallee, the Hubbard Brook executive director, told NHPR the team had been operating under a sustained hiring freeze that strangled staffing as people retired. The May 11 reprieve took the station off the chopping block. It did not undo the freeze. It did not restore the staff already gone. And it did not protect the 56 other research stations whose science is, by every measure that matters, the same kind of irreplaceable.

The 95-Year Record at Bartlett

Bartlett Experimental Forest sits in Carroll County, six miles from Hubbard Brook. It was established in 1931 and is now in its ninety-fifth year of continuous silvicultural research on northern hardwoods. The 441-plot inventory grid laid out in 1931 was re-measured in 1939, 1991, and 2003. On the ground at Bartlett is a record of how spruce and pine and beech and sugar maple respond to single-tree selection, group cuts, patch cuts, and clearcuts — on the same plots, in the same soils, across nearly a century. There is no substitute for that record. It exists because somebody marked the plots in 1939 and somebody else kept showing up.

The people who use that record are not abstractions. Ann Davis, a tree farmer from Wilmot, told the Concord Monitor that the storm-damaged woodlot she bought in 2002 was restored using methods developed at Bartlett, and has since grown into Woods Without Gile, the 530-acre operation that made her and her husband New Hampshire’s Outstanding Tree Farmers of the Year in 2022. Jasen Stock, executive director of the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association, said Bartlett’s test plots are what he uses to teach landowners why they need a real forester. Mariko Yamasaki, who retired as a research wildlife biologist at Bartlett in 2023, told NHPR that nobody else does long-term ecological research the way the Forest Service does, because nobody else has the 90-year record.

The March 31 press release was prepared to put all of that on a moving van. The May 11 statement walked half of it back. As of this writing, the “reexamination” has not produced a final decision. The bunkhouse is still in the press release. The science is still in limbo.

The Math of Who Got Saved

One state out of 31 got a partial win. The state with the senior Senate appropriator and the Republican governor who could call the USDA secretary for a favor. Read the column for what it is: a political map dressed up as a science decision. The Forest Service did not reexamine Bartlett because the science changed. It reexamined Bartlett because Jeanne Shaheen and Kelly Ayotte agreed on something, and that agreement was leveraged through a Senate committee that controls USDA’s appropriations. Pineville does not have a Shaheen. The Lake States Research Center in Minnesota does not have a Shaheen. The lesson the administration just taught every state government in the country is that federal science survives if your senators can muscle the secretary and disappears if they cannot. That is patronage, not a research strategy.

What Closes With the Lab

The Forest Service’s clarification document promises that research continues from the consolidated hubs. The promise misunderstands what a research forest is. It is not a workstation. It is a parcel of land where measurements have been taken at the same plots on a continuous schedule, sometimes spanning four scientific generations. Interrupt the continuity and you do not get a slightly degraded dataset. You get a discontinuity that propagates forward forever. The Bartlett plots measured in 1931, 1939, 1991, and 2003 produce a single time series. A new plot measured in 2030 is a different time series. The two are not comparable.

The same applies, at higher stakes, to Hubbard Brook’s 1963-onward precipitation record — the record that proved acid rain existed. That finding required not a snapshot but a slope: rainfall acidity sampled continuously enough to demonstrate the trend was real and that it tracked Midwestern emissions. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments sit, in part, on top of that slope.

The administration was prepared to interrupt that kind of record at 56 of the 57 facilities still on the closure list. Wildfire research labs are among them, scheduled to shutter as the West heads into another fire season. Pest and pathology labs are among them. Forest hydrology labs at a time when New Hampshire’s rainfall patterns are simultaneously wetter and drier — the paradox the NH Bulletin’s Molly Rains reported on last week — are among them.

The International Map

The reason this matters past the New Hampshire line is that Hubbard Brook is not a national asset. It is a node in an international scientific infrastructure. The International Long Term Ecological Research Network coordinates sites on six continents, and the technique many of those sites use — measuring everything flowing into and out of a single small watershed to balance the books on a forest’s chemistry — traces back, in significant part, to the framework Likens and Bormann built in the White Mountains. The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 became a template for international acid deposition agreements, including the 1991 U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement.

That global footprint is the part the reorganization ignores. The researchers and programs around the world that built on the Hubbard Brook model cannot call Brooke Rollins. They are watching the United States walk away from a research enterprise the rest of the world treats as a public good.

The Generational Math

The reorganization is being sold as a managerial decision, but it is also a generational one. The data being walked away from is the inheritance one scientific generation leaves to the next. The researchers who began measuring at Bartlett in 1931 and Hubbard Brook in 1963 were investing in a record they would never personally use for the most important papers. They were building a baseline for the next generation, who used it to discover acid rain, and for the generation after that, who needs it to track climate change against an undisturbed reference.

Science compounds the same way. It is how compounding works in every long-horizon obligation New Hampshire is currently absorbing: housing supply, the education funding fight, deferred infrastructure, unfunded pension liabilities. The closure of 57 research stations is the same maneuver in a different account — the kind of pattern Generational Malpractice tracks across every domain where today’s administrative convenience erases tomorrow’s inheritance.

The Forest Service is proposing to consolidate decades of irreplaceable ecological data into a Fort Collins hub and assume the new arrangement will produce the same outputs. The proposition is unfalsifiable in the short term and catastrophic in the long term. By the time a successor administration in 2031 or 2035 realizes the experimental forests cannot be reconstituted, the people who knew how to run them will have retired or died. The plots will be gone. The continuous record will have a hole punched through it that no funding decision can repair.

What the Reprieve Doesn’t Fix

Ayotte and Shaheen deserve credit for the May 11 announcement. The state is materially better off because they made the calls. Hubbard Brook is open. Bartlett, probably, will stay open. The bunkhouse may even get the upgrade.

The reprieve does not fix the hiring freeze that has already hollowed out staff at both sites. It does not restore the national footprint just cut from 77 to 20. It commits nothing beyond a verbal review of Bartlett. It does not protect the labs in 30 other states whose science is being shut down on the same schedule. And it does not change the underlying signal: the federal government can be persuaded to preserve specific scientific infrastructure if you can get the right secretary on the right phone, and is otherwise willing to walk away from research enterprises that took a century to build.

The right response is not gratitude. It is documentation. The senators and governor who saved Hubbard Brook should now press for the same review of the other 56 stations, using the same logic that worked here: irreplaceable continuous data is a national resource, and consolidating it into Fort Collins guarantees its destruction. They should also press the question Lavallee raised on NHPR: what happens to the staff already lost to the hiring freeze, and what will it take to restore them?

If the rescue stops at the state line, New Hampshire just learned what the rest of the country is about to learn the hard way. The country is being asked to trade a national scientific apparatus for a series of state-by-state lobbying contests. New Hampshire wins those contests. Louisiana and Minnesota do not. The Mountain West does not. Turning federal science into a favor only senior senators can call in is the decision the administration made on March 31, and the decision two phone calls partially reversed for one state on May 11.

The bunkhouse will get its repairs. The 56 other labs will not. That is not a science policy. That is what science policy looks like when it has been demoted to constituent service.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice.