The Trump administration is drastically cutting the budget and reorganizing the U.S. Forest Service, moving its headquarters and research facilities to western states. In Pennsylvania, four research sites are on the chopping block.
Research at the Allegheny National Forest
As forest ecologist Richard Bowden walks through an old growth section of the Allegheny National Forest, he points toward the ground. It’s barren of young trees.
“There’s nothing,” said Bowden, a professor of environmental science and sustainability at nearby Allegheny College. “And that’s because of deer.” Deer overpopulated this area, called Heart’s Content, and much of the Allegheny Plateau, for decades; they eat whatever vegetation they can reach.
He stops walking at a small fenced area. “This is a deer exclosure,” he explains that the fence keeps deer out. On the ground inside, there are plants growing.
“You can see all those young hemlocks coming up, and a number of other hardwoods coming up in there. In a couple weeks when everything fully leaves out, we’ll see a lot more low lying vegetation,” he said.
Bowden said a vibrant forest understory is important for growing new generations of trees, which supports birds and other wildlife, and the timber industry.
Funding cuts, and the closure of research labs
While the ideas behind this deer management demonstration might seem simple, it’s taken decades of research to understand the problem, and do the work to actually keep the deer population in balance with the forest.
Much of the research, and the coordination of solutions on the ground, was done by the Forest Service Northern Research Station in Irvine, Pennsylvania. It’s a small building in the woods outside the boundary of the Allegheny National Forest in Warren County.
But the Irvine lab is slated for closure in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s reorganization plan announced in March.
“I’m heartbroken,” said Susan Stout, who retired in 2018 after nearly 40 years as a research forester and team leader at the Irvine lab.
The plan calls for the closure of 57 of the 77 US Forest Service research sites nationwide, including four in Pennsylvania: Irvine, in the northwest, Williamsport, York, and Long Pond, in the Poconos.
Stout said it would be a huge loss. For nearly a hundred years, the Forest Service lab in Irvine has researched everything from deer, to black cherry and sugar maple trees, hemlock wooly adelgid, and other forest pests, according to Stout.
She said that research takes time. The Irvine lab started studying deer in the Allegheny National Forest in the 1970s.
“Were deer the cause of regeneration failures in the forest? Which we learned very quickly the answer was ‘yes’,” Stout said. “Then of course deer are also part of the forest. So how many deer are too many? And that’s probably the most famous study that we did, and that ran from the early 1980s through about 1990.”
Their findings on deer management are used within the 515,000 acres of the Allegheny, throughout the nearly 17 million acres of public and private forestland in Pennsylvania, around the US, and in other countries, she said.
Researchers at the Irvine lab also created a popular software tool to help foresters figure out when a tree stand could be sustainably harvested. For many years, they’ve been bringing foresters together for training.
“There are thousands of foresters who’ve worked with us and over time that became a working relationship,” Stout said.
“It’s that continuity over time and through intellectual heritage from one generation of foresters to another acting in a continuous way that is what’s really at risk of being lost,” she said.
Congress reacts
At a House Budget subcommittee hearing last month, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz answered lawmakers’ questions about Trump’s 2027 budget recommendations, which cuts total Forest Service funding by more than 70 percent, and about the agency’s reorganization plan. Schultz said the Forest Service will prioritize activities like timber sales, critical minerals, energy development, and recreation. The plan moves wildfire efforts to a new agency in the Interior Department.
Trump’s budget also eliminates the entire $309 million Forest Service research budget.
Representative Josh Harder of California asked Schultz what this would mean for federal forest researchers.
“Isn’t it true that there’s also a reduction of 800 scientists in this re-org as well?,” Harder asked.
“No, there is no reduction of any scientist in this reorganization that’s proposed,” Schultz responded.
Schultz said there is a difference between the Forest Service reorganization plan, which moves some research funding to other programs, and President Trump’s proposed 2027 budget, which eliminates the research funding.
“The president’s budget is looking to shift research from where it is today to more of a model that would be done either in the private sector or with universities,” he testified.
Schultz noted that Congress would ultimately decide whether to approve Trump’s budget.
Still, given the proposed budget cuts, Schultz said the reorganization plan looks to close underused research buildings.
“We have many facilities that have either zero employees, one, two, or three employees,” he said. “So what we’re looking to do is…we are looking to retain research and researchers over facilities and facility managers.”
The Irvine lab in Warren County is an example. The number of employees there has dwindled over the past twenty years from around 18, to only four staff today, and that includes only one researcher. According to one source, when researchers have retired, their positions have not been filled.
According to reports, staff across the country have already been sent letters, requesting that they look for other Forest Services positions.
Pennsylvania’s timber industry relies on the Forest Service
“It’s kinda scary to think about,” said Matt Galey, a forester who manages 118,000 acres of private land in northwest Pennsylvania, “I just can’t state enough how valuable they are.”
Galey said his team relies on the Irvine lab, and the other federal research facilities.
“We’re constantly asking the research lab in real time. Forest managers or foresters will be out on the ground, a lot of times it would be something relating to forest health,” he said. “Who or what is going to fill that gap because it’s really an invaluable resource to a land manager [like] myself.”
Foresters in Pennsylvania are often managing land for hardwood trees like oak and black cherry, two species that drive an important part of the state’s economy.
Amy Shields, executive director of the Allegheny Hardwood Utilization Group, which represents foresters, timber and paper companies in 14 counties in northwestern and northcentral Pennsylvania, said the state’s $21 billion timber industry is its top agricultural economic driver.
“We employ over 60,000 people, and it’s one of the few industries in Pennsylvania that has jobs in all 67 counties,” said Shields.
She said the industry relies on research, like the U.S. Forest Services’ work on forest health at its facility in Long Pond, the forest inventory and analysis done at Williamsport, and product development at the York lab.
Shields said forest research has been curtailed by declines in federal funding.
“There’s been a kind of a systematic reduction of commitment to research over these last 15 years, from both sides of the political aisle,” Shields said, pointing to the reduction in staff at the Irvine lab.
She said that while moving the remaining few employees and closing the Irvine lab seems to make financial sense, the Forest Service already owns the building, and it houses specialized labs, a greenhouse, and other equipment that can’t be moved, along with rooms packed with historical data.
“They’ve got some long-term data sets within the lab that just can’t be replicated, you know?,” she said. “You’d have to probably reinvest so much money in the pieces that would need to be rebuilt to support their ongoing work that you wouldn’t really gain anything by closing the Irvine lab.”
Shields said that while the state and universities could pick up the work done by the U.S. Forest Service in the coming years, she worries about what will happen to the continuity of nearly 100 years of data in the meantime.
A bright spot for Pennsylvania
One part of U.S. Forest Service reorganization for Pennsylvania includes a new a regional office in Warren that would oversee 13 states from West Virginia to Maine. Shields sees this as a potential boon for that part of the state.
“For Warren, Pennsylvania to be selected as the state office for what will become the mid-Atlantic region, that can be a significant economic development boost to the city of Warren in bringing jobs and higher paying, high skilled science related jobs back into the region,” Shields said.
Read more from our partner, The Allegheny Front.