McIntire-Stennis Program: Eligibility, Formula, and Funding

The McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research Program is a federal capacity-grant program that funds forestry research and graduate training at universities in all 50 states and several territories. Created by Public Law 87-788 in 1962 and administered today by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), it distributes roughly $35 million a year by formula to about 75 to 80 institutions, which must match every federal dollar with a non-federal dollar.¹²

The program filled a gap the Hatch Act of 1887 had never covered. As of 1952, forestry received only about one percent of the roughly $12.9 million Hatch distributed to state agricultural experiment stations, a share forestry leaders considered inadequate given the size of the nation’s forest sector. President John F. Kennedy signed the McIntire-Stennis Act on October 10, 1962, creating a dedicated federal funding stream for forestry research at land-grant and other state-supported forestry schools.³

Which Institutions Are Eligible

At the start, eligibility was limited to 1862 land-grant institutions and other state-supported colleges and universities offering graduate training in sciences basic to forestry. Two Farm Bills widened the pool. Section 7412 of the 2008 Food, Conservation, and Energy Act brought in the 1890 land-grant institutions, adding 13 historically Black colleges and universities.⁴ Section 7502 of the 2018 Agriculture Improvement Act extended eligibility to 1994 institutions — tribal colleges and universities — that offer an associate’s or baccalaureate degree in forestry.⁵ By fiscal year 2023, Leech Lake Tribal College in Minnesota and Salish Kootenai College in Montana were among the tribal institutions receiving allocations.⁶

Within each state, the governor or the governor’s designee certifies which eligible institutions receive funds and decides how the state’s allocation is divided among them.²

How the Money Is Distributed

The Formula

Federal dollars are apportioned to states through a formula built on four factors: the area of non-federal commercial forest land, the volume of timber cut each year, total state expenditures on forestry research from non-federal sources, and a base amount distributed equally among all states.¹ The National Association of University Forest Resources Programs describes the weighting as 40 percent non-federal commercial forestland, 40 percent annual timber removal volume, and 20 percent state non-federal research spending.⁷

The Matching Requirement

Participating institutions must match every federal dollar with at least one dollar from non-federal sources. Indirect costs and tuition remission do not count toward the match.¹ Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands are exempt from the match, and other insular areas are exempt if their allocation falls below $200,000.⁴ Federal funds that go unmatched can be reapportioned to other eligible institutions in the same state. NAUFRP has reported that federal McIntire-Stennis dollars are often leveraged at a ratio as high as nine to one when combined with state and private funding.²

Appropriations Over Time

The statute authorizes more than $150 million a year, but actual appropriations have run well below that ceiling.⁷²⁸ The FY 2025 amount available was $35,474,478.⁴ The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities requested $46 million for FY 2026.

What the Money Funds

The statute directs funded research into seven broad categories: reforestation and timber production; watershed management, including flood and erosion control; forage and wildlife habitat; outdoor recreation on forest lands; forest protection against fire, insects, and disease; wood utilization; and management and marketing policy for forest resources.⁹ The active portfolio has grown to include carbon sequestration, climate variability, biomass energy, invasive species, urban canopy cover, and the valuation of ecosystem services.¹⁰ A typical year supports more than 600 research projects at 75 to 80 universities across 54 states and territories.²

Graduate education was one of the founding purposes, and the money is structured to serve it. Individual project grants typically run $45,000 to $50,000 per year, with funds designated primarily for graduate student support along with a small supply budget.¹¹ Since 1964, the program has supported more than 8,100 master’s degrees and roughly 2,400 doctoral degrees in forestry, an estimated 37 percent of all forestry graduate degrees awarded in the country, and has provided over 24,000 years of cumulative graduate student support.¹²

Program-funded work has produced guidelines used to restore more than 300,000 acres of bottomland hardwoods in the Mississippi Delta, termite-control approaches in Hawaii credited with saving over $30 million a year, reinforcement techniques for glue-laminated beams that use lower-grade wood and save roughly $60 million a year in raw material costs in the Pacific Northwest, and the reestablishment of nesting peregrine falcons in Kentucky for the first time since 1939.¹²

How It Fits Alongside Other USDA Capacity Grants

McIntire-Stennis is one of several long-standing capacity grants NIFA administers. The Hatch Act of 1887 funds general agricultural research at state experiment stations and 1862 land-grant institutions; the Smith-Lever Act funds cooperative extension. Other programs cover research and extension at 1890 institutions, animal health and disease research, the Renewable Resources Extension Act, and tribal college endowments.¹³ All of them use the same administrative plumbing: programmatic data flows through the NIFA Reporting System, financial reports go through the ezFedGrants portal, and each operates as a formula-based grant with an institutional match.⁹ What sets McIntire-Stennis apart is its exclusive focus on forestry research and the training of forestry scientists.

Recent Changes to the FY 2026 Solicitation

NIFA released the FY 2026 request for proposals before a full appropriations act was in place and indicated it would distribute funds based on FY 2025 levels until final appropriations were enacted. The FY 2026 solicitation added a USDA directive stating the department will no longer fund programs that “improperly discriminate on the basis of race or sex, including discrimination in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies,” consistent with Executive Order 14151 issued on January 20, 2025. The same solicitation prohibits using capacity grant funds for “dangerous gain-of-function research” as defined in a separate executive order.⁴

Who McIntire and Stennis Were

The program carries the names of its congressional sponsors. Clifford McIntire, a Republican representative from Maine, was a University of Maine agriculture graduate who served in the House from 1951 to 1965 and introduced H.R. 12688, the bill that became the McIntire-Stennis Act.¹⁴ John C. Stennis, a Democratic senator from Mississippi who served 41 years in the Senate and chaired the Appropriations Committee, introduced the companion legislation. Stennis grew up on a Kemper County farm surrounded by longleaf, loblolly, and shortleaf pines, was named Mississippi’s Tree Farmer of the Year in 1952, and became widely known as the “Champion of Forestry” for his sustained legislative work on behalf of the sector.³

More than six decades after enactment, the program has channeled over $400 million in research funding and remains the primary federal vehicle for sustaining university-based forestry research across the country.³

1
USDA NIFA. McIntire-Stennis Administrative Summary
2
NAUFRP. FY 2017 McIntire-Stennis Fact Sheet
3
Forest History Society. Senator John Stennis: Champion of Forestry
4
USDA NIFA. FY 2026 McIntire-Stennis Request for Proposals
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 16 U.S.C. Chapter 3, Subchapter III
6
USDA NIFA. FY 2023 McIntire-Stennis Appendix A Distribution
7
NAUFRP. McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research Program Brochure
8
Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. FY 2026 Agriculture Priorities
9
USDA NIFA. McIntire-Stennis Capacity Grant
10
University of Nebraska–Lincoln. McIntire-Stennis Resources
11
University of Wisconsin–Madison. McIntire-Stennis Program Information
12
ResearchGate. A Driving Force in Developing the Nation’s Forests
13
USDA NIFA. Hatch Act of 1887 and Multistate Research Fund
14
Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives. Clifford McIntire