Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Thursday announced a long-awaited reorganization plan to transfer most of the Washington-area staff to five locations around the country and close a number of key USDA offices in the capital region.
Rollins, speaking in a video message to employees, said USDA will move people to Salt Lake City; Fort Collins, Colorado; Indianapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; and Raleigh, North Carolina. Staff will receive notice about their new assignments in the coming months.
The department will close nearly all of its Washington-area buildings as a result, with the exception of the Whitten and Yates buildings, which are located directly on the National Mall. That includes the South building of USDA’s headquarters, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the George Washington Carver Center and a Food and Nutrition Services facility in Alexandria, Virginia, that has recently had major workplace hazards.
However, there will be no large-scale reductions in force, given that the department has already seen an exodus of 15,364 employees through the administration’s deferred resignation plan, Rollins said.
“This reorganization already recognizes that many USDA employees provide critical frontline services in locations all across our great country that cannot be disrupted,” she added.
Rollins’ move is the latest in a round of shakeups to the federal workforce enacted by the Trump administration as it seeks to dramatically slash what it sees as excess spending and a bloated bureaucracy. The USDA plan, which POLITICO first reported earlier Thursday, comes after the Supreme Court earlier this month allowed agencies to move forward with their reorganization and staff reduction goals, overturning a lower-court stay initially blocking the implementation.
More than 90 percent of the department’s nearly 100,000 employees are already based outside the beltway in county and regional offices, including at regional research facilities, farm loan offices and conservation facilities.
Rollins said this latest plan to relocate even more employees will help USDA better serve its “core constituents” of farmers, ranchers and U.S. producers.
The secretary, in a follow-up press release, also said the move is a cost-saving one. USDA expects to move more than half of its 4,600-person Washington staff, allowing the department to cut workers’ pay: The D.C. region has a nearly 34 percent federal salary locality rate, which increases salaries based on the cost of living, compared to 17 percent in Salt Lake City, for example.
“While this is a strategic and long term decision for USDA, I know that for you, this is an immediate and potentially major change,” Rollins told employees in the video message. “I know that your primary concern at this moment is for you, your families and your colleagues, I want you all to know that this decision was not entered into lightly.”
Congressional Republicans, weeks before the announcement, were clamoring to bring USDA workers and offices to their districts.
But several USDA staffers told POLITICO that the move will further hurt morale.
“This administration [isn’t] interested in supporting staff or even really in the jobs we do,” said one employee granted anonymity in order to speak publicly without fear of repercussions. “If they cared about either of those things, if they cared about serving farmers and ranchers, they wouldn’t have taken away all the staff, tools, and resources we use to serve them.”
A second employee, also granted anonymity to speak candidly, warned that relocating staff out of the Washington area would make oversight more difficult.
“[This] is just going to create an inner circle of powerful employees with access to people in high places and send everyone else out to ‘hubs,’” they said. “They are concentrating power and want fewer witnesses to what they are doing.”
The second employee suggested that moving would be costly for employees and for USDA, and it could force some workers to make the difficult choice to quit.
The first Trump administration moved USDA’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City, Missouri, triggering an exodus of staff. That relocation was later reversed by the Biden administration.