In July, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins dropped a plan in the form of a 5-page memo to shake up the USDA.
More than half the agency’s Washington, D.C., jobs – some 2,000 positions – were to be divided among five new hubs strung out across the middle of the country. Jobs would be sent to Raleigh, North Carolina; Indianapolis, Indiana; Kansas City, Missouri; Fort Collins, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah. The memo also called for shuttering a major research center in Maryland.
The general idea of moving USDA jobs out of D.C. wasn’t new, but Rollins’ proposal took legislators and lobbyists representing farmers, ranchers, and the rest of the vast agriculture industry by surprise.
Amy Klobuchar, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and other lawmakers were furious that a plan to reorganize the sprawling Department of Agriculture was hatched in secret with little to no input from anyone involved in agriculture.
“The Administration put out a half-baked plan with no notice and without consulting agricultural leaders,” Klobuchar said at a hastily called hearing on the plan. “We have a half-baked agenda that will almost certainly result in worse services for farmers and families in rural communities.”
The USDA recently extended a comment period on the plan through Sept. 30.
Farmers rely on the USDA to stay in business. The agency handles crop insurance and disaster relief programs to help mitigate what would be crushing losses in down years. It issues grants and runs conservation programs that put money in many farmers’ pockets. It fights plant and animal disease outbreaks, funds research that finetunes farming tools and techniques, and provides personalized expert advice. The USDA also ensures food safety and runs the nationals food assistance and school lunch programs.
But, far away from Washington, John Thaemert grows wheat and sorghum on the high plains of central Kansas near Sylvan Grove, and he’s sanguine about the reorganization.
“It doesn’t concern me at all,” Thaemert said.
He likes the idea of getting D.C. staffers closer to where the farms are and spreading good-paying government jobs around the country.
“Washington, D.C., has got some really high-paying jobs and a lot of wealth concentrated there. I like to see Kansas City have some of these jobs, as well as Raleigh and Indianapolis and Fort Collins and Salt Lake, and then kind of spread that out a little bit,” he said.
Thaemert also believes the shake-up will check the power of USDA bureaucrats who, in his experience, sometimes dismiss the concerns of non-profit farm organizations like the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers, where he volunteered for years.
“It’s always encouraging when they are heard and when they are listened to, and it’s discouraging when they’re not,” Thaemert said of USDA staffers' response to farm groups. “I’d like to think this would give more voice to those volunteer members of commodity organizations that are in the trenches, farming and doing this work.”
A shrinking USDA
Yet farmers may have a lot fewer USDA employees to talk with if the plan to disburse D.C.-based staff across the country goes through.
Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said USDA employees are already demoralized. She said most will quit rather than uproot their lives.
“They have children in school. They have aging parents. They have other obligations,” she said. “When you make it hard for people to do their jobs on behalf of the American public, you lose those people. And we've seen this before in the first Trump administration.”
In 2018, then Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced USDA was moving two key departments, the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), out of Washington. He didn’t say where. The announcement set off a nationwide jump ball with dozens of cities pledging millions in tax breaks and other sweeteners to try to land the agencies and their high-paying jobs.
Nine months later, Kansas City Missouri, won the competition, but the move was a flop.
“There was a massive exodus of people who couldn't or wouldn't move,” said Stillerman. “Enormous expertise was lost. It was a huge brain drain.”
More than half the employees involved quit. Output plunged. The Biden administration concluded that the only way to rebuild the agencies was to move them back to Washington, resulting in what many concluded was a net loss, costing USDA some of its highest-level researchers and grant writers.
The current reorganization plan dwarfs the first Trump Administration’s ERS and NIFA moves. Stillerman thinks the plan, coming on the heels of mass terminations and pressured retirements that have culled nearly 20% of the agency’s workforce, will be much worse.
“This reorganization plan, such as it is, is just another disruption and, as I see it, as another step in dismantling this department that serves all of us every day,” said Sillerman.
Yet others worry the department is losing a huge share of employees who already are close to farmers. While about 10% of USDA’s workforce is inside the Beltway, nearly every county in the U.S. has USDA employees at Farm Service Agency (FSA) and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offices.
Kansas Farmers Union Director Nick Levendofsky said he’s more concerned about losing those field employees.
“Those are the folks that are boots on the ground, assisting farmers and ranchers and rural folks with the programs, with the paperwork and everything, the services that they provide,” said Levendofsky.
Levendofsky said rural FSA and NRCS offices were shorthanded before the Trump Administration began firing new employees and pressuring others to step down.
“Some of them lost all of their staff. There are some counties that have zero NRCS staff now,” he said. “That means farmers and ranchers and the folks that are utilizing these services have to go further out to get those services. They have to go to a neighboring county. And that can mean a lot of travel.”
That kind of inconvenience may spread. Though departures at USDA have slowed since the first few months of Trump’s second administration, Levendofsky expects the agency to keep shedding employees.
“We're going to see a lot of folks who are just fed up, and they're not going to put up with it anymore,” he said. “They're just going to say, ‘All right, we're done. We give up.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
