USDA to Vacate, Sell South Building as Reorg Begins

Reuters’ Karl Plume reported that “the U.S. Department of Agriculture is selling its flagship South Building office hub on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and relocating employees to other locations across the country by the end of the year, the agency said on Wednesday.”

“The move to vacate and sell the massive but aging building is part of a broader cost-cutting initiative at the department, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said, citing high maintenance costs and low occupancy,” Plume reported. “‘At one time, the South Building was the beating heart of USDA, alive with research and teeming with activity decades ago. But today, it is a shell of what it once was,’ Rollins said at a press conference outside the building on Wednesday.”

“The building will be turned over to the government’s General Services Administration for sale, Rollins said as Iowa Senator Joni Ernst unveiled a ‘For Sale By Owner’ sign,” Plume reported. “The flagship USDA property, built in the U.S. capital in the 1930s, has $1.6 billion in delinquent maintenance costs while about 80% of its offices are vacant, GSA Administrator Edward Forst said.”

Federal News Network’s Jory Heckman reported that Deputy Secretary Stephen “Vaden said USDA is also moving Food and Nutrition Service employees out of their leased office space in Alexandria.”

“USDA will return that leased office space to GSA, and FNS employees will be relocated to buildings that currently house the Forest Service and the Agricultural Research Service,” Heckman reported. “Vaden said FNS staff have complained about the building for years, and he saw the state of the building when he attended a Christmas party there last year.”

“I couldn’t use the elevators. They were blocked off by caution tape, which is an everyday headache that details what our employees are being asked to deal with,” Vaden said,” according to Heckman’s reporting.

Employee Relocations to Take Place by End of Year

Government Executive’s Eric Katz reported that “the department plans to move all of the employees it is repositioning, both those relocating locally and to new sites throughout the country, by the end of the year, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden said. It plans to inform employees of their new destinations in the coming months so they can move before the start of the new school year this fall. The department is standing up five regional hubs around the country that will house relocated employees, located in Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah. It has not yet announced any further details for those locations.”

At @USDA HQ, our South Building is mostly empty and in disrepair—a MASSIVE drain on taxpayer dollars.

Today, USDA officially began the process of turning the South Building over to General Services Administration—because taxpayers should NOT be paying for empty offices!

The… pic.twitter.com/0DrN4NrjY9

— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) February 26, 2026

“‘We’re taking our employees into account,’ Vaden said,” according to Katz’s reporting. “‘We know many of them have school-aged children. We want them to make the move to our new hub locations across the country. So as part of that, we’re planning to go through all the legal and union and other regulatory steps that we need to take to do so lawfully and get the proper notice.'”

“USDA currently has 4,600 employees in the Washington area and is looking to shrink that number to 2,000. Just 10% of the department’s workforce is currently in the capital region,” Katz reported. “It will utilize layoffs to meet the goal as needed if employees refuse reassignments, officials have said. The department has already shed more than 15,000 employees from its initiative that allowed employees to sit on paid leave for several months before resigning.”