USDA Moves Forward with Mandatory Relocation Despite Pushback

Meatingplace’s Peter Voskamp reported that, “the USDA Rural Development Mission Area recently announced that it is moving forward with its declared intention to move nearly 3,000 members of its workforce out of the Washington DC area in order to ‘modernize operations, increase accountability, and ensure federal resources are positioned where they can deliver the greatest impact.’”

“This, despite most of the agency’s workforce expressing opposition to the move,” Voskamp reported. “The recent plan update comes nearly a year after the Trump Administration first announced the reorganization plan.”

“In July 2025, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the USDA would move some 2,600 employees in Washington D.C. to five regional hubs in Raleigh, N.C.; Kansas City, Mo., Indianapolis; Fort Collins, Colo.; and Salt Lake City,” Voskamp reported. “The aim, as Rollins outlined, was to match USDA’s workforce with available financial resources, to bring USDA ‘closer to its customers,’ reduce bureaucracy and consolidate redundant support functions.”

“The USDA’s Rural Development wing maintains the largest field-based presence in the federal government, with more than 400 offices throughout rural America, per the agency,” Voskamp reported. “The new announcement reiterated the goals of the reorg: ‘aligning workforce size with available resources, relocating resources closer to customers, eliminating excess management layers, and consolidating support functions.’”

Employees Unlikely to Relocate

NOTUS’ Tyler Spence, Eric Katz and Natalie Alms reported that, “employees throughout the department told NOTUS their colleagues overwhelmingly did not plan to move to new offices across the country. This month, employee unions and nonprofit organizations asked a federal judge to halt the USDA’s plans.”

“Their warnings: A reduction in force at this scale will delay policy changes, damage research, slow getting federal dollars out the door and hamper wildfire response,” NOTUS reported. 

“‘No one was asking for this,’ said former USDA Undersecretary Robert Bonnie,” NOTUS reported. “‘It’s hard to reach any other conclusion than that the purpose of this is to dramatically reduce the size of the federal civil service. There’s no compelling reason to do this.’”

‘No one was asking for this. It’s hard to reach any other conclusion than that the purpose of this is to dramatically reduce the size of the federal civil service. There’s no compelling reason to do this.’

“It’s potentially another drastic reduction in the USDA’s workforce, which already faced some of the most significant cuts during the DOGE era,” NOTUS reported. “In a 2025 workforce plan made public this month as part of the employee groups’ ongoing lawsuit, USDA said it was anticipating that ‘a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments’ out of Washington and regional and state offices.”

“In multiple polls from various unions representing USDA employees, around 80% say they would rather quit than move,” NOTUS reported. “It’s a percentage that would exceed the loss of staff in 2019, when the USDA moved hundreds of employees from its Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture offices in Washington to Kansas City, Missouri.”

Experts Warn that Relocation Could Lead to Substantial Loss

Politico’s Rachel Shin and Marcia Brown reported that, “Collin Bradley, president of the AFSCME Local 3976 union that represents Foreign Agricultural Service workers, told MA the billions of dollars that flow through Food for Peace — the United States’ international food aid program — are ‘going to be managed by less than 10 people who are staying in D.C.’”

“‘Foreign service officers are going to be pretty screwed’ as well, he said, because of the relocation of the Global Services branch that manages operations for U.S. embassies abroad,” Shin reported. 

“FAS workers were told Friday that more than one-third of them have been asked to relocate,” Brown reported. 

“Food safety groups and experts separately asked Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins on Friday to pause the proposed department’s relocation of its Environmental Microbial and Food Safety Laboratory out of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center,” Shin reported. 

“‘The loss of highly specialized scientific expertise would be substantial,’ the experts wrote in a letter,” Shin reported. “‘Past USDA relocations have shown that such moves often result in significant staff attrition, leading to gaps in institutional knowledge and reduced effectiveness in serving agricultural stakeholders.’”

‘The loss of highly specialized scientific expertise would be substantial. Past USDA relocations have shown that such moves often result in significant staff attrition, leading to gaps in institutional knowledge and reduced effectiveness in serving agricultural stakeholders.’

“USDA rejected that the reorganization would be detrimental to research,” Shin reported. 

“‘The Department has made clear the reorganization is a regimented, multi-step process, and that specific to research, all continues without interruption, except the research Congress chose to defund,’ USDA spokesperson Michael Abboud said in a statement,” Shin reported.