USDA wants to modernize farmer services, even as staffing cuts could hurt the effort

The Trump administration is continuing efforts to cut red tape around farmer programs, the Agriculture Department detailed in a new policy agenda released on Monday.

Many of the to-do items build on work started in the first Trump administration and continued under Biden to simplify the farm loans process, but the White House’s push to shrink the federal workforce could make the endeavor more difficult. 

The department is planning to launch an internal audit to find farmer-facing applications that are still paper-based so that they can be streamlined and digitized.

“Putting Farmers First means addressing the issues farmers face head-on and fostering an economic environment that doesn’t put up roadblocks on business creation but removes them,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in a statement about the agenda, which is focused on small family farms. 

USDA is also assessing shared services platforms for the financing programs within its Farm Service Agency and Rural Development office, and the department also plans to make farmers.gov into a “one stop shop for all farmer needs,” it said. 

“USDA resources are only effective if they are usable and accessible,” the document read.

The policy agenda comes as the department plans to cut staff as part of a new reorganization. Already, USDA has lost thousands of employees through “deferred resignation” offers.

“It is unclear how many customer experience and digital experience employees still remain, and I don't know how USDA is going to deliver service improvements without the talent to do that,” said Amira Choueiki Boland, chief of staff at think tank New America’s New Practice Lab. She was previously the first-ever customer experience lead at the Office of Management and Budget. 

“It’s disappointing, because these are literally efforts and teams the first Trump administration started,” she noted.

Work to simplify farm loan applications does date back to the first Trump administration, when Agriculture worked with the General Services Administration’s Centers of Excellence to make a farm loan discovery tool and guides for loan applications. The department also hired its chief customer experience officer out of COE in the spring of 2020. 

The Biden administration continued efforts to simplify farm loan applications, including it as an action item in Biden’s 2021 executive order on customer experience, and, in 2023, Agriculture debuted a direct farm loan application that had been shortened by 16 pages and moved online.

In recent years, Agriculture had been trying to hire experts in customer and digital experience. Capacity was the top priority of the department's chief customer experience officer, and the department was building out a USDA Digital Service team to work on projects like the farm loan application modernization.

Now, the department has lost about 30% of its IT staff, one person familiar estimated, including from the digital service team. They weren’t authorized to speak on the record.