Judge grants temporary pause in USDA relocations in new lawsuit

Updated at 3:42 p.m. on Sept. 14

A federal judge in San Francisco is ordering a temporary pause of the Agriculture Department’s imminent plans to relocate employees across the country. 

U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria issued an administrative stay on Sept. 14 putting a hold on deadlines for all “management directed reassignment” letters USDA has issued so far, as part of its sweeping reorganization plans. The administrative stay will last until Oct. 2. The court’s next hearing in this case is currently slated for Sept. 29. 

Chhabria specified that this administrative stay includes "any deadlines requiring employees to report to new locations or to accept or decline reassignments or relocations." 

"Defendants shall not take any action to implement, carry out, effectuate, or enforce those deadlines, including proceeding with any termination, separation, or other disciplinary proceeding against an employee, or placing an employee on Absent Without Leave status, based on the employee’s decision to decline reassignment, not to respond to a notice of reassignment, or not to relocate," he added. 

The administrative stay applies only to the following USDA components: the Food and Nutrition Service (which USDA has rebranded as the "Food and Nutrition Administration"); Research, Education, and Economics mission area; Forest Service; Foreign Agricultural Service; Rural Development mission area; Farm Production and Conservation mission area; Office of the General Counsel; and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. 

Chhabria told attorneys in a hearing last Thursday that he may need to issue a “brief administrative stay” in order to get up to speed on the facts of the case. 

A coalition of federal employee labor unions, nonprofits and local governments initially challenged USDA’s relocation plans in July, as part of an ongoing lawsuit over the Trump administration’s mass downsizing of the federal workforce. 

But U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, in a Sept. 2 ruling, allowed USDA to proceed with its relocation plans and urged plaintiffs to file a new lawsuit if they wanted to keep challenging the agency’s reorganization. Plaintiffs filed a new lawsuit on Sept. 8 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. 

Chhabria said an administrative stay “doesn't say anything about the merits,” or “whether it's a strong or weak case or anything,” but would give him more time to “adjudicate this properly.”

“I don't have a problem with slowing down the schedule. In fact, I think it would be better for everybody involved. Because like I said, these issues appear to be very complicated and Judge Illston's been dealing with them for a long time, but I haven't had to deal with anything remotely like this before,” he said. 

Corrine Johnson, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said management-directed reassignment letters have gone out to eight USDA components so far. Johnson said about 200 USDA employees have been instructed to report to new offices across the country starting Sept. 21, while others have been instructed to report by Oct. 5. 

USDA officials told the court in late August that about 725 employees have received MDR letters so far, and that 64% of them have accepted reassignment. 

Employees and union officials, however, say USDA’s acceptance rate is “inflated.” They claim that some workers have accepted relocation notices because that is the only way they can proceed with a request for a hardship or medical exemption. Others say they have nominally agreed to relocate, but are still applying for other jobs. If that those plans fall through, they may quit rather than move. 

Justice Department attorney Taylor Pitz told the judge that the government would object to such an administrative stay, and that USDA’s reorganization “has already been well underway” for over a year. 

“There's been plenty of interim planning development in the meantime, and this is certainly not the first step of the reorganization. Our understanding is there's already been employees who have needed to vacate certain buildings, so this is just another in many steps that have already been well underway,” Pitz said. 

Chhabria said an administrative stay in this case would be “as limited as possible.”

“If somebody has a deadline of like Dec. 1, there's no need for me to stay that, because we're going to have the P.I. motion adjudicated long before that,” he said, referring to the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction. 

USDA expects no more than 2,000 of the 4,600 employees currently working in the national capital region will remain there after moving staff to five regional hubs being stood up across the country. 

Plaintiffs argue that the relocations are a veiled attempt for USDA to further shrink its workforce. Lawmakers included a provision in the fiscal 2026 appropriations bill for USDA that blocked officials from reorganizing or relocating offices or employees without congressional authorization. 

Department officials pushed back on plaintiffs’ claims that its relocation plans are a reduction in force in disguise, but DOJ attorneys told the court that the “reorganization plans include workforce optimization measures, including downsizing.”

DOJ attorneys told the court this summer that USDA hadn’t conducted any attrition analysis on its reorganization plans yet, but will do so, "in conjunction with hiring and facilities planning at relocation sites as it finalizes relocation plans on an agency-by-agency basis."

USDA agencies saw major staffing losses when it relocated hundreds of D.C.-based employees to Kansas City, Mo., under the first Trump administration — a much smaller-scale plan than what USDA is proposing under the second Trump term.

The Government Accountability Office found the vast majority of employees at the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture quit rather than relocate to Kansas City in 2019. 

GAO found that ERS and NIFA dealt with major staffing losses and saw substantial decreases in productivity. According to GAO, it took both agencies about two years to recover from those staffing losses. Even then, the watchdog agency says ERS and NIFA staff are now less experienced and less diverse. 

USDA plans to hire 16,000 employees, but senior officials expect these hires will mostly “offset expected attrition," driven by its reorganization plans.