Planning behind USDA employee relocations ‘unknown,’ after agency chief rebuffs watchdog’s review 

A government watchdog says it’s not clear how much analysis went into the Agriculture Department’s plans to relocate thousands of employees across the country, after its auditors were denied access to records for nearly a year. 

The Government Accountability Office, in a report released Monday, wrote that its employees repeatedly asked USDA officials to provide documents on the planning that informed the department’s July 2025 announcement to relocate thousands of employees across the country. GAO wrote that “USDA did not provide documentation of such analysis.” 

“Thus, Congress and the public do not have information on the extent to which USDA examined issues such as how the reorganization could impact service delivery, the economic effects of the reorganization, or how to safeguard taxpayers’ dollars in disposing of property through the reorganization,” GAO wrote. 

USDA under the second Trump administration is planning to relocate about 2,600 of its employees to regional “hubs” across the country. USDA sent about 725 relocation notices as of late August. 

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins challenged GAO’s findings as a partisan attack on its reorganization plans. But GAO wrote that it “conducted this review in an objective, independent, and nonpartisan manner,” and stands by the accuracy of facts presented in its report.  

“Notably, we do not take a position on USDA’s decision to reorganize or the stated objectives of the reorganization. Rather, over the course of the review, we asked USDA to provide documentation of analysis that supported its specific reorganization decisions in order to provide Congress with information with which to conduct oversight. Despite many opportunities to do so, USDA did not provide such documentation,” GAO wrote.

Senior Trump administration officials have repeatedly rebuffed GAO’s oversight efforts. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said last year that GAO “shouldn’t exist.” In March 2026, Vought called GAO’s authority into question when OMB released updated guidance on internal controls in the federal government. 

In May 2025, OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta told GAO that the White House would cooperate with its work only when it does not “unduly burden” the president’s agenda. 

USDA’s refusal to turn over these records could also have implications in a lawsuit that is currently barring the department from carrying out its employee relocation plans. A federal judge in San Francisco granted a stay on Oct. 13 preventing USDA from carrying out employee relocations connected to its reorganization plans. 

A coalition of federal employee labor unions, nonprofits and local governments filed a lawsuit in July arguing that USDA’s sweeping relocation plans are a veiled effort to keep shrinking its workforce. USDA cut its overall workforce by 20% last year, but some of its component agencies disproportionately bore the brunt of staffing reductions. 

In a written response to a draft version of the report, Rollins rebuked GAO’s findings as a “politicized review of the Department’s reorganization.” 

“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) may scrutinize that decision, but it does not get to define the objective through veiled partisan shenanigans meant to maintain the status quo and ignore the realities facing USDA’s mission today,” Rollins wrote.  

GAO, in a rare move, included several of its own annotations to rebut some of the points made in Rollins’ written remarks. 

“As discussed in more detail earlier in this report, we conducted this review in an objective, independent, and nonpartisan manner and stand by the accuracy of the facts presented in our report,” GAO wrote in one such annotation. 

Rollins told GAO that the last major USDA reorganization took place in 1994, and that “the world the Department operates in today is vastly different” more than 30 years later. 

“While I have long appreciated the work of the Comptroller General to audit and evaluate use of taxpayer resources, I write with concern that GAO proposes releasing a report that fails to tell the American people and Members of Congress the unadulterated story of the Department's reorganization. 

Rollins wrote that GAO’s report “disregards contemporary hiring actions,” and directs the watchdog agency to “review materials in the public domain, including court records.” 

In July, USDA officials told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that it planned to hire nearly 16,000 employees in fiscal 2026. But according to updated staffing plans, the department officials wrote that a “majority” of its hiring initiatives will “result in no net gain,” and will instead “offset expected attrition.” 

“In fact, through workforce optimization initiatives, these organizations may end FY 2026 with reduced employee counts where attrition outpaces gains,” USDA wrote.

USDA is trying to relocate many more employees than it attempted under the first Trump administration. 

The 2019 relocation of the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture set the stage for what followed, with those agencies losing more than half their staff after employees quit rather than relocate to Kansas City, Mo. It took about two years for ERS and NIFA to recover from staffing and productivity losses. 

USDA officials say a majority of employees who received relocation notices so far have agreed to relocate. But some employees say they’ve 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 plan doesn’t work out, they may quit rather than move. 

Justice Department attorneys told the court in August that USDA hasn’t conducted any attrition analysis 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."

“The best information currently available to the agency indicates that, as a result of the current job market, attrition will be less than during prior reorganizations,” they wrote. 

GAO wrote that USDA officials provided some nonpertinent records – including “raw, unanalyzed data” on daily attendance at four of its buildings in the D.C. region and an August 2024 report on financial challenges facing the Forest Service. 

“None of these materials constitute analyses that inform the specific reorganization decisions announced in July 2025. Thus, Congress and the public do not have information on the extent to which USDA used analyses to inform these decisions,” GAO wrote.