Secretary Rollins’ reorganization of USDA will weaken the delivery of programs to farmers, ranchers and rural communities

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s recent announcement of a reorganization at USDA is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to undermine the federal government’s ability to provide services to families and communities, in this case the farmers and ranchers of America.

Secretary Rollins issued the reorganization announcement with a broadside against the USDA workforce, calling it “bloated, expensive, and unsustainable” in a press release. Specifically, she criticized a modest 8% growth in the workforce over the past four years and complained that federal workers had gained a pay raise of 14.5%, which, incidentally, was not even enough to cover the increased costs of living during that time period.

“This all occurred without any tangible increase in service to USDA’s core constituencies across the agricultural sector,” the secretary claimed. In saying this, she all but accused her own employees of being lazy and worthless. 

I served in various capacities at USDA for over 20 years in both Washington, D.C., and in the Mountain West. During my tenure, I was fortunate to work with hundreds of talented professionals who were committed to the mission of serving farmers, ranchers and rural communities. For Secretary Rollins to suggest that the dedicated public servants at USDA are ineffective and overpaid is shameful and wrong.

But perhaps even worse than the secretary’s dismissal of the value of her own workforce is the impact her reorganization plan will have on many of USDA’s core constituents.

Make no mistake, services to farmers, ranchers and rural communities will suffer as a result of this proposed reorganization for several reasons.

First, the reorganization will accelerate an exodus of experienced professionals from the department. The administration brags that it has already chased more than 15,000 employees from the department. The reorganization, Rollins says, is “another step of the Department’s process of reducing its workforce,” which means thousands of additional employees at USDA will be pushed out the door or simply fired.  

But these actions will do more than reduce the workforce; they will reduce technical and financial services to farmers and ranchers.

Undoubtedly, the administration will extol its remaining workers to accomplish more with less, a hollow cry that often bellowed from the political appointees in the Whitten Building during the first Trump administration to the senior management corps located across the street in the South Building. 

Now, those bellows will echo in the long, empty hallways of the South Building, for it is to be completely vacated as part of the reorganization.

But the dirty truth about the administration’s reductions in force is that a smaller, less experienced workforce will simply accomplish less with less, and in many cases, much less.

Second, the reorganization seeks to relocate core portions of the remaining USDA workforce from the Washington, D.C. area (the National Capital Region or NCR), to five regional hubs located outside the Beltway. 

The asserted purpose of this mass exiling of employees is to bring the workforce closer to the communities they serve. 

But the USDA workforce is already one of the most dispersed bureaucracies in the federal government. According to the administration’s own numbers, only 4,600 of USDA’s nearly 100,000-person workforce is located within the NCR.

The real impact of removing thousands of officials from the NCR will be to disconnect senior program managers from the top echelons of leadership at the department. This will reduce the effective flow of information, undermine relationships and generally weaken USDA’s voice on behalf of the agriculture industry on Capitol Hill and within the Beltway community.

A similar gambit was attempted during the first Trump administration, when USDA abruptly relocated many of its research programs from the NCR to Kansas City. 

In 2022, a GAO report found that USDA’s relocation of the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture  “was not fully consistent with an evidenced-based approach.” Translation: The decision was arbitrary and poorly thought out. 

With its newly announced USDA reorganization, the Trump administration is doubling down on a “non-evidenced-based” approach to management in which the real goal is not to bring government closer to the people, but rather to hollow out the federal workforce. Stakeholders from every corner of Agriculture should loudly proclaim their opposition to this poorly considered plan. 

Steven C. Silverman served as the director of USDA’s National Appeals Division from 2014-2019 and as USDA’s Principal Deputy General Counsel from 2009-2012. He currently serves as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School.