Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced July 24 that the USDA would reorganize, representing consolidation and elimination of programs and personnel.
Dubbed the “USDA Department Reorganization Plan,” the move will include moving more than half of the agency’s Washington, D.C.-area staff to five different hubs across the country, “refocusing its core operations” on USDA’s founding mission, and reducing overall staff. According to the announcement and plan document, the move is intended to “improve the internal management” of the department.
“Here at USDA, we are refocusing our core operations to better align with President Lincoln’s founding mission of supporting American farming, ranching, and forestry, as well as serving American taxpayers,” Rollins wrote Thursday morning on social platform X.
Here @USDA, we are refocusing our core operations to better align with President Lincoln’s founding mission of supporting American farming, ranching, and forestry, as well as serving American taxpayers.
— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) July 24, 2025
The reorganization is built around what the agency calls four pillars:
- Ensure the size of USDA’s workforce aligns with financial resources and priorities.
- Bring USDA closer to its customers by relocated resources outside of the national capital region.
- Eliminate management layers and bureaucracy.
- Consolidate support functions.
USDA Workforce Costs and Location Changes
Highlighting the high cost of living in the nation’s capital — where average monthly rent in January 2024 was $2,475, according to real estate and rental search site RedFin — USDA’s reorg seeks to move roughly 2,600 of its current 4,600 D.C.-area personnel to five “hub locations” across the country.
According to the plan document, these locations were selected considering cost of living and “existing concentrations of USDA employees.”
These hubs (and their January 2024 average rent levels) are:
- Salt Lake City, Utah ($1,627)
- Fort Collins, Colo. ($1,607)
- Raleigh, N.C. ($1,371)
- Indianapolis, Ind. ($1,265)
- Kansas City, Mo. ($1,140)
“In addition to these five hubs, USDA will maintain two additional core administrative support locations: Albuquerque, New Mexico and Minneapolis, Minnesota,” the reorg plan reads. “USDA will continue to maintain critical service centers and laboratories including agency service centers in St. Louis, Missouri; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Missoula, Montana.”
The department says it aims to have no more than 2,000 staff members remain in the National Capital Region.
“The details are still to be determined,” adds Callie Eideberg, a Principal with The Vogel Group. “It will be helpful when we know the pace and cadence of these changes, as that will determine how smooth or chaotic this move will be.”
She agrees that the reorganization could benefit those employees looking for a lower cost of living, but the distance between hubs will make for its own workforce management issues.
“Different administrations have tried, in smaller ways, to move the federal workforce to other regions and they’ve been met with these management obstacles,” adds Eideberg. “Stakeholders, as well, will now need to travel to five different locations around the country to have their conversations with USDA instead of ‘one stop shopping’ in Washington.”
The location changes are not limited to personnel only, however. The physical buildings USDA will be occupying in the capital area will also change. The reorg plan cited costs associated with maintaining and repairing some of the overly large buildings as part of the motivation.
Announced building changes include:
- The South Building and Braddock Place facilities will be vacated.
- Beltsville Agricultural Research Center will be vacated over several years “to avoid disruption of critical USDA research activities.”
- George Washington Carver Center, currently being used for area USDA personnel during the reorg, will be sold or transferred eventually.
The department said the Whitten Building will remain the USDA headquarters, and both the Yates Building and the National Agricultural Library “will be retained for use.”
Consolidation and Elimination
Though the reorg document stressed that “USDA is not conducting a large-scale workforce reduction” as part of the change, it also highlighted that the move is part of its ongoing process of reducing its workforce.
“Much of this reduction was through voluntary retirements and the Deferred Retirement Program (DRP), a completely voluntary tool. As of today, 15,364 individuals voluntarily elected deferred resignation,” the reorg document read.
According to the agency’s own site — both currently and during the previous administration — the USDA has “nearly 100,000 employees.” This makes the stated number of USDA employees who have taken deferred resignation slightly more than 15% of the agency’s overall staff.
Programs within USDA will also be consolidated or eliminated. Those programs and efforts highlighted include:
- The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) will eliminate its area offices, with “residual functions” to be preformed by its Office of National Programs.
- The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) will consolidate its current 12 regions into five “over a multi-year period.”
- The Food and Nutrition Service will reduce its current seven regions into five, aligned with the five hubs, in the next two years.
- The Forest Service will “phase out” its nine regional offices in the coming year. It will maintain a reduced state office in Juneau, Alaska, and consolidate its stand-alone research stations into one in Fort Collins, Colo. It will keep its Fire Sciences Lab and Forest Products Lab.
- Most “support functions” previously done within the USDA — such as civil rights functions, Freedom of Information Act responses, IT and HR, legislative and tribal relations, and others — will be moved into other agencies of the federal government in an effort “to reduce duplication” within the department.
The reorg document also notes that it will consolidate grants and financial assistance: “This consolidation will include, where feasible, the transfer of grant making and administration functions from USDA offices and agencies that currently have limited capacity to perform such duties to other offices and agencies.”
Most extension personnel in hub-area institutions whom The Packer reached out to about the potential impacts of the reorg either had not responded as of press time or reported that it is too early to provide any meaningful insight.
The News Service from Colorado State University in Fort Collins said, “CSU is continually tracking changes at the federal level and assessing impact to our work.”
Rollins: Impact in Her Own Words
Midday July 24, Rollins spoke to AgriTalk‘s Chip Flory to talk about the announcement.
“This is just another step in the implementation of getting the government out of Washington, D.C., and getting it to the people,” she says, adding that the move “will save a lot of money.”
When asked if the existing D.C. staff will make the move to the five hubs or if new personnel will need to be hired in those areas, Rollins says she thinks it will be “half and half.”
“For those that do want to continue leading in the Forest Service or working hard on food stamps or, of course, our key work supporting farmers and ranchers, they’re going to have an amazing opportunity to move to, frankly, a better part of the country,” she says. “Out of Washington, D.C., better quality of life, better cost of living and continue to serve the great people of our country. I think that’s a win-win.”
For those who don’t want to move, she says “there are plenty of opportunities in the private sector.”
Rollins adds that the transition is not going to be easy, but the department is ready to do hard work that will streamline its operations and bring services closer to the communities being served. She gave the example of the Forest Service.
“A lot of people don’t know that the USDA manages all of our national forests. We’ve got 11,000 full-time firefighters on the USDA payroll that are constantly battling our fires and are the frontliners,” she says. “The fact that that leadership is in Washington, D.C., but most of the fires are in the West — that doesn’t make any sense. Why don’t we have the leadership of the Forest Service closer to the fires and the firefighters that they serve?”
