Workers at the Department of Agriculture are trying to stop mandatory relocations, which they warned are mass layoffs in disguise.
Employees throughout the department told NOTUS their colleagues overwhelmingly did not plan to move to new offices across the country. This month, employee unions and nonprofit organizations asked a federal judge to halt the USDA’s plans.
Their warnings: A reduction in force at this scale will delay policy changes, damage research, slow getting federal dollars out the door and hamper wildfire response.
“No one was asking for this,” former USDA Undersecretary Robert Bonnie told NOTUS. “It’s hard to reach any other conclusion than that the purpose of this is to dramatically reduce the size of the federal civil service. There’s no compelling reason to do this.”
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It’s potentially another drastic reduction in the USDA’s workforce, which already faced some of the most significant cuts during the DOGE era.
In a 2025 workforce plan made public this month as part of the employee groups’ ongoing lawsuit, USDA said it was anticipating that “a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments” out of Washington and regional and state offices.
“We absolutely do view it as a RIF in disguise,” one employee at the Foreign Agricultural Service, USDA’s trade policy arm, told NOTUS, using an abbreviation for the term reduction in force.
In multiple polls from various unions representing USDA employees, around 80% say they would rather quit than move. It’s a percentage that would exceed the loss of staff in 2019, when the USDA moved hundreds of employees from its Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture offices in Washington to Kansas City, Missouri.
Following that move, both agencies lost more than half of their workforces and subsequent reviews by the Government Accountability Office found they spent years recovering from the significant losses in productivity.
The USDA is once again moving employees from both agencies to Kansas City, as it did in Trump’s first term, after former President Joe Biden brought most staff back to Washington. Kansas City will serve as one of the five regional hubs USDA is building around the country, with others in Utah, North Carolina, Colorado and Indiana.
The department last year announced it would push 2,600 employees out of Washington, while also consolidating regional offices around the country. It has so far announced new locations for a dozen of its subagencies, though in most cases it has yet to issue assignments for individual employees.
USDA officials have said the changes will put employees closer to the farmers and ranchers they serve, though only around 10% of the USDA workforce is currently in the Washington region. The department did not respond to questions from NOTUS, instead pointing to a tweet from USDA Undersecretary Stephen Vaden noting it is proceeding as scheduled with relocations.
A former longtime senior USDA employee expressed concern that the first employees to leave will be the agency’s most skilled and longest-tenured staff, as they have the most options to work somewhere else, creating a brain drain in the department.
“If you don’t have options, you’re more likely to take the move,” the former employee told NOTUS.
USDA has shed 21,000 employees since Trump took office. The department has shifted away from its original plan to follow up last year’s incentivized attrition with mass layoffs, but employees suggested the relocations will have the same effect.
In declarations filed in court and interviews, employees described how a change in office would alter their lives, since they own property in their current locations, their spouses have jobs there, or they would have to leave their support system and start a new life in a new state.
“They’ve got families,” one USDA employee said. “They don’t want to uproot their lives.”
At some components, such as the U.S. Forest Service, which is moving its headquarters to Salt Lake City and closing most of its regional offices and many of its research stations, management has openly told employees they expect the relocations to result in significant attrition.
USDA sent about a third of FAS civil service staff based in D.C. letters Friday telling them that they’re relocating to Kansas City. Much of the work involves coordinating with foreign embassies and the State Department, so the move “doesn’t make any sense,” the employee said. The agency has already lost more than a quarter of its staff.
USDA employees have also expressed concern the department will target specific people for moves. “We believe they’re going to use this opportunity to try to move key, long-term employees to try to get them out,” one Natural Resources Conservation Service employee said.
Workers are also sounding the alarm on the impacts that relocations will have, both as a result of an accompanying brain drain and the lack of concentration for remaining staff.
“We’re literally going to be not able to do things on time,” the NRCS employee said. “We’ll be doing things improperly.”
Employees throughout the USDA warned that headquarters and regional engineers who help standardize policy across the country are set to leave in droves rather than move, which will lead to slower policy rollouts, inconsistent implementation of department rules and more litigation that will delay timber sales and other administration priorities.
“We basically have to rebuild that expertise from a technical standpoint,” another Forest Service employee said.
In a recent presentation to agency leadership, employees in the Agricultural Research Service warned of the consequences of closing down the famed Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland and dispersing its projects around the country. The facility is sending its pollinator bee laboratory to Fargo, North Dakota, for example.
“We mostly made the case that invaluable resources would be lost,” one ARS employee said. “And that the program moving there would not be able to complete their mission.”
The Forest Service has stressed that its cadre of firefighters will not be affected by the changes, but employees have cautioned that incident management teams, which the agency stands up for major fires, are made up of non-firefighter staff still subject to relocations. The agency has already shed 15% of its workforce under Trump, and further reductions resulting from upcoming changes would exacerbate shortfalls as the agency seeks to provide logistical support to fire crews.
“We are going to see, if we haven’t already, impacts to our wildfire response,” one regional Forest Service employee said.
The complaints have largely fallen on deaf ears.
At several components, the department first aims to send senior staff to new locations while the rest of the workforce awaits its fate. Very few of those top career officials plan to move, employees said.
The delays in information for those remaining has added anxiety and confusion, they said, especially after earlier this year top officials said everyone would have their new assignments and be moved by the end of the summer so they could have their kids enrolled for the start of the 2026 school year. At least some senior executives have told staff they cannot share more information because they have signed non-disclosure agreements related to the reorganization.
“Everything they say, the targets they want to meet, they blow by them and then they don’t acknowledge they’ve blown by them,” the NRCS employee said. “It doesn’t inspire confidence. They’re not doing anything they said they would do.”
The overall plan appears to still be in flux. Regional Forest Service employees in Portland, Oregon, for example, were told this week that they would not be shipped to other cities and that the agency had instead found office space for them at various buildings within 50 miles of their current duty stations. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, currently battling the New World Screwworm outbreak, has told staff they would not be moved, though new hiring will occur at hub locations.
The new organizational chart of the newly renamed Food and Nutrition Administration isn’t expected to be fully implemented until mid-2027, the acting head of the component told staff last week in an email, viewed by NOTUS, that acknowledged “for many of you, there are still more questions than answers.”
The agency also recently agreed not to move union-eligible staff currently working in Alexandria, Virginia, outside of the Washington region until 2029 “in the interest of maintaining workforce stability during periods of attrition,” according to a memorandum of understanding with the union obtained by NOTUS.
USDA had faced particularly significant pushback on the FNA moves from lawmakers who decried potential disruptions to nutrition programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Women, Infants and Children Program.
Only about a third of the staff in FNA work in the D.C. region, however, and others still don’t know where they’ll be relocated. Most have voiced opposition to the move.
“My team is of the opinion that, like, the program [SNAP] would fall apart,” said another FNA employee, who is leaving the agency over the potential moves. The employee said there would be insufficient staff to assist states and that Trump administration efforts to reform the program “would go down the toilet.”
Federal employee unions and nonprofits have asked a federal judge in San Francisco to temporarily block the Trump administration from reorganizing or downsizing any USDA agency. That motion seeks to stop the closing, moving or consolidating of offices, or transferring programs between offices, and to stop USDA from sending any further relocation notices or removing employees who already declined to move.
In a filing in the case, the unions argue in part the relocations conflict with spending legislation. USDA initially sought congressional authorization for its downsizing and reorganization plans as part of its fiscal 2026 budget request, but lawmakers rejected the proposed cuts and included language in the approved spending plan barring USDA from using appropriated funds to move offices without congressional approval.
USDA management has requested such permission on a rolling basis for each of its components, but has indicated it will not wait for an explicit sign-off before moving forward.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has defended the relocations as a management improvement rather than a workforce-reduction tactic, telling lawmakers at a House Agriculture Committee hearing last month that moving staff outside Washington would be a “massive value add” for USDA’s research operations because “we have some extraordinary researchers, but most of them don’t want to be in Washington, D.C.”
Employees rejected that argument.
“Based on the fact that they moved near every single office,” one Forest Service employee said of the workforce reduction efforts, “yeah that seems like the goal.”
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