The Agriculture Department announced plans Thursday to shut down a massive federal research complex in Prince George’s County, Maryland, over the objection of members of Congress.

The department will begin decommissioning the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a 6,500-acre federal research complex that has operated since 1910 and is considered the world’s largest agricultural research facility. The announcement is the next step in a reorganization plan Secretary Brooke Rollins unveiled last July, which called for closing the center and scattering its research programs across five regional hubs in Salt Lake City; Fort Collins, Colorado; Indianapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Congress attempted to slow the move late last year, inserting language into the fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill barring the USDA from closing or consolidating research facilities without approval from the House and Senate Appropriations committees.

“The administration’s trying to move forward in violation of what Congress has expressly stated,” Rep. Glenn Ivey, a Democrat whose district includes the Maryland facility, said in an interview. “Congress is pushing back, and I think that’s going to continue to happen.”

The agency has framed the move as a cost-saving modernization effort, arguing that many of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center’s more than 400 buildings are outdated or underutilized and that moving researchers closer to farming communities will improve the quality of their work. Most USDA employees already live outside Washington, D.C.

“Transitioning these programs will allow USDA to modernize its research footprint, improve safety, and better connect researchers with the producers they serve,” the department said in a statement announcing the plan Thursday.

Researchers at the Maryland research center had previously raised concerns about unsafe working conditions due to budget and staffing cuts and excessive maintenance needs, and employees filed a federal complaint in 2023. Lawmakers including Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen secured $3 million for renovations and directed that research funding be maintained at least at 2024 levels.

“In attempting to shutter this facility, the Trump Administration is turning its back on farmers and blatantly violating the law – given Congress has made clear in no uncertain terms that BARC should remain open and be updated with funds we fought to provide on a bipartisan basis explicitly for this purpose,” Van Hollen said in a statement to NOTUS.

Ivey and Van Hollen expressed concern over the loss of scientific research from the facility, given that many experiments and studies cannot simply be picked up and moved.

“The scientific research, I think, would be dramatically disrupted,” Ivey said. “You can start over with new research in other places, but we’ve got decades going here that can’t be replicated.”

Maryland’s Democratic congressional delegation argued in a letter last August to Rollins that closing the center would gut research serving the thousands of farms across the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

They also challenged the administration’s cost-of-living rationale, noting that Prince George’s County is actually a cheaper place to live than several of the proposed hub cities, including Fort Collins and Raleigh.