USDA TO REORGANIZE TO FOCUS ON ITS CORE MISSION OF SUPPORTING AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

On July 24, 2025, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced the intent to reorganize the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to economically focus on and sustain its core mission of supporting American agriculture. President Donald J. Trump has made a conscious effort to review government spending and found through review that USDA has become expensive to maintain, overstaffed, and unsustainable long term. The number of USDA employees grew 8% over the last four years with salaries increasing by 14.5%. During the same time period, there were no measurable increases in services to USDA’s core constituents in the agricultural sector.

Critical USDA functions will continue, and the reorganization will focus on four pillars of priorities.

1. USDA’s workforce is to be sized to align with the financial resources available and identified agriculture priorities,
2. Relocate USDA closer to customers,
3. Eliminate layers of management and bureaucracy, and
4. Consolidate functions.

USDA’s first efforts to move its workforce closer to agriculture include a phased plan to relocate Agency headquarters and staff outside of the Washington D.C. area to the following five hub locations with their current Federal locality rates:

1. Raleigh, North Carolina (22.24%)
2. Kansas City, Missouri (18.97%)
3. Indianapolis, Indiana (18.15%)
4. Fort Collins, Colorado (30.52%)
5. Salt Lake City, Utah (17.06%)

Currently, USDA houses 4,600 employees at their National Capital Region (NCR) in Washington D.C. The first phase of the USDA plan will lower the total employees located in the NCR to 2,000. This will lower employee’s cost of living expenses as the NCR has a federal locality rate of 33.94%.

Employee reductions were also attained through voluntary retirements and the Deferred Retirement Program (DRP). At USDA, 15,364 employees chose voluntarily elected deferred resignation.