On June 18, 2026, Derek Schmidt introduced a bill to keep USDA offices from closing in Kansas.

It's called the USDA Field Office Stability Act. He filed it with Democrat Sharice Davids, which is genuinely unusual and genuinely useful. It would bar the Agriculture Department from shutting or moving the county offices that farmers actually walk into — the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Rural Development — unless another office sits within 20 miles. It would force USDA to keep enough people on staff to keep the doors open during business hours.

Here is Schmidt explaining why it's needed:

"Many small offices are staffed by only one or two people, which means a reduction in staffing can leave the office unable to function."

He's right. That is exactly what happened. The question worth asking is who did it.

Kansas lost about a third of its USDA workforce

The numbers in Schmidt's own bill announcement are brutal. Kansas has lost more than 500 USDA employees — roughly 32 percent of its USDA workforce, the largest percentage drop in the region. Nationally, more than 24,000 USDA employees left the department after January 2025, a nearly 27 percent reduction between September 2024 and December 2025.

That did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of some vague thing called "Washington."

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition tracked the departures using federal personnel data. It found about 20,000 USDA employees gone between January 2025 and January 2026, and attributed the majority of them — around 15,000 — to the Deferred Resignation Program, the buyout push run by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Kansas shows up in that data at 559 employees lost. Nearly 7,000 of the people who walked out the door nationwide had more than ten years of experience. Investigate Midwest, reporting on a separate NSAC analysis built from a Freedom of Information Act request, found the same cause: the losses came primarily after DOGE's early-retirement and deferred-resignation offers.

So: DOGE emptied the offices. Now let's look at what Derek Schmidt was saying while it was happening.

"Maturing"

In April 2025 — right in the window when most USDA employees were signing their buyout paperwork — Schmidt went on KVOE radio in Emporia and was asked about DOGE. He said the approach was "maturing" and would become more "predictable" over time.

Not "this is going too fast." Not "somebody should check what this does to farm country." Maturing.

Two months later, on June 12, 2025, Schmidt voted to make a big chunk of DOGE's work permanent. He put out a press release taking credit for it, naming "the Department of Government Efficiency," describing the $9.4 billion clawback of money Congress had already approved as a "watershed."

DOGE itself shut down on July 4, 2026, with no final report and nobody willing to own the wreckage. The wreckage stayed.

Ten months later, the countryside called

By April 2026, the empty offices were a problem Schmidt could not talk around.

On April 23 he signed onto a letter with 14 other members of Congress asking USDA to fix the staffing shortages. His own press release describing that letter lays out the damage in plain language: constituents were reporting "delays in application processing, payments, and contract certifications," with conservation programs and the FSA farm loan program hit hardest. If it kept up, the letter warned, the disruption would spread across every USDA program in that division.

Talking to KWCH the next day, Schmidt put it this way:

"Sometimes decisions get made in Washington that look good on paper, but don't make a lot of sense out in the countryside in Kansas."

Read that again. Schmidt is Washington. He has been since January 2025. He was in the room, he had a vote, and when the decision was in front of him he called it a watershed.

The Kansas Farmers Union's executive director, Nick Levendofsky, told the same station that some parts of the state now have no USDA staff at all, so producers either drive further or give up on benefits they've already earned. On KZRG in May, Schmidt described the mechanics himself: "In a lot of these small counties, there are literally one or two people. That's the entire staff of the USDA local office. Well, if you cut one person out of it or two, you're literally left with an office that can't function." And: "In some cases, there's nobody there to do the work."

He is describing, accurately and with real feeling, a thing he voted to lock into law.

The same offices Kansas farmers need because of his other votes

The timing is its own indictment. Kansas farmers need those FSA counters more than usual right now, and the reason is the trade war.

Schmidt voted twice in March 2025, and again that September, to keep the House from even considering a repeal of Trump's tariffs — one sentence tucked into a procedural motion, three times over. Kansas soybean sales to China for all of 2025 came to zero. Moody's put the Kansas economy in recession, driven largely by collapsing farm exports.

The federal answer to that has been bailout money. Bailout money is applied for, processed, and certified at exactly the county offices that no longer have anybody sitting in them.

We've seen this movie

This is now a recognizable genre. A Republican cheers the cuts, the cuts land on people back home, and the Republican writes letters.

New York's Andrew Garbarino did it with the 9/11 responders' health program — four rounds of DOGE cuts, four rounds of letters to undo them, and then a vote to make the rest of DOGE's cuts permanent. Kentucky's Andy Barr told a Lexington business crowd "don't worry about DOGE", passing along promises from Elon Musk that turned out to be wrong one after another.

The bipartisan USDA bill is a good bill. Kansas Farmers Union president Donn Teske thanked Schmidt and Davids for it, and he was right to. But it is a patch on a hole Schmidt helped cut, and it does not bring back 559 people or their combined decades of knowing which form a Kansas rancher needs.

If your congressman wanted to tell you about that, there'd be a room and a microphone somewhere. Schmidt's version of a town hall is a phone call, on a topic he picks, where his office told constituents up front it "will not give individual tax advice." When KCUR invited all nine members of Congress from the Kansas City metro to take live questions from constituents about DOGE and tariffs in 2025, Schmidt's office was among those that never responded to the invitation.

More than 1,000 people showed up to that event anyway. They had questions about this exact thing.

Source

Davids, Schmidt introduce bipartisan bill to keep USDA offices open for Kansas farmers and ranchers — KWCH, June 18, 2026, and Kansas congressman urges USDA to address staffing shortages at local offices — KWCH, April 24, 2026. Photo: KWCH.