A year ago this month, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins signed a memo reorganizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The plan was to move most of the department's Washington-area staff to five regional hubs and shrink the D.C. footprint to a fraction of its size.

The USDA's own announcement, dated July 24, 2025, laid out the math. Roughly 4,600 employees worked in the National Capital Region. Afterward, USDA expected "no more than 2,000 employees will remain."

That's about 2,600 people told to relocate to Raleigh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Fort Collins, or Salt Lake City — or find another job.

Last week, current and former USDA employees got on a call with federal union leaders and explained what that actually means on the ground.

"A forced choice"

Chearice Vaughn works for a USDA office that handles grants and loans for rural development projects — clean water systems, small business lending in towns that have no other lender. She and 45 members of her team were told to relocate from Washington to Dallas.

Of the people on her team who got relocation notices, she said 86% were people of color.

"It's a forced choice: uproot your entire life, or leave federal service."

Vaughn, who is also president of AFSCME Local 3870, said the stakes aren't really about the staff:

"It's about whether the next little town waiting on clean water gets it in time. It's about whether the next small business owner in a town with no other lender gets a chance at all. We built these things once. We're asking to be allowed to keep building them."

That's the part the word "reorganization" hides. These aren't abstract headquarters jobs. Somebody processes the rural water grant. If that somebody quits rather than move to Dallas, the grant waits.

The number that tells you how this ends

The administration presents relocation as an option. Officially, nobody is being fired.

But the National Federation of Federal Employees polled nearly 3,000 of its Forest Service bargaining unit members about the reorganization. Genny Kotyk, who leads the union's Forest Service Council, said 7% said they'd be willing to relocate.

Seven percent.

That poll covered Forest Service members, not every affected USDA employee. But if the willingness to pack up and move is anywhere near that low across the department, this isn't a relocation. It's a layoff with a different name on it. That was the union leaders' central point on the call: the reorganization "will amount to widespread layoffs, as many workers will choose not to relocate."

And this is on top of losses that already happened. Since President Trump returned to office, the USDA has lost more than 20,000 employees, according to Office of Personnel Management data. Most went through early retirement or buyouts offered by the U.S. DOGE Service. USDA's own July 2025 release put the deferred-resignation count at 15,364 at that point.

Fire season

Here's where it gets hard to defend.

The Forest Service is the largest firefighting agency in the United States. In 2025 alone, more than 6,500 Forest Service employees left through layoffs, buyouts and early retirements, according to OPM.

Kotyk said the reorganization now puts a similar number in the same position:

"We're looking to lose, potentially, another 6,500 employees that are going to be forced to either change their job duties, have a longer commute, or move completely across the country, or resign, or retire. Forty percent of those employees have some kind of fire qualification, and because they're higher level staff, they typically also have a more seasoned career and have higher level fire qualifications."

Forty percent, weighted toward the most experienced. Kotyk said the cuts are already affecting the response to the wildfire season currently burning through Canada and parts of the Midwest and North.

Now compare that with what USDA said when it announced the plan:

"To be clear, all critical functions of the Department will continue uninterrupted. For example, we are at the height of fire season, and to date, have not only exceeded hiring goals, but have preserved the ability to continue to hire."

Both things can't be true. Either the firefighting workforce is fine, or the union representing it is watching senior fire-qualified staff walk out the door during an active fire season.

What else runs through this department

Kevin Shea ran the USDA as acting secretary under President Biden. He listed what the department actually does day to day: fighting pests and diseases, protecting forest land, ensuring food safety.

"All of this requires an adequate and qualified workforce. These new proposed actions, added to the damage already done, all but ensures that we'll not have one."

Food safety means meat and poultry inspection. Pest and disease work means keeping something like a new bird flu strain or a crop blight from ripping through American agriculture. These are not luxuries the department added during a spending spree. They're the reason it exists.

The justification, and the arithmetic

USDA's stated case rests on cost. The release described the department as "bloated, expensive, and unsustainable," noted the South Building carries about $1.3 billion in deferred maintenance, and argued the hub cities offer "a more affordable cost of living for USDA employees."

Rollins framed it as delivering for farmers:

"President Trump was elected to make real change in Washington, and we are doing just that by moving our key services outside the beltway and into great American cities across the country."

Two problems with that.

First, most USDA staff were never in Washington to begin with — the department's own figure was about 4,600 people in the capital region. And as the Wisconsin Examiner reported, the majority of the staff reductions so far have come from outside D.C. — from the state and county offices that are, by definition, already close to the people they serve. You don't get closer to farmers by cutting the field staff.

Second, a reorganization that pushes out large numbers of trained, experienced federal employees doesn't save money in any sense a taxpayer would recognize. It converts people who know how a wildfire incident command works, or how a rural water loan gets underwritten, into vacancies. Rehiring and retraining for those roles costs real money, and the gap in between costs communities time.

Where it stands

Several national labor unions have asked a federal court in San Francisco for an injunction to block the relocations. That case is ongoing. USDA is proceeding in the meantime.

USDA spokespeople did not return a message from the Wisconsin Examiner seeking comment.

The Beltsville Agricultural Research Center — 6,500 acres in Prince George's County, Maryland — is on the list of properties USDA will vacate and hand back to the General Services Administration.

Source

Reported by Sam Gauntt for the Wisconsin Examiner, July 27, 2026. Photo: Danielle J. Brown / Maryland Matters.