Agriculture Department To Shed Thousands Of Workers Who Feed Poor Americans, Insisting It Is Not A Layoff But A Change Of Scenery

WASHINGTON. The Department of Agriculture confirmed this week that it expects a "significant number" of its employees to quit rather than move their families across the country, an outcome the department has arranged to record not as the mass layoff that federal law currently forbids, but as a series of personal decisions for which it bears no responsibility.

Under a reorganization the department began unveiling last year, thousands of USDA workers are being ordered to relocate from Washington and existing regional offices to five hub cities, and to report to their new desks by September or October. Internal planning documents submitted to a federal court show the department is counting on many of them to decline, and intends to use the resulting resignations to reach a target of cutting its workforce by 23 percent, or 31 percent once food-safety inspectors are included. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has said the plan "is not a large-scale workforce reduction," a characterization that is accurate in the narrow sense that the department is not the one technically doing the reducing.

The maneuver solves a problem Congress had gone to some trouble to create. Lawmakers, anticipating exactly this, wrote language into the fiscal 2026 spending bill barring USDA from using appropriated funds to relocate offices, reorganize programs, or eliminate them without the approval of Congress. The department is proceeding anyway, on the understanding that an instruction from the legislature is a data point rather than a limit. A coalition of federal employee unions led by the American Federation of Government Employees sued in San Francisco on Wednesday, asking a judge to halt what they called an unlawful downsizing dressed as a change of address.

The workers being encouraged to relocate or resign are, in large part, the ones who feed people. The plan calls for cutting the Food and Nutrition Service, which administers SNAP and the WIC program for mothers and infants, by at least 46 percent, and directs it to "deemphasize the food stamp program" outright. The agencies that conduct the nation's agricultural and economic research face cuts of 39 to 43 percent, Rural Development faces 47 percent, and the Forest Service is to move its headquarters to Salt Lake City. Officials have offered the relocations as a way to bring government closer to the people, a goal best served, in this instance, by relocating the government away from the people who currently do it.

The department has done this before, and knows how it goes. When the first Trump administration moved two research agencies to Kansas City in 2019, roughly three quarters of the affected employees left rather than move, and the agencies' research output fell measurably afterward, results the current plan reproduces at far greater scale. When more than 47,000 members of the public submitted comments, over 80 percent of them negative, USDA acknowledged the sentiment and continued. "The intent is not to push anyone out the door," the Forest Service chief told Congress in April, describing a plan whose entire budgetary logic depends on people walking through it.

At press time, USDA had reassured the country that no one was being fired, only asked to choose between their job and their home, a choice the department was confident a sufficient number of them would resolve on their own.