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TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2026   |   SPECIAL REPORT & ANALYSIS

SPECIAL REPORT  |  USDA REORGANIZATION

The Great Uprooting: USDA’s Bet That Washington Is the Problem Heads for Its Reckoning

One year after USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the most sweeping restructuring in USDA’s modern history, the plan faces its two decisive tests: a federal courtroom in San Francisco and a September deadline by which thousands of employees must move, quit or be fired.

Analysis  ·  July 28, 2026

A year that began with USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins promising to put USDA “closer to the farmers, ranchers and foresters it serves” ends with the department suing and being sued, its headquarters complex on the auction block, more than a fifth of its workforce out the door, and union surveys suggesting that most of the employees ordered to five new regional hubs would rather resign than go. What was announced on July 24, 2025 as a tidy, money-saving realignment has become the defining test of whether an administration can relocate and shrink a cabinet department without Congress writing a law — and whether the department that emerges can still deliver farm programs, food safety inspection, nutrition assistance, research and wildfire response at the level farmers and consumers expect.

The dispute is no longer over whether USDA will change — the workforce is already down roughly 20%. It is over whether the reorganization is a genuine efficiency drive or, as the unions’ lawsuit puts it, “a ruse for forcing employees to quit” — and whether a judge will freeze it before the September separation deadlines make the question moot.

The plan: five hubs and a much smaller Washington

The July 2025 blueprint, issued under the Secretary’s reorganization authority dating to a 1953 executive reorganization plan, rests on four pillars. First, USDA’s National Capital Region workforce of roughly 4,600 employees shrinks to no more than 2,000, with the displaced positions reassigned to five hub cities — Raleigh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Fort Collins and Salt Lake City — plus support locations in Albuquerque and Minneapolis. Second, USDA vacates and disposes of most of its Washington-area real estate, headlined by the massive South Building, along with Braddock Place in Alexandria and, eventually, facilities at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland. Third, mission-area structures are consolidated: the Forest Service loses all nine regional offices, the National Agricultural Statistics Service goes from twelve regions to five, the Food and Nutrition Service from seven to five, and research agencies are dispersed to field locations. Fourth, back-office functions — human resources, contracting, information technology — are centralized under the Assistant Secretary for Administration.

By mid-2026 the plan had grown well beyond the original five hubs. Relocation notices issued since April send Food Safety and Inspection Service headquarters staff to a new “National Food Safety Center” in Urbandale, Iowa; SNAP administration to Indianapolis under a renamed “Food and Nutrition Administration”; child nutrition programs to Dallas; and pieces of other agencies to Denver, Atlanta, Athens, St. Louis, Los Angeles and New York. Senator Amy Klobuchar’s tally in a May 2026 oversight letter counted staff being scattered across “over 27 different locations within months.”

Table 1. The five hubs and the capital: locality pay differentials are central to USDA’s savings math. Source: USDA July 24, 2025 announcement; OPM locality rates.

Figure 1. Where USDA is going: the five hubs (with locality pay), selected additional relocation destinations announced through mid-2026, and the shrinking National Capital Region. Source: USDA announcements, July 2025–April 2026.

USDA’s case: Vaden’s four-billion-dollar argument

No official has carried more of the public burden of selling the plan than Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden, the former USDA general counsel and Court of International Trade judge who took office July 7, 2025 — seventeen days before the announcement. Testifying before the Senate Ag Committee on July 30, 2025, Vaden put a number on the promise: the changes would “save the department approximately $4 billion,” a figure he has never broken down publicly and which committee Democrats note has no published cost-benefit analysis behind it. The savings case rests on three legs: locality pay (every position moved from Washington’s 33.94% adjustment to, say, Salt Lake City’s 17.06% gets cheaper), real estate (USDA’s South Building alone carries a deferred-maintenance backlog USDA put at $1.3 billion in July 2025 and revised to $1.6 billion by February 2026), and attrition-driven payroll shrinkage that the department insists is a byproduct, not the goal.

Vaden’s second argument is proximity. He told senators the moves would put employees “closer to farmers and other constituencies of the agency,” pointing out that roughly 90% of Forest Service lands lie west of the Mississippi, and predicted a “large number” of affected employees would choose to relocate to cities with cheaper housing. He has also been the plan’s chief calendar-keeper: in December 2025 he said the reorganization would be complete in 2026, promising that USDA will have redistributed the majority of USDA employees to new hub locations. And he has been its most combative defender. When the National Treasury Employees Union pressed bargaining demands over the nutrition-agency moves in June 2026, Vaden publicly accused union leaders of “prioritizing their own interests and needs over the agency’s mission” — an unusually sharp public attack on the department’s own workforce representatives.

There are softer notes in the sales pitch. Announcing the disposal of the South Building in February, Vaden emphasized that relocation timing would respect families: “We know many of them have school-aged children.” 

Rollins, for her part, has stuck to a consistent formulation — the plan “is not a large-scale workforce reduction” — language that has become legally significant now that plaintiffs are quoting internal planning documents targeting a 23% department-wide staffing cut, with reductions of 43-47% at research, nutrition and rural development agencies.

The opposition: unions, Democrats, scientists — and uneasy Republicans

The organized opposition runs wider than the usual suspects. Federal employee unions — AFGE, NTEU, NFFE and AFSCME — argue the plan is a reduction-in-force dressed up as a reorganization, engineered so that mass resignations do the work that formal RIF procedures, with their legal protections, would otherwise govern. AFGE national president Everett Kelley calls the plan flatly “unlawful.” NTEU’s survey of Food and Nutrition Service headquarters staff found more than 80% would refuse to move; NFFE’s survey of roughly 3,000 Forest Service members found just 7% willing to go to Salt Lake City — numbers the unions say USDA privately expects and is counting on.

Congressional Democrats have made the fight institutional. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the Senate Ag Committee’s ranking member, branded the rollout a “half-baked agenda” that Congress learned about “just minutes before it was announced.” House Ag ranking member Angie Craig (D-Minn.) invokes the 2019 precedent of “massive brain drain.” Maryland and Virginia members — with thousands of constituents affected — have been the loudest: Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-Md.) warns of losing “decades of research, institutional knowledge and experienced staff,” and the National Capital Region delegation opened a formal House Oversight investigation in August 2025 demanding the cost-benefit analysis USDA has never produced. Democrats also wrote their objections into law: the FY 2026 agriculture appropriations act enacted Nov. 12, 2025, requires 30-day advance notice and Appropriations Committee approval before funds are spent relocating offices (Section 716), bars moving agencies between mission areas without legislation (Section 745), and protects ARS labs and NRCS field offices (Sections 771 and 779). USDA has proceeded anyway, on its general counsel’s advice that the Secretary’s standing authority covers the moves — a position now at the center of the litigation.

Republican reaction has been split rather than solid. Senate Ag Chairman John Boozman (R-Ark.) said he was “disappointed” to get no advance notice and pressed USDA to preserve its “boots on the ground presence in rural America,” while Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) — who spent years lampooning the near-empty South Building — celebrated the sale with a “For Sale By Owner” sign, and Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) praised the Kansas City hub. Interior appropriations chairman Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Id.) captured the caucus’s ambivalence about the Forest Service move: “This might be the best idea since sliced bread, I don’t know. But there are just a whole bunch of questions I need answered.” Outside government, the Union of Concerned Scientists asked USDA to withdraw the plan entirely; the National Farmers Union warned of “significant staff turnover, loss of institutional knowledge and service disruptions”; and even the cautious American Farm Bureau Federation — which, notably, was not consulted before the announcement — stressed that service delivery “is not disrupted.” Former officials from both parties piled on, from former USDA Secretary Dan Glickman’s alarm about research facilities to former USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue-era veterans’ silence and former USDA Undersecretary Robert Bonnie’s July 2026 verdict: “No compelling reason to do this.”

The department’s own public comment docket is the starkest measure of sentiment: of roughly 14,000 substantive comments received in late 2025, 82% were negative and 5% positive. USDA finalized the plan anyway — Vaden had described it as “about 95%” settled even as the comment period opened.

The ghost of 2019: what Kansas City taught everyone

Every argument in this fight runs through the 2019 relocation of the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City under Secretary Sonny Perdue. The Government Accountability Office’s 2022 post-mortem (GAO-22-104540) found USDA’s claimed $300 million in savings ignored hiring, training and productivity costs and assumed staffing levels that never materialized; both agencies lost more than half their people, ERS report output fell by roughly half for two years, NIFA went six months into fiscal 2020 without processing a single capacity-grant payment, and the share of NIFA staff with more than a decade of experience collapsed from 50% to 19%. USDA’s answer is that the agencies eventually rebuilt in a cheaper city. The opposition’s answer is that “eventually” cost years of degraded research output — and that this time the same treatment is being applied to a dozen agencies at once, including the two that already went through it: ERS and NIFA were ordered to Kansas City a second time in April 2026.

Figure 2. Union surveys through mid-2026 suggest refusal rates at or above the ~75% seen in the 2019 ERS/NIFA relocation. Surveys are of union members and may overstate final refusals. Sources: NFFE, NTEU, AFGE-affiliated union surveys; GAO.

An exodus by the numbers

The reorganization is landing on a department already hollowed out by the fastest workforce contraction in its history. USDA began 2025 with 110,384 employees. By June 14, 2025 — before the reorganization was even announced — 20,306 had left, an 18.4% reduction in five months, according to the department’s own inspector general: 15,114 through the two rounds of the government-wide deferred resignation program, plus roughly 2,000 ordinary resignations, 1,600 terminations and 1,300 retirements. Along the way USDA fired some 5,700 probationary employees in February 2025 (the Merit Systems Protection Board ordered them temporarily reinstated after the Office of Special Counsel found the identical form letters unlawful), and the Forest Service alone shed nearly 5,900 people — including about 1,400 with firefighting certifications — before asking some to come back for fire season.

The reasons stack on top of one another: DOGE-driven downsizing pressure and buyout offers with short decision windows; return-to-office mandates; the threat, explicit in DRP round two, that those who stayed might face RIFs or forced relocation anyway; and now the relocation orders themselves, which convert refusal into “involuntary separation” effective Sept. 30, 2026, without standard RIF appeal rights and with a lump-sum moving allowance that unions estimate shifts $9,000 to $14,000 of relocation costs onto the employee. The consequences are no longer hypothetical: 42 county Farm Service Agency offices ended 2025 with zero county staff, FSIS lost inspectors and veterinarians averaging 16 years of experience, and every state lost USDA employees — 94% of the departures came from outside Washington, a fact that sits awkwardly beside the plan’s stated aim of moving the department closer to farm country.

Figure 3. Departures in the first five months of 2025 alone, as a share of each agency’s workforce, per the USDA inspector general’s December 2025 review. Office-level units (Office of the Secretary, -67%) excluded. Source: USDA OIG.

Table 2. One year from announcement to courtroom. Sources: USDA; CRS R48905; Government Executive; court filings.

Could the courts stop it

The serious legal challenge arrived on July 2, 2026, when a coalition led by AFGE — joined by AFSCME, SEIU, scientific societies, the National WIC Association, conservation groups and seven cities and counties — asked Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California to halt the entire reorganization. The suit, folded into the existing AFGE v. Trump docket, makes four claims: that the plan violates the FY 2026 appropriations riders because USDA never obtained the required committee approvals; that no statute authorizes a restructuring of this scale without Congress; that the public efficiency rationale is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act given internal documents targeting a 23% workforce cut; and that mass directed reassignments are a reduction-in-force in disguise, designed to evade the protections of RIF regulations. Lead counsel Corinne Johnson put the theory bluntly: “The actions of this administration to reorganize USDA are a ruse for forcing employees to quit because they work on programs… that this administration opposes for political reasons. That is unlawful.” A parallel NFFE motion filed July 22 seeks to stay the Forest Service moves specifically.

Could it work? Observers say the honest answer is: possibly, but the clock favors USDA. The plaintiffs’ strongest card is the appropriations riders — concrete statutory text, enacted after the plan was announced, that on its face conditions spending on committee approval USDA never sought. Judge Illston has shown willingness to act: her May 2025 injunction froze government-wide RIFs and reorganizations at some twenty agencies, including USDA. But the Supreme Court stayed that injunction in Trump v. AFGE on July 8, 2025, signaling deference to executive workforce management — while pointedly reserving judgment on “the legality of any specific agency RIF or reorganization plan.” Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence left the door open for exactly the kind of agency-specific, statute-anchored challenge now before the court. Against that, the government will argue employee grievances belong at the MSPB and FLRA rather than in district court, that appropriations riders are enforced by Congress rather than by private plaintiffs, and — most powerfully — that events have outrun the case. Every week of delay moves more separations from threatened to accomplished; by the Sept. 1 hearing, thousands of decisions will already be irreversible. A preliminary injunction could still freeze the final separation deadlines and the building dispositions. What no court order can do is un-resign the people who have already left.

The South Building: still for sale, no buyer yet

USDA’s South Building is still on the block, and still unsold. The 2.1-million-square-foot behemoth on Independence Avenue — the largest office building in the world when it opened in the 1930s, with some 4,500 rooms across two city blocks — was formally handed to the General Services Administration (GSA) for disposal on Feb. 25, 2026, alongside USDA’s Braddock Place offices in Alexandria. Ernst planted a ceremonial “For Sale By Owner” sign; GSA Administrator Edward Forst was more careful, calling the building the largest liability in GSA’s portfolio and the sale “a long… comprehensive process” still in a “discovery” phase of consulting stakeholders and potential buyers. As of midsummer 2026 no buyer has been identified, and the complications are real: the building is on the National Register of Historic Places, its heating and water systems are physically intertwined with the Whitten Building next door (which USDA is keeping), and GSA’s only comparable recent sale — the 940,000-square-foot former GSA regional office building — fetched about $24 million, a sobering data point against a $1.6 billion maintenance backlog. Occupancy claims have wobbled with the sales pitch, from Ernst’s 11% utilization figure in 2023 to USDA’s February 2026 claim that the building is “more than 85%” unoccupied. Employees are to be out by the end of 2026; what happens to the building after that remains, quite literally, an open listing.

Bottom line

The reorganization will almost certainly “succeed” on its own terms — buildings vacated, positions rebased, payroll cut — because attrition is doing the heavy lifting and the administrative machinery is far ahead of the legal one. The real questions are the ones the 2019 precedent answers unfavorably: whether the promised $4 billion materializes once rehiring, training and lost productivity are counted, and whether farm programs, food inspection, nutrition delivery and fire response degrade in ways farmers and consumers actually feel in 2027-28.

Watch three dates: the Sept. 1 injunction hearing (the last realistic off-ramp), Sept. 30 (when refusals become separations and the changes become largely irreversible), and the FY 2027 appropriations process (where Congress could either fund the $55 million relocation request or defund the plan outright). And watch the quiet indicator: whether USDA ever publishes an official acceptance-rate tally. It has not yet — and the department that trumpets its locality-pay math has been conspicuously silent on the one number that will determine whether this is a relocation or a purge by other means.

AG POLICY & MARKETS DAILY   |   SPECIAL REPORT  |  USDA REORGANIZATION — TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2026