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USDA Hiring Push Shifts From Downsizing to Targeted Rebuilding

Nearly 1,000 jobs are in process as staffing shifts to hubs and field sites — but the 15,923-hire plan measures churn, not workforce expansion

Analysis  ·  August 5, 2026

USDA is preparing for a substantial round of hiring tied directly to its reorganization, but the department’s projected numbers should not be interpreted as a broad expansion of the federal workforce. A July 24 court declaration (link) lays out, in the department’s own words and with unusual specificity, how the rebuild will work — and why the totals are smaller than they look.

In the declaration, filed in federal court in San Francisco, USDA Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Administration Mary Pletcher Rice said the department’s fiscal 2026 Annual Staffing Plan anticipates 15,923 hires and forecasts a “modest increase” in total staffing.

However, that figure includes promotions and transfers of existing USDA employees as well as people newly entering the department. It also assumes retirements and other voluntary departures will create vacancies that must be backfilled, particularly in field offices, service centers and designated regional hubs.

The 15,923 figure measures gross personnel actions, not new employees — USDA is largely refilling seats emptied by more than 15,000 deferred resignations, and refilling them in different places.

The filing’s purpose matters as much as its numbers. It was submitted to oppose a preliminary injunction sought by federal employee unions in AFGE v. Trump, and its central argument is momentum: hiring is already underway under the new organizational structures, leases have been signed, renovation money spent and reassignment letters delivered. Pausing now, USDA argues, would leave critical positions vacant and disrupt statutory work. That litigation posture is worth keeping in mind — the department has every incentive to present the reorganization as too far along to unwind.

Gross hires, not net growth

The distinction between personnel actions and net additions is the key to reading the plan. USDA is simultaneously replacing workers who left under the Deferred Resignation Program, which Rice said resulted in more than 15,000 departures, and continuing to adjust staffing through voluntary retirement and separation incentives. USDA says it has not conducted a reduction in force and has no current plans to do so; the declaration states flatly that “all current USDA employees will have a position in the Department.”

The staffing plan itself, submitted to the Office of Personnel Management in December 2025 and updated in February 2026, explicitly disavows the Agency Reduction in Force and Reorganization Plans sent to OPM and OMB in spring 2025, which had assumed further workforce cuts beyond the resignation program. USDA now says those documents are obsolete and that its congressional notifications — issued agency by agency from March to June 2026 — represent the operative plan.

The pipeline already moving

The most immediate hiring pipeline is already taking shape. USDA reported that 71 positions had been filled at its hub locations and another 972 were in various stages of recruitment. Of those pending positions, 435 are within Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Plant Protection and Quarantine facilities, underscoring that the first priority is filling jobs connected to statutory responsibilities and front-line protection of U.S. agriculture.

USDA’s research, economic and statistical agencies also are hiring under their future organizational structures. The department argues that delaying those recruitments would leave critical positions vacant, increase workloads and threaten the timely production of research, economic analysis and required agricultural data.

Table 1. USDA’s fiscal 2026 staffing plan at a glance. Source: Declaration of Mary Pletcher Rice, AFGE v. Trump (N.D. Cal.), July 24, 2026.

USDA also intends for about 31% of newly hired permanent employees to be early-career workers. Nearly 3,000 positions in the staffing plan were left undesignated, giving management flexibility to place workers where vacancies, relocations and emerging priorities create the greatest need.

Senior leadership recruitment will be another major component. USDA said it intentionally left numerous Senior Executive Service positions vacant while the reorganization was being developed. Since January, the department has identified more than 175 executive vacancies to be filled through reassignment or formal recruitment. Only a handful of new executives had been permanently hired as of the filing, with others awaiting approval by OPM or moving through candidate review.

Geography: hubs, not Washington

Hiring will be geographically concentrated. The declaration makes clear that many vacancies will be filled at USDA’s new hubs and specialized centers rather than automatically returning to Washington, D.C. The five designated regional hubs — Raleigh, N.C.; Kansas City, Mo.; Indianapolis; Fort Collins, Colo.; and Salt Lake City — are joined by a lengthening list of agency-specific centers.

The Office of the Chief Information Officer plans to fill vacancies at a new Technology Center in Kansas City, with Fort Collins serving as a secondary location. The Food Safety and Inspection Service is establishing a roughly 200-employee National Food Safety Center in Urbandale, Iowa — which will become the agency’s largest office in the country — and a Science Center in Athens, Georgia. USDA said those facilities are intended to expand training, administrative and scientific capacity while attracting a new generation of food-safety professionals.

Meanwhile, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) will center its operational workforce at a National Operations Center in St. Louis, with additional eastern and western units in Georgia and Colorado. That shift is not expected to move the department’s market-sensitive report “lockups” out of Washington, however: NASS’s plan expressly retains a core D.C. presence for executive leadership and the Agricultural Statistics Board, the body that conducts the secure lockup and release of Crop Production and other major statistical reports. (WASDE is compiled by the World Agricultural Outlook Board under the Office of the Chief Economist, which the declaration does not address — nothing in the filing suggests that release process moves.) The Food and Nutrition Administration is assigning major program functions to Raleigh, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Dallas, with retailer-compliance offices in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas. The Forest Service is relocating its headquarters to Salt Lake City, and Rural Development will run its national office out of centers in St. Louis and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Table 2. Where reorganization-driven hiring and relocations will land, by agency. Source: USDA congressional notifications summarized in the Pletcher Rice declaration.

The emptying headquarters

The geographic shift is as much about real estate as recruitment. USDA’s Washington-area footprint has been hollowing out for years: the number of employees working in the department’s D.C. office buildings fell from 6,055 in January 2019 to 2,832 by June 2026, and staffing across the National Capital Region dropped roughly 50%, from 7,389 to 3,965. The South and Whitten buildings carry a combined $1.923 billion in deferred maintenance and operate at just 18% to 23% occupancy — far below the 60% utilization floor the 2025 USE IT Act imposes on federal office space. GSA and USDA announced the disposal of the South Building in February 2026.

Figure 1. USDA employment in its Washington, D.C., office buildings (South, Whitten, Yates and leased space). Source: Pletcher Rice declaration, ¶¶17–19.

Money is already flowing toward the new map: a new Kansas City lease at about $1 million a year, $3.9 million in Yates Building renovations, $1.3 million in furniture for the Urbandale food-safety center, roughly $4.4 million for new NRCS space in Fort Worth, and buildouts for General Counsel offices in Davis, California, and Kansas City. Notably, the department reversed course on the George Washington Carver Center in Beltsville, Maryland — once slated for sale, it will now house up to 1,900 employees, and USDA says its plans will produce a net increase of 802 employees in Prince George’s County even as the deteriorating Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is decommissioned.

The wild cards

The largest uncertainty is how many current employees will accept relocations. USDA has issued Management Directed Reassignment letters to at least 716 employees — 111 at FSIS, 586 across the research agencies and 19 at the General Counsel’s office — plus duty-station change notices to 366 Food and Nutrition Administration employees moving within the capital region. At the Forest Service, roughly 6,500 employees were told their positions are subject to the reorganization, but USDA estimates only about 250, or 4%, will be required to move outside their commuting area.

USDA expects less attrition than occurred during the 2018-2019 relocations of the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture — moves that cost those agencies more than half their staff — partly because it views the current federal job market as weaker. That is a plausible but untested assumption, and the department acknowledges it will have to assess departures agency by agency and coordinate hiring with available facilities at relocation sites.

Labor negotiations are a second variable. Of USDA’s 93,951 employees, 27,336 are in bargaining units, and the department reports seven completed reorganization-related agreements covering roughly 3,600 of them, with talks still ahead or underway at the Food and Nutrition Administration, Rural Development and the Foreign Agricultural Service. Several agencies’ plans are expressly “subject to change” based on those negotiations. The third variable is the court itself: the declaration exists because unions are asking a federal judge to halt the reorganization, and an injunction would freeze much of the hiring described here.

Bottom line

The result is likely to be a prolonged, highly targeted hiring cycle rather than an across-the-board USDA hiring spree. Recruiting will be strongest in plant and animal protection, food safety, technology, statistics, research and program administration — and increasingly concentrated in regional hubs. The final number of outside hires will depend heavily on retirements, relocation decisions, labor negotiations and whether the courts allow the reorganization to continue on USDA’s planned timetable.

Sources: Declaration of Mary Pletcher Rice, Doc. 457-1, AFGE v. Trump, No. 3:25-cv-03698-SI (N.D. Cal.), filed July 24, 2026, with exhibits; USDA FY 2026 Annual Staffing Plan and congressional notifications as described therein.

AG POLICY & MARKETS DAILY   |   SPECIAL REPORT  |  USDA REORGANIZATION & HIRING — WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2026