Editor’s Note: This post is a guest blog authored by Mia Keady, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Soil & Environmental Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and is part of our ongoing series on USDA staffing. Her research focuses on soil health, land stewardship, and conservation incentives. She’s passionate about finding solutions to environmental degradation and understanding soil processes in response to land management. Mia grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she was first introduced to the prairie. Her work spans grassland ecology, microbial ecology, and conservation biology. She completed her bachelor’s in biology at Nebraska Wesleyan, master’s in biology at George Mason University, and Ph.D. in Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

‘Conservation requires management’ was a key takeaway from my undergraduate studies; dispelling naive ideas about letting the land heal itself without stewardship. During my academic journey, I’ve learned how humans are a part of nature and have shaped ecosystems for millennia and that contemporary conservation solutions will likewise require human interventions. The last century and a half of tilling up the once rich prairie has depleted soils and created many environmental problems including declining surface and ground water quality, increased flooding, biodiversity loss, and contributing to climate change.

Recognizing this difficult reality, can we reshape the impact of modern agriculture? Can we steward our agricultural lands to protect and enhance ecosystem services? What can we learn from the prairies to inform our stewardship? What strategies advance perennial agriculture that builds soils, retains nutrients, and provides habitat if managed well?

My research addresses these questions by examining soil change in the once-prominent but now threatened prairies of Southern Wisconsin, the influence of federal conservation funding across the state, and the critical role played by staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and county conservation districts.

In this post, I will discuss the important role that perennial agricultural systems can play in supporting ecosystems and how perennial practices are supported by conservation staff, using Wisconsin as an example. My research shows that the number of NRCS and county conservation staff corresponds to federal conservation dollars spent in counties and that passionate and highly-skilled conservation staff are essential to supporting the adoption of perennial agricultural systems. 

What can agriculture learn from prairies?

Prairies provide key ecosystem benefits like clean ground and surface water, reduced flooding, critical habitat, and soil protection (Zhao et al., 2020). How can we mimic these benefits on farms? Perennial agricultural practices, including managed grazing of pasture, forestry, agroforestry, or grassland restoration, mimic the prairie ecosystem and bring many of these ecosystem services into agricultural systems. Peer-reviewed studies consistently show that perennial agricultural systems build or maintain soil organic matter, reduce nutrient and sediment runoff compared to annual row crops, and provide more resilient agroecosystems under climate stress (Culman et al., 2013; DeHaan et al., 2023; Dietz et al. 2024; Kreitzman et al., 2022; Mosier et al., 2021; Picasso et al. 2022; Soto-Gómez and Pérez-Rodríguez, 2022; Sprunger et al. 2024). Perennial agricultural practices that mimic the prairie ecosystem should be prioritized to maximize the environmental benefits of conservation investments.

Do conservation dollars support ‘prairie-like’ agriculture?

Even though perennial agricultural systems deliver substantial long-term environmental benefits, my research finds that they receive only a small portion of the federal agricultural conservation spending in Wisconsin (Keady, 2025). 

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) administers voluntary, cost-share conservation programs to support farmers implementing conservation and nudge land management towards improved ecosystem services. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), administered by the NRCS, is the largest such federal conservation program in terms of total spending. To participate in EQIP, farmers and land managers work directly with NRCS staff and technical service providers to plan, apply for, and implement a range of approved conservation measures on private lands. In my research, I assessed EQIP spending from fiscal years 2014 through 2024 across Wisconsin to ask: Where do federal conservation dollars flow in Wisconsin and what influences where they go? In particular, I examined how much EQIP spending went to perennial agricultural conservation practices.

In Wisconsin, an average $29.7 million per year in EQIP support flowed to farmers in the 11-year period, with ~20% supporting agriculture that ‘acts like a prairie’ (that is, perennial practices including managed grazing of pasture, forestry, agroforestry, and habitat restoration), while ~60% supported interventions within annual row crop and livestock confinement systems such as cover crops and waste storage facilities (see full report here). The remaining 20% was used for multi-system practices such as heavy use areas, or practices that didn’t fall within these categories including dams and streambank protection. These results beg the question: is this the ‘best’ distribution of these dollars? Should we support interventions into systems well-known for environmental degradation to make them a bit less degrading, or should we invest in practices that help transform farms to perennial agriculture that ‘acts like a prairie’? 

The Important Role of Conservation Staff

 My research explored what county level factors shaped where EQIP dollars flowed. The strongest predictor of where EQIP dollars were spent was the number of conservation staff in a county, both federal and county employees (Figure 1) (Keady 2025). Local and federal conservation staff are critical to helping farmers access support for conservation practices. County conservationists in Wisconsin are members of Wisconsin Land and Water, also referred to as conservation district staff. Federal conservationists are NRCS field staff located within counties. Conservation staff work with farmers to find on-farm solutions and help navigate the application process (with grueling paperwork).Yet, NRCS staff has declined by over 30% over the past two decades, even before the devastating job cuts of 2025. In a time of intense environmental degradation, society desperately needs to support agricultural transitions to perennial systems that maintain soil carbon, produce food, and protect critical ecosystem services. Supporting well-trained and inspired conservation staff is critical to this equation.

Figure 1. NRCS staff (A) and county conservation district staff (B) correlate with the amount of conservation EQIP spending in Wisconsin counties. 

How do we transform agroecosystems? Passionate and Skilled Conservation Staff

Transitioning to perennial agroecosystems takes more than increasing conservation staff numbers, it also takes passion. Sauk County conservationist, Serge Koenig spent 30 years working with landowners, and the last 10 years inspiring and supporting transitions to managed rotational grazing. Serge sees grazing as the “most bang for your buck” – a financially viable farming option that provides solutions to environmental issues rather than interventions that slow the problem. His message has been convincing: Sauk County receives the most EQIP dollars in Wisconsin for grazing-related practices (Keady 2025). Serge credits this success to a combination of interpersonal skills, supervisory support, and most importantly – wanting to be the change. The interpersonal skills come naturally to Serge, but he’s adamant these are skills technicians can and should learn. Working with farmers requires “trust, sincere curiosity, and knowing when to listen, when to comment, and when to make suggestions,” he says. Supervisory support that encourages conservation staff to lean-in to their passion and expertise when working with farmers is key. Finally, conservationists want and need access to specialized training in grassland restoration, agroforestry, forestry, silvopasture, and grazing management. The heart of moving the needle towards perennial conservation comes from recognizing the ecological value of a perennial system and making it a priority to advocate for stewardship that makes our world a better place for farmers and society as a whole. 

Perennial systems such as well-managed rotational grazing, forestry, and agroforestry can mimic the prairie in protecting and enhancing ecosystem services. Perennial plants protect soil, clean water, and provide habitat – and should be a key tool for conservation programs, including NRCS’s EQIP. Conservation staff are critical to working with landowners and getting conservation on the ground. We desperately need to support their passion and ability to advance land-management and provide benefits to both the farmer, land, and society at large. 

The post Guest Post: Thinking like a prairie – strategies for perennial conservation appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

This is the final post in the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC)’s series documenting the ongoing staffing crisis across the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The scale and pace of staffing losses across the USDA, combined with the uncertainty introduced by a sweeping USDA reorganization plan, have weakened the Department at the very moment farmers face rising production costs, unstable markets, and climate-driven disasters. As the series comes to an end, the data show a workforce under extreme strain and an urgent need for renewed investment in the staff that make the People’s Department function.

 A Year Defined by Unprecedented Staffing Losses

Beginning in January 2025, USDA experienced historic staff losses. Nearly 3,000 employees separated from the agency in the first quarter alone, according to the Office of Personnel Management. These early losses included both career staff, many with 20 years or more of institutional knowledge, and recent hires who had not yet completed their first year of service. 

The truly unprecedented staff losses followed soon after, with roughly 15,173 USDA employees who accepted Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) buyouts. 94% of the USDA staff who left via the DRP were located outside of the Washington, DC area. All of the staff who accepted the DRP officially separated from the agency on September 30, 2025. 

Figure 1: Location of USDA Staff Who Left Via DRP

The consequences of these losses were immediate.

• Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), already struggling to meet rising farmer demand, lost planners, conservationists, and program technicians whose expertise cannot be easily replaced. Promising conservationists like Gretchen Troutman and Josh Hardin are no longer there to help farmers design conservation plans and get funding to protect and enhance the resources that ensure their farm’s viability.

• Farm Service Agency (FSA) lost staff responsible for administering farm loans, disaster assistance, and commodity programs—programs that require precise and timely processing to keep farms solvent. FSA offices like the Oklahoma office where Kevin Dale used to work have had their staff cut in half or are fully vacant, even as work demands increase with the need to allocate 30 million new base acres and administer an additional $12 billion in farm financial assistance. 
• Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) lost experienced inspectors, veterinarians, and scientists, threatening on-the-ground food safety capacity.
• Rural Development offices lost staff with an average of 13.5 years of service, with losses concentrated among both the most junior and most experienced employees, leaving gaps in both institutional memory and the future of the agency. These Rural Development staff administer programs like the Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program (MPPEP) to help grow rural economies.
• The research agencies Economic Research Service (ERS), National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), and Agricultural Research Service (ARS) lost economists and scientists whose research supports federal decision-making, weakening USDA’s capacity to produce market forecasts, evaluate rural well-being, and administer competitive research grants.

Taken together, the federal workforce responsible for serving farmers and supporting rural communities shrank dramatically in a matter of months.

 A Reorganization Plan That Accelerates Risk

In July 2025, USDA announced a major reorganization plan, drafted without public input, that would relocate thousands of jobs, consolidate field offices, and restructure core program functions. Early details suggest the relocation of up to 2,600 headquarters and regional staff, along with the consolidation or closure of field offices across NRCS, FSA, Rural Development (RD), and other agencies. US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has publicly stated that she expects up to half of the staff to leave the department rather than relocate.

For agencies already operating with gutted staff and the loss of institutional knowledge, this reorganization introduces additional uncertainty. Staff have been given limited details about timelines, office closures, reassignments, or new reporting structures. Farmers and stakeholders have been offered no clarity on how service delivery might be affected. During their adhoc public comment period on the reorganization, the USDA received nearly 47,000 emails. Their own analysis concludes that 82% of the responses expressed negative sentiment and concerns. 

The risks of USDA reorganization are clear. The deepest staffing losses occurred in agencies already stretched thin and struggling to meet farmer demand, leaving many USDA programs operating with minimal capacity at a time when farmers are facing a worsening financial crisis. Farmers rely on these agencies for conservation planning, loan processing, and disaster assistance. Any reorganization risks amplifying service gaps precisely when farmers need USDA support the most.

 The Shutdown and Reopening

When the government shut down on October 1, 2025, the incredible importance of USDA staff and services became even more evident. Outreach events were canceled, conservation planning stalled, and loan processing halted.

Farmers like Lindsay, from Tourvaille Farm in Ohio, could not get their conservation contracts paid on time because staff were furloughed. Others like Celeste, a farmer from Washington, didn’t receive their much-needed farm loans and safety net payments. These and the hundreds of other stories of American farmers and rural communities unable to access the resources and services they depend upon made visible the often-overlooked importance of USDA staff. 

The bill to reopen the government – passed on November 13, 2025 – included several provisions that shape the future of USDA staffing and services:

• First, the bill provided full-year funding for USDA, ensuring that USDA staff will not be furloughed for the remainder of the 2026 fiscal year.
• Second, Congress inserted new oversight requirements that could limit USDA’s ability to move forward with large-scale reorganizations, relocations, or office closures. This represents one of the first meaningful checks on the reorganization since its announcement.
• Third, the legislation stabilized funding for research and scientific programs. These investments protect programs critical for research and economic forecasting, areas where staff was already thinned due to the 2025 staff losses.

However, the shutdown bill did not reverse the staffing losses the USDA has already endured. It did not pause the reorganization, only slowed it and perhaps established some guardrails. And it did not provide any emergency hiring authorities or explicitly additional staffing budgets that agencies desperately need to rebuild.

Charting a Path Forward for Federal Agricultural Capacity

The USDA staffing crisis of 2025 makes clear that the department’s capacity has been compromised at a moment when robust federal support for farmers is most essential. If these staff losses are not addressed, access to USDA services will become more uneven and core missions of the USDA, from conservation to farm resilience, food safety, and rural development, will suffer.

NSAC urges the Administration and Congress to rebuild staffing across all USDA mission areas and pause the reorganization until a transparent and iterative process is laid out to meaningfully integrate stakeholder input. USDA must prioritize immediate hiring in NRCS, FSA, RD, and other agencies suffering acute shortages. No USDA reorganization and structural change should proceed until USDA conducts a transparent impact assessment, engages meaningfully with farmers and frontline staff, and demonstrates that proposed changes will strengthen, not weaken, service delivery.

The past year has shown how deeply USDA’s ability to serve the public depends on a strong and stable workforce.

The post USDA Staffing Crisis: A Year of Losses and the Road Ahead appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

This post examines the devastating loss of experienced staff within US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development and the consequences for the agency’s ability to support farmers, rural businesses, and communities. As the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) continues to track the staffing crisis across USDA, Rural Development stands out not only for the depth of its losses, but also for the ripple effects those losses create across the entire rural economy.

This post is the latest in our series documenting the widespread staffing crisis underway at USDA and the compounding impacts of the department’s proposed reorganization. Each part of this series highlights how reduced staffing and weakened capacity are undermining core USDA functions that farmers and rural communities depend on every day.

Rural Development (RD) plays a critical role in growing the vitality of rural America. Through a wide range of financial services, technical assistance, and community-focused initiatives, RD supports job creation, business investment, affordable housing, infrastructure improvements, and essential services. A number of priorities for NSAC and its members are housed within RD such as the Value Added Producer Grants, Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program, Rural Energy for America Program, the Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program, and many others. These programs drive economic opportunity for farmers and improve quality of life in rural communities—outcomes that require knowledgeable staff, consistent program delivery, and strong local partnerships. As RD loses seasoned staff at an alarming pace, farmers and rural communities are already beginning to feel the strain of slower service and reduced capacity.

Rural Community Federal Support Severely Hollowed Out

The previous twenty years have seen a steady erosion of RD staffing numbers, leaving current staffing levels at less than half of what they were in 2005. In addition to steady staff attrition, Rural Development (RD) has been hit extremely hard by recent staff cuts, losing approximately 36% of their staff since January 2025. As rural American communities and farmers endure a period of economic hardship, RD is operating with fewer staff to support them. 

Figure 1: Rural Development staff

RD lost approximately 1,536 staff to the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). The DRP was a program spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to reduce the federal workforce by offering incentives to staff who voluntarily resigned in early 2025. RD had one of the largest losses of any USDA agency, behind only the Forest Service which lost more than 4,000 staff to the DRP and the Natural Resources Conservation Service which lost approximately 2,409. In addition to the losses from the DRP, an additional 188 RD staff separated from the agency between January and March 2025, according to data from OPM. Separations include retirements, early retirement, transferring to a different federal agency, quitting, or any other separation from the agency. 

A Dual Loss: Experience and the Next Generation

The staff who separated from RD had an average of 13.5 years of service to the agency; however, this average masks a striking divide: turnover was concentrated at both ends of the experience spectrum. 32% of employees who separated had less than one year on the job while 31% who separated had more than twenty years of experience and institutional knowledge. In other words, RD lost both its most seasoned experts and the next generation of employees.

The impact of losing these bookends of the workforce cannot be overstated. Long-tenured staff hold deep program knowledge, trusted relationships with rural partners, and practical understanding of how to navigate complex federal processes—knowledge that cannot simply be replaced by hiring new staff. At the same time, the departure of early-career employees eliminates the pipeline of future leaders needed to maintain continuity and innovation. These staff losses will undermine the ability of the agency to serve its mission for years to come. 

No State Spared from Staff Cuts

RD staff, like most other USDA agencies, are predominantly located outside of the Washington, DC region, with less than 4% of RD staff located in Washington, DC. Rural Development is, by design, a field-based agency—its effectiveness depends on local staff who understand regional needs, maintain relationships with communities, and implement programs on the ground.

Staff losses have occurred nationwide, affecting every state and territory. Smaller states with already limited staff numbers were hit especially hard. Rhode Island lost 100% of their staff, essentially eliminating the agency’s presence in the state. Connecticut, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and Idaho all saw losses exceeding 50 percent, leaving critical gaps in service delivery and severely constraining program access for rural communities. 

These local staff losses matter because RD’s work cannot be centralized or outsourced; it depends on staff who know local lenders, understand rural economies, and collaborate with community partners. This erosion of field staff undermines the agency’s ability to connect farmers and rural community partners with essential programs that strengthen local economies and expand market opportunities.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time in recent history that RD has been undervalued by its political leadership. In the last major USDA reorganization, during President Trump’s first term, then-Secretary Sonny Perdue demoted Rural Development, eliminating it as a mission area with a designated Under Secretary to advance its mission. This move was reversed in the 2018 Farm Bill, but Rural Development continues to be plagued by a lack of support and underinvestment, in addition to these persistent and acutely felt staff shortages.

The map below shows the percentage of RD staff lost in 2025 to both the DRP and other separations. Click on a state to see details and click “get the data” to download the data directly

Figure 2: Rural Development Staff Loss By State

Rural Development Losses Will Hurt Rural Communities

Rural Development staff administer a wide range of programs that serve not only America’s farmers, but also their communities, including loans, business development, housing support, and rural infrastructure. The loss of these staff across the country undermines the agency’s ability to promote rural prosperity and for the USDA to fulfill its mission. As the former RD director for South Dakota told Agri-Pulse: “It is really sad. USDA Rural Development is the only area of government that was really focused on economic development for small rural communities. So, it can be devastating.”

In July 2025, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released a reorganization plan for the USDA, drafted without any input from farmers or other stakeholders. While the plan does not explicitly outline changes to RD, Secretary Rollins has publicly signaled that the agency may be a target for program or staffing consolidation while President Trump wrongly asserted the duplicative nature of RD programs, limited macro-economic impact, and the costly nature of delivery in his Presidential Budget Request this year. RD investments are, in fact, highly effective programs tailored to the unique needs of rural communities. 

Research shows that counties that received RD investment in rural broadband had higher business survival rates and better employment outcomes than those that did not receive the investments. Research also consistently shows that RD supports farm viability by diversifying farm revenue with value-added products through programs such as the Value Added Producer Grants (VAPG). Analysis by the Economic Research Service finds that “VAPGs enable recipient businesses to reduce the risk of failing and to provide more jobs than the comparison group” and additional research finds that these funds help farm businesses develop their businesses more effectively than otherwise. Value added and local foods development like that supported by VAPGs are widely understood to be an economic multiplier for rural communities in which every $1 of federal investment is multiplied in its positive impact on rural economic growth. 

RD program support is already stretched thin, operating with 36% less of the staff than it had at the start of 2025, including the loss of many employees with decades of institutional knowledge. Any reorganization layered on top of this crisis threatens to deepen the damage and further erode the agency’s ability to deliver critical programs that serve rural communities that depend on it.

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Federal food safety agencies have seen significant staff losses in 2025, threatening their ability to serve stakeholders and ensure the safety of our food supply Several federal agencies – including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) – hold this responsibility. These federal agencies work with state partners to set and enforce food safety standards and help reduce the risk of foodborne illness outbreaks or the spread of disease from animals to humans. Staffing losses at the agencies, particularly inspectors and outreach professionals, threaten the safety of the US food system and the ability to serve agricultural enterprises of all types and sizes 

This post continues the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s (NSAC) series on the federal staffing crisis by examining staff losses at key food safety agencies. In this post, we extend our lens beyond the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to also include the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This is the sixth post in the series.  Previous posts have given an overview of USDA staffing losses and cuts at key USDA agencies. All of the posts in the staffing crisis series are here. 

Staff losses at FSIS and APHIS in particular will likely be further exacerbated by the USDA’s planned reorganization. On July 24, 2025, USDA announced a major reorganization of the department, drafted without any input from farmers, Congress, or other stakeholders. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) continues to encourage USDA to allow meaningful stakeholder input into any reorganization and to share all comments that were received from stakeholders via an ad hoc public comment. NSAC’s reorganization comment can be seen here.

Food Safety Agencies Face Severe Staffing Shortages

Each of the food safety agencies has experienced significant staff losses in 2025. APHIS has seen the most dramatic staff reductions, losing approximately 20% of their staff to the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and other separations between January and March 2025. FSIS lost approximately 8% of their workforce to the DRP and separations. The DRP was a program led by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to reduce federal staff numbers by offering incentives for employees to resign. Unfortunately, it is not yet clear how many FDA employees left the agency via the DRP, but they have lost at least 3,500 staff to reductions in force in April 2025 and an additional 411 employees to other separations between January and March 2025, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). It is not yet entirely clear what portions of these positions have been lost within the broader Human Food Program, or the Office of Produce Safety, those sections within FDA that most impact farmers and the food system. 

Figure 1: Percentage of Staff Lost to DRP and Separations

While each agency takes a different approach and has different responsibilities regarding food safety, these staff losses will pose major challenges for them to fulfill their missions. APHIS, with the largest staff loss percentage, is responsible for preventing and addressing the spread of plant and animal disease. This means that they do not inspect final food products, but their efforts to prevent the spread of pests and disease help protect the human food chain from contamination. After the resignation and separation of more than 1,600 employees, APHIS found itself scrambling to refill positions that it realized were essential to securing the safety of the American food and agriculture system. FSIS is the agency responsible for ensuring the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products. It conducts continuous inspection at slaughter facilities and verifies that processors meet federal food safety standards.  It also liaises with and provides support to states that run their own meat inspection agencies, which have been shown to benefit small meat processors, and other supplementary programs such as the Cooperative Interstate Shipment that support small processors. With hundreds of staff lost in 2025, the agency faces growing gaps in its ability to provide adequate inspection and support for processors, particularly small plants.

Reorganization Threatens to Worsen Staffing Crisis

These widespread staff losses at food safety agencies are likely to be further exacerbated by the USDA’s planned reorganization. While APHIS and FSIS are not specifically named in the reorganization plan, they will undoubtedly experience its impacts. One of the major tenets of the reorganization plan is the movement of USDA staff and offices outside of the Washington, DC capitol region. Approximately 14% of APHIS staff and approximately 8% of FSIS staff are located in Washington, DC, Maryland, or Virginia, according to data from OPM. Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins expects up to 50% of USDA’s capitol area staff to leave the Department because they decline to relocate. Similarly, they will experience its universal proposal for consolidation of support, FOIA, and Tribal relationship functions. For FSIS in particular, which provides voluntary inspection for non-amenable species including bison, often cultivated by different Tribal nations, this lack of direct connections between FSIS and Tribes could prove harmful. These additional staff losses and other impacts of the planned reorganization will further disrupt the ability of the agencies to fulfill their missions and serve stakeholders. 

Losing Institutional Knowledge and Technical Expertise

The staff at these agencies that safeguard food safety are highly specialized professionals and each loss represents a loss of essential institutional knowledge. It is impossible to know specific occupations or experiences of the staff who accepted the DRP. This is due to the failure of OPM or other agencies to provide any detailed information on the tens of thousands of staff who left federal employment via the program. NSAC joins the calls of many other stakeholders for OPM and all agencies to provide detailed information on the scope and impact of DRP resignations.

While we cannot know the scope of lost institutional knowledge due to the DRP, the FDA staff who otherwise separated from the agency between January and March 2025 had an average of 21 years of experience and the FDA inspectors who separated, specifically, had an average of 19 years of experience, according to data from OPM. The FSIS employees who separated had an average of 16 years of service and APHIS employees had an average of 10 years of experience. Approximately 15% of the APHIS employees who separated from the agency also held masters degrees, doctorates, or another advanced degree, again according to data from OPM. Within FSIS, more than 63% of the staff who separated from the agency were classified as part of the investigations group, which includes inspectors. 

Together, these staff losses threaten the ability of the agencies to both safeguard food safety and to effectively engage with stakeholders such as small and diversified farms and processors. For example, FDA is responsible for the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that significantly expanded the regulation of fruit and vegetable production. NSAC continues to advocate that it is essential that these standards be appropriate and accessible for small and diversified farms and those who implement sustainable practices. Fewer staff at FDA, particularly in the education and inspection domains, may lead to a lack of experience in the design of the remaining FSMA rules and undermine their appropriateness for a wide range of farms, especially those pursuing activities which help mitigate climate and environmental impacts. 

Rebuilding the Workforce for a Safe and Thriving Food System

Together, the staff at these different agencies help ensure a safe food system that serves consumers and farmers. These major staff losses are extremely concerning not just for preventing foodborne illness but also for the ability of the agencies to develop, educate, and enforce standards and regulations in a manner that is appropriate for farmers and processors of all sizes.

If they are understaffed and overstretched, agencies like FSIS might prioritize working with large processing facilities, as no statutory provision explicitly stops them from doing so. This would undermine support and outreach to small and midsize firms. For example, during the recent federal government shutdown, there is evidence that FSIS continued to pay inspectors at large processing facilities while inspectors at small and midsized plants were not paid. This can lead to declines in inspector morale, inspection quality, and long term struggles in hiring and retaining future inspectors.  Adequately staffing these and other federal agencies is essential to serve stakeholders and fulfill the mission of USDA and FDA.  NSAC calls for the immediate restoration of staffing levels as well as transparency and stakeholder input for both the staffing plans and the proposed reorganization. 

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Several offices within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) provide legal guidance, oversight, and accountability for actions the Department takes, and these offices have endured significant staff losses in 2025. Their work, though often invisible to the public, is essential for ensuring that USDA follows its own rules and those set by Congress. It makes the Department transparent, accountable to the public for its decisions, and ensures it treats farmers and other stakeholders fairly. The major staff losses these offices are experiencing threaten that work.

This post is the sixth in our ongoing series on the staffing crisis at USDA. It examines the massive cuts to legal oversight offices within the Department including the National Appeals Division (NAD), the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights (OASCR), the Office of the General Counsel (OGC), and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the impacts of the USDA’s planned reorganization. Together, these agencies provide different aspects of essential legal oversight and guidance for USDA and their staffing levels have been gutted in 2025.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) continues to call for long-term adequate USDA staffing levels and the opportunity for stakeholders to provide meaningful guidance on the proposed reorganization. Read NSAC’s comment on the proposed reorganization here. 

Steep Declines Across Key Offices

While each oversight office has a unique role and responsibilities within USDA, together they provide the legal structure and guidance needed to ensure that the Department and its staff function legally and ethically. The NAD (part of the Office of Hearings and Appeals) conducts impartial administrative appeals hearings for program decisions made by several USDA agencies. NAD is where an appeal would be handled if, for instance, a farmer believed that their conservation contract was unfairly terminated. OASCR ensures that both USDA stakeholders and employees are treated fairly and in accordance with federal civil rights laws. Any stakeholder or employee who believes that they have experienced discrimination or unfair treatment from a USDA agency or staff member can file a complaint with the OASCR, which will investigate and take appropriate actions, if needed. The OGC is an independent legal office within USDA that provides legal guidance to the Secretary of Agriculture and department staff. OGC provides guidance to ensure that all USDA programs and activities comply with federal laws and regulations. The OIG is an independent agency within the Department responsible for auditing agencies and investigating allegations of fraud, waste, or abuse within USDA agencies. 

These four legal oversight offices have seen significant staff losses in 2025. Each of these offices have smaller staffs than other USDA agencies and therefore have been particularly vulnerable to recent staff cuts. The hardest hit office has been OASCR, which has lost 33% of its staff since January 2025. The relatively small office (150 employees in September 2024, according to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)) lost 47 employees to the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and an additional 2 staff to other separations between January and March 2025. The DRP was a program created by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut federal staffing numbers by offering incentives for employees to resign. Separations can include firing, quitting, retiring, transferring to another agency, or other separation from an agency. The figure below shows the percentage of employees lost from each agency in 2025, including both the number who accepted the DRP and those who had other separations between January and March 2025.

Figure 1: Staff Lost to Both DRP and Separations (January-March 2025)

Losses Threaten Unfair Treatment and Delays

Each legal office at the USDA provides a different aspect of essential legal oversight and guidance to the Department and its agencies. Staff losses at these offices will ripple throughout all agencies of USDA and threaten the Department’s ability to serve all farmers and stakeholders fairly. 

The NAD oversees administrative appeals that farmers and other stakeholders may file when they disagree with decisions made by certain USDA agencies. In 2025, the NAD caseload has been exceptionally high due to the unprecedented number of signed agreements USDA has terminated. For example, in April 2025, USDA abruptly terminated over one hundred agreements under the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities program, many of which appealed to the NAD. The NAD must hear each of these appeals, review the appropriateness of the decisions, and issue a decision. Access to fair and timely appeals is essential for program accountability and farmer trust. Fewer staff at NAD means higher case loads and longer wait times for resolution. These delays severely decrease the efficacy of this important avenue to ensure fairness for farmers; who may be irrevocably harmed by an agency action if its reversal is unnecessarily delayed. 

Losses to the OASCR are particularly troubling given that USDA has a well-documented history of civil rights violations. Perhaps most notably, the Farm Service Agency (FSA) was found to have discriminated against Black farmers in allocating farm loans and disaster payments in the Pigford lawsuit, settled in 1999 with USDA agreeing to pay more than $1 billion to complainants. Congress also authorized an additional $1 billion in payments to Black farmers for discrimination in 2010, a settlement often called Pigford II. 

OASCR is responsible for preventing – through training and oversight – these kinds of civil rights violations and for investigating and resolving complaints when they arise. OIG has frequently found that OASCR takes an excessive amount of time to process claims of discrimination and recommended increased staffing in OASCR. Higher OASCR staffing levels and funding was also one of the major recommendations from the USDA Equity Commission – which have now been scrubbed from all USDA websites – to ensure that they can process all civil rights complaints in a timely manner. These recent staff losses fly directly in the face of this and other recommendations to keep OASCR and legal offices adequately staffed.

OGC attorneys are the chief legal USDA officers. Fewer attorneys at OGC means that all processes at the Department will be slowed and the effects will ripple into all USDA agencies. Firstly, OGC attorneys advise USDA leadership on federal laws and regulations and represent USDA in court and administrative proceedings, defending agency actions and enforcing USDA regulations. With nearly 20% fewer OGC attorneys, OGC attorneys will be less available to enforce USDA regulations and staff will be stretched thin trying to review regulations and policies to ensure that they are legally sound. This will likely delay program revisions across all USDA agencies and increase the risk that USDA may adopt policies that do not comply with federal law. Ultimately, fewer OGC attorneys threatens all USDA programs and policies. 

Finally, OIG is an independent, non-partisan oversight body that promotes accountability and efficiency within USDA. OIG ensures that all of the other USDA agencies are operating effectively and efficiently and they investigate allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse. While OIG has seen the smallest number of staff losses, any losses to this office pose a major threat to their ability to provide essential watchdog services. Notably, in January 2025, President Trump fired USDA’s Inspector General (IG), the head of OIG, along with the IGs from sixteen other agencies. Ultimately, a federal judge found this firing to be illegal but stopped short of reinstating the IG. These disruptions to OIG and OIG staffing are deeply concerning. Without a strong watchdog, even well-intentioned reforms can falter. 

Every lost staff member takes with them accrued institutional knowledge and experience. The staff from legal agencies who separated from the Department between January and March 2025 had an average of 23 years of experience, according to data from OPM, and 32% of separated staff held a doctorate or the most advanced degree in their field, likely a Doctorate of Jurisprudence (JD), the degree held by attorneys. Staff in these legal offices are highly skilled with specialized knowledge that is not easily replaced. Every loss represents lost institutional knowledge that helps USDA better serve farmers and communities.

Reorganization Risks Deepening the Crisis

Extensive staff losses at USDA legal offices in 2025  have already threatened basic fairness and transparency.  USDA’s planned reorganization will further exacerbate these losses. On July 24, 2025, USDA issued a memo detailing a planned reorganization drafted without input from farmers or other stakeholders. The USDA reorganization plan includes major changes including consolidating all civil rights functions into OASCR and consolidating all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) management into OGC. These changes would significantly increase the responsibilities of those offices at the very time that they are experiencing unprecedented staffing losses. The planned shift of many USDA offices outside of the Washington, DC metro area also threatens to exacerbate staff losses as the Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins expects up to half of the Department’s DC area staff to leave the agency due to relocation. How will the OASCR with 33% fewer and OGC with 19% fewer employees, plus additional losses due to potential relocation, manage their increased responsibilities? Staff that are already stretched thin will be further burdened and the whole system of fairness for farmers will falter.

Rebuilding Capacity Must Be the Priority

These offices – the National Appeals Division, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Office of the General Counsel, and Office of the Inspector General – uphold the rule of law within USDA. Their staffing losses threaten basic fairness, transparency, and due process at the “People’s Department.” Behind every percentage point of lost staff is a farmer waiting longer for their justice, a complaint left uninvestigated, or a new regulation left in limbo. Together these offices provide the legal backbone of USDA and staff losses that will only be exacerbated by the planned reorganization undermine the functioning of the Department and essential trust in government. 

NSAC calls for the immediate restoration of staffing for USDA’s legal and oversight offices, as well as transparency and stakeholder input for both the staffing plans and the proposed reorganization. USDA needs a long-term staffing strategy that better supports the mission of the Department and centers on fairness and transparency. 

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“I believe public service is my calling… The Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) hasn’t received much coverage in the media, but they do important work in advancing American agricultural interests abroad. Given the current administration’s priorities, I thought they would double down on this mission by staffing departments like the FAS. However, despite receiving and signing an offer letter following an arduous interview and security clearance process, my offer was withdrawn before my start date.”
— Rescinded FAS hire

The Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) is the branch of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) responsible for building international markets for US agricultural products and overseeing international trade negotiations. It is also the division responsible for supporting international food aid programs, producing detailed reports on international market conditions, and helping to ensure food safety for global agricultural markets. In a time of great economic uncertainty and the impacts of trade wars, the role of the FAS is more important than ever, but their staff has been gutted. 

Although NSAC’s primary attention is on domestic programs that serve farmers and rural communities, the staffing losses at the FAS reveal the same systemic problem affecting every corner of USDA: the erosion of public-sector capacity. The loss of highly trained staff at FAS reflects the same hollowing-out of USDA expertise that threatens the agency’s ability to serve farmers, rural communities, and sustainable food systems.

On July 24, 2025, US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released memorandum SM-1078-015 announcing a proposed reorganization of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Created without consultation from farmers or other stakeholders, the restructuring plan follows a loss of more than 20,000 employees since the start of 2025 and creates the potential for thousands more additional staff to leave. After widespread outcry, the USDA opened an ad hoc opportunity for comment via email but failed to issue a formal Federal Register notice. The ad hoc comment period ended on September 30, 2025. NSAC continues to urge the USDA to make all submitted comments publicly available and to provide meaningful and transparent opportunities for stakeholder feedback to be addressed and incorporated. NSAC’s comment on the reorganization can be seen here. 

This post is the fifth installment in our series examining USDA’s staffing crisis and the effects of the proposed reorganization of the USDA. Previous posts discuss overall losses, the devastation of research agencies, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the Farm Service Agency. In this post we discuss the loss of staff in the FAS and how it affects the farmers and communities who depend on a well-functioning USDA, whether for technical assistance, fair trade relationships, or access to reliable market information. 

FAS Faces Steep Staff Declines

The last decade has seen a steady decline in FAS staffing levels and the agency was hit hard this year by staff losses from the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and recent staff separations. Staffing levels at FAS peaked at just under 1,000 employees in 2010 before falling 25% to approximately 739 employees in September 2024, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). 

Figure 1: FAS Staffing Levels

Since January 2025, the FAS has lost an additional 19% of their staff from the already depleted numbers. The DRP was a program that offered federal staff incentives to voluntarily resign from their positions as an effort to reduce staff numbers. Overall, approximately 15,173 USDA staff left their positions through the DRP. 

FAS lost 15 staff members in the first round of DRP resignations in February 2025 and another 89 employees in the second round of DRP. In addition to the 104 staff members who left via the DRP, FAS also lost 40 more employees to other separations between January and March 2025, according to OPM. Separations can include quitting, retirement, firing, transferring to another agency, or other separation from the agency. This brings the FAS staffing levels to their lowest level in over twenty years, nearly 40% lower than their peak in 2010.

Eroding Institutional Knowledge and Mentorship

As seen in other USDA agencies, many of the staff losses at FAS were highly skilled and experienced employees. Employees who separated from FAS between January and March 2025 had an average of 26 years of service, according to data from OPM. These were highly experienced and specialized professionals with valuable institutional knowledge that supported the agency.

A senior staff member who left the agency via the DRP spoke of feeling pushed out before she was ready due to the uncertainty of her role’s future and the future of the agency:

“I didn’t plan to retire. I was planning to stay at least three more years…{but} the more I thought about it the more I realized I was coming to work extremely tense and more and more stressed out everyday and I didn’t want to do that. I came to this job because I love the work and believe in the work,” but she felt she couldn’t stay amidst an uncertain future. 

This senior member’s departure exemplifies the widespread impacts of losing experienced staff. She led a USDA-wide career coaching program to help public servants grow their career, provided a leadership course for midcareer foreign service officers, and mentored many younger staff. “I was trying to create leaders to be the change that we want to see. Authentic and communicative leaders for the future of the agency.” All of this mentorship and knowledge is lost when career employees leave or are forced out of the USDA. These losses and the institutional knowledge accompanying them are not easily reversible, and the reorganization of the USDA threatens to further exacerbate existing losses.

Reorganization Risks Deepening the Crisis

The loss of staff and institutional knowledge at FAS is emblematic of the broader hollowing out of USDA capacity. Staff losses contribute to low staff morale and declining ability to serve US farmers and stakeholders, and the reorganization drafted without stakeholder input will greatly exacerbate these losses. Unlike many other USDA agencies, FAS employees are overwhelmingly located in Washington, DC and surrounding areas (615 of the 739 employees in September 2024), with the remaining serving to represent US interests in foreign countries. The reorganization’s vague plans to move staff out of the DC region would be particularly disruptive to this agency that depends on interfacing closely with staff on the Hill and with other federal agencies outside of the USDA regarding international trade. 

The future of the FAS, as with every other USDA agency, is uncertain as the administration advances a reorganization plan without transparency and without meaningful input from farmers and stakeholders. Without decisive action to restore USDA’s workforce, the loss of institutional knowledge and public service capacity will continue to weaken the foundation of US agriculture.

The post USDA Staffing Crisis: Eroding Capacity Within the Foreign Agricultural Service  appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

On July 24, 2025, US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released memorandum SM-1078-015 announcing a proposed reorganization of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The proposal was drafted without consultation with farmers or other key stakeholders. Since the beginning of 2025, the agency has already lost more than 20,000 employees, and if implemented, the restructuring could trigger thousands more departures.

In response to a public outcry, USDA opened an ad hoc opportunity for feedback on the proposal. NSAC is encouraging farmers, advocates, and organizations to submit their perspectives on the proposed reorganization to reorganization@usda.gov by September 30, 2025. Still, NSAC remains seriously concerned that USDA has bypassed the standard practice of issuing a Federal Register notice to formally solicit public input on a change of this scale.

This post is the fourth installment in our series examining USDA’s staffing crisis and the ripple effects of the proposed reorganization. Here, we highlight staffing declines within the Farm Service Agency (FSA), where staff reductions threaten to undermine the agency’s ability to administer farm safety net programs, deliver disaster assistance, and provide critical support to farmers across the country. Our earlier posts looked first at overall USDA and state-level staff losses, the implications for the Department’s research agencies, and the loss of staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

FSA Staff Numbers Have Fallen for Two Decades

The Farm Service Agency (FSA) administers loans and payments to farmers and landowners, operating through a network of more than 2,000 state and county offices. FSA staff help farmers apply for loans, price support programs, income support, disaster recovery, and a variety of other financial support programs. FSA, quite literally, keeps the money flowing for millions of American farms and ranches. 

FSA employees include national, state, and county office staff. About ⅔ of FSA employees are county staff, working directly with farmers and landowners in local offices spread across the country. In 2024, for instance, approximately 7,168 employees were FSA county staff and approximately 3,402 were FSA state or national employees. 

Figure 1: FSA Staff in FY2024

FSA staffing levels have steadily eroded over recent decades. Even before the staff losses sustained during the current administration, the number of federal and state FSA staff declined by 43% between fiscal year 2005 and the beginning of fiscal year 2025. The number of county FSA staff declined by 22% during the same twenty year period. The National Association of Farmer Elected Committees recently sounded the alarm that there are now fewer than 6,000 FSA county office employees nationally, a 34% reduction from 2005 staffing levels. 

Figure 2: FSA Staff by Fiscal Year

Accelerated FSA Staffing Losses

The FSA has lost at least 1,200 additional employees just since January 2025. Approximately 499 FSA national and state employees and 674 FSA county employees opted to accept the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). The DRP encouraged federal employees to resign from their positions in exchange for receiving full pay and benefits through September 2025. Approximately 88 additional FSA state and national employees separated from the agency between January and March 2025, according to OPM. Unfortunately, since FSA county employees are not tracked by OPM, it is unknown how many FSA county employees also separated from the agency during this new administration. 

Table 1: Recent FSA Staffing Losses

Altogether, the FSA is entering the 2025 harvest season with at least 12% fewer staff members than in January 2025 and at least 1,100 employees fewer than at the end of the first Trump Administration. Just as farmers and landowners enter a period projected to be extremely economically challenging, the agency that provides their federal financial support has been gutted. The FSA has struggled to administer payments to farmers under the Supplemental Disaster Relief Program of 2025 and the 2023/2025 disaster relief programs, and is navigating the extensive changes to the federal commodity payment programs that were part of the recently passed budget reconciliation process. In addition, there is a growing recognition that supplemental relief will be needed for producers impacted by tariffs, high input costs, and program cuts. The scale of such assistance, likely to be around $20-30 billion, will require significant FSA support to ensure any program is run effectively and payments reach all producers in need. At a time of extremely high demand, these staffing levels will cause distress for the agency and stakeholders.

Every State Hit With FSA Staff Losses

Since two-thirds of FSA employees are county staff, the impact of the DRP and staff separations has been felt in every state across the country. Amongst the FSA federal employees, states lost an average of 17% of their FSA staff to the DRP. Two states, Alaska and Delaware, lost 100% of federal FSA employees in their state to the DRP. The 674 county FSA employees who left their positions to the DRP were spread across 46 states, with Texas (59 employees), Iowa (37 employees), Georgia (36 employees), and Kansas (33 employees) losing the large number of FSA county staff. The map below shows the number of FSA staff lost in each state since January 2025, including both the staff who accepted the DRP and those who otherwise separated from the agency.

Figure 3: FSA Staff Lost to DRP and Separations

No state has been spared in the gutting of the FSA staff. States with small staffing numbers have been hit particularly hard, such as Alaska and Delaware which have lost 100% of their FSA federal employees.

Farming Stakeholders Express Their Distress With Staff Cuts

Recently, The National Association of Farmer Elected Committees (NAFEC) issued a statement expressing their distress and frustration with existing low FSA staffing levels. NAFEC President Jim Zumbrink said: “NAFEC has County Committee members in every county in the nation and the word we are consistently hearing is our county office staffs are critically understaffed…As such, our staff will find it very difficult to perform the complex work of the new Farm Bill, combined with Disaster programs and ongoing programs, with the speed agriculture producers in America, both expect and desperately need.”

Leaders at NAFEC shared that their local offices will be unable to administer existing safety net programs and the forthcoming changes from budget reconciliation and a potential new farm bill. “The new farm bill is going to require millions of new base acres to be established which is going to take a lot of work. We also know that ongoing programs like the Livestock Forage Program (LFP), critical to our nation’s livestock producers, is a program that takes a lot of staff time to administer,” said Kevin Dale, a retired county executive director from a large beef-producing county in Oklahoma. His Oklahoma county office staff has recently been cut from a staff of four full time employees (including one full-time temporary employee) to just two staff members. With those numbers, he says, “Issuing payments quickly under this program will be impossible, without additional staffing.” 

FSA staff are highly skilled with extensive institutional knowledge that is lost with these separations. For instance, staff who separated from the agency between January and March 2025 had an average of 18.6 years of service, according to OPM. The decades worth of  invaluable experience and institutional knowledge FSA staff carry is essential to serving stakeholders effectively and efficiently. Bob Braden, a NAFEC officer and corn and soybean grower from Iowa says: “With the recent buyouts, not only are FSA offices depleted of warm bodies, but a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience also walked out the door of our offices. Replacing this experience will take a good amount of time.”

NAFEC’s recent public outcry concerning FSA staffing levels follows a July 2025 letter to farm groups highlighting that FSA staffing levels were “already at a breaking point:” “With recent buyouts and early retirements, the staffing levels in our counties has never been lower. Already at a breaking point, we are now faced with having to develop base acres on over 36 million new acres, as well as maintain all of the Title 1 programs that ensure a strong farm safety net. Frankly, we need your help if we are to be able to deliver the farm programs in the fast and efficient manner our producers have come to expect and deserve.” 

FSA Staff at a Breaking Point

The steady erosion of FSA staff, combined with the recent surge in losses, has left farmers and landowners with fewer resources and slower access to critical support just at the moment they most desperately need it. Rather than addressing this crisis, the Presidential budget includes massive cuts of more than $372 million to the FSA budget for the next fiscal year and plans to close many local offices. Deputy Secretary Vaden has said there are no plans to ask for either temporary or permanent increases in FSA staff levels, despite widespread stakeholder concerns. 

The proposed USDA reorganization will only further exacerbate this staffing crisis by driving even more staff out of the agency. Without a clear plan to rebuild FSA’s workforce, particularly at the county level where farmers most directly depend on assistance, USDA risks undermining the very programs that sustain farm communities in times of need.

The post USDA Staffing Crisis: Farm Service Agency Staff Losses Put Farm Safety Net at Risk appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

On July 24, 2025, US Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, issued memorandum SM-1078-015 outlining a proposed restructuring of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The plan was developed without meaningful engagement from farmers or other stakeholders. Since January 2025, USDA has already shed more than 18,000 employees, and the reorganization as proposed will likely drive thousands of additional departures.

Following mounting criticism, USDA created an informal channel for public feedback on the reorganization. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) urges farmers, advocates, and organizations to provide comments by emailing reorganization@usda.gov no later than September 30, 2025. However, NSAC remains deeply concerned that USDA has not followed the usual process of publishing a Federal Register notice for public comment, which is standard practice for proposals of this magnitude.

This piece is the third in a series exploring USDA’s staffing crisis and the potential consequences of the reorganization. Here, we focus specifically on staffing losses in the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and examine how staff reductions could weaken the agency’s ability to deliver conservation assistance and financial support to farmers and landowners across the country. Our first post in the series examines staff losses across the USDA and states and the second examines the scope and impact of staffing losses within the research agencies. 

A History of Staffing Decline in Vital Agency

NRCS is the primary agency within USDA that delivers on-the-ground conservation assistance to farmers, ranchers, and landowners. Through programs like the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), NRCS staff work directly with producers to implement conservation practices that improve soil health, protect water quality, enhance wildlife habitat, and build resilience. NRCS provides both technical assistance and financial assistance programs. Technical assistance involves helping producers develop a customized conservation plan with suggested conservation practices that address their conservation goals. Financial assistance programs are voluntary programs such as EQIP and CSP in which farmers enter into contracts with the agency to provide financial assistance for adopting specific conservation practices best suited to their land and resources. 

Between 2005 and 2023, NRCS has provided $87.3 billion in conservation support to farmers and ranchers, with 61% of that spending ($53 billion) going directly to farmers in the form of financial assistance payments and 37% going to support technical assistance, according to data provided by the agency. 

Figure 1: NRCS Obligations by Type, 2005-2023

NRCS staffing levels have been steadily eroded over the past two decades. In 2005, the agency employed nearly 13,000 staff. By 2019, that number had dropped to just 8,914, a decline of more than 30%. Staffing partially rebounded in recent years, due in large part to dedicated efforts from the previous administration to hire and train new, young conservation professionals and improve producers’ customer experience. Total staff reached 11,623 employees in 2024, a major victory for producers who want faster service at the county level and more consistent access to technical experts. 

Both producer and staff sentiment on the need to have more hands on deck to complete paperwork and prioritize time spent evaluating resource concerns in the field have been well documented. A survey by the Soil and Water Conservation Society of conservation professionals – watershed coordinators, soil and water conservation district employees, NRCS District Conservationists, and NRCS Soil Conservationists – found that 90% of practitioners agreed that “high employee turnover among conservation practitioners negatively impacts conservation momentum.” Conservation professionals were clear: they were already understaffed before the recent losses. 82% of practitioners said that there was a need for “more capacity to provide farmers/landowners with technical assistance” and they consistently rated staff capacity priorities as the highest needs in their local offices. One practitioner reported: “We simply have more landowners coming into the local office requesting assistance with programs than is possible to assist without cutting corners with a soil and water district staff of two and USDA staff of two.” These concerns existed before the NRCS staff were gutted in early 2025.

Losses since January 2025 have brought the number of NRCS staff down to again approximately 9,000 employees, echoing the record lows of 2019 during the previous Trump Administration. The NRCS budget request for fiscal year 2026 calls for a reduction to just 8,000 NRCS employees. This short-sighted goal would leave NRCS woefully underequipped to disperse the historic increase in conservation program dollars provided by the recent reconciliation package.

Figure 2: NRCS Staffing by Year

_{*Current NRCS staffing estimate is based on the separations and DRP information. FY2026 staffing is based on the NRCS budget.}

Conservation Staff Have Been Wiped Out

The NRCS has lost nearly 1 in 4 of their staff since January 2025. The Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) offered buyouts and incentives to encourage federal employees to resign. At NRCS, 2,409 employees, 21% of the workforce, accepted the DRP. 560 NRCS employees accepted the first DRP in February 2025 and another 1,849 accepted the second round of DRP in April. 

In addition to the NRCS employees who left the agency via the DRP, an additional 182 employees (2 percent) separated from the agency in just the first three months of 2025, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. Separations include retirements (early, voluntary, or for disability), firing, failure to renew contracts, quitting, transferring to another federal agency, or other separation.

Altogether, nearly one in four NRCS employees have departed this year alone.

While the USDA has not publicly provided information on the staff who accepted the DRP, Charles Melton, a former staff member in the Office of the Executive Secretariat who himself accepted the DRP, estimates that it was primarily mid-career individuals with experience who left the department via the DRP: “What the DRP did was remove everyone who had twelve to fifteen years of experience or higher and took them out. It put a big donut hole in an organization that wasn’t fat to begin with,” Melton said. 

The loss of mid-career and experienced staff to the DRP echoes the losses seen following the relocation of the Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to Kansas City, Missouri in 2019. This recent experience showed that it was largely the skilled employees with more than ten years of experience who left both agencies. By 2020, just 19% of NIFA employees had more than a decade of experience, down from over 50% before the relocation. At ERS, by 2021, just 37% of employees had more than a decade of experience, down from 71% before the relocation. 

These staff losses are not sustainable. They threaten NRCS’s ability to deliver timely, effective conservation assistance to farmers at a moment when demand for these services is growing. Annecdotally, NSAC members report NRCS field staff are often either late career or relatively recent graduates. This can prove quite challenging for producers seeking to adopt the most innovative conservation practices available, as younger staff tend to have less experience with agriculture itself, and staff approaching the end of their career may be unfamiliar with newer research on the effectiveness of certain practices. Capable mid-career field staff, with a mastery of natural sciences and a strong understanding of the realities of farming, are by far the most helpful to producers and the most difficult to maintain within NRCS’ workforce. If, as observers are beginning to warn, recent departures have indeed pushed out experienced staff, producers can expect several years of greatly degraded service from NRCS. NSAC strongly supports action from Congress and USDA to prioritize the hiring of mid-career staff and to make policy changes within NRCS that will attract and retain capable young professionals for long-term careers with NRCS.

Table 1: NRCS Staffing Losses 

NRCS Staff Losses Are In the Field

More than 99% of NRCS staff work outside of Washington, D.C.

The latest data from the Office of Personnel Management shows that just 105 employees out of the agency’s 11,623 staff in September 2024 worked in Washington, D.C. with the rest in offices around the country. These staff included 8,397 employees working as natural resource management or biosciences professionals and 1,313 engineers and architects. 

NRCS staff work in every state and territory, providing direct support to farmers and ranchers for their conservation planning and contracts, and every state has lost a significant amount of NRCS staff, as seen in the map below. Indeed, every state except three – Delaware, Michigan, and Arkansas – has lost more than 20% of their NRCS staff and 36 states have lost more than 25% of their NRCS staff.  

Figure 3: NRCS Staffing Losses

Staff Losses Exacerbate Farmer Wait Times and Service Disruptions

Low staffing levels and high demand from farmers and ranchers means that NRCS programs already have long wait times to enroll and many farmers who want to enroll are unable. Demand to participate in the conservation programs supported by USDA staff is extremely high, with tens of thousands of farmers and ranchers applying for contracts each year. Recent reporting by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) finds that less than 25% of the applications to the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) are granted contracts and only about 26% of the applications to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) are granted contracts. 

Even prior to this latest round of staff losses, NRCS staff were stretched extremely thin with very high workloads. The wait time between when a farmer or rancher applies to one of the NRCS programs and finds out if they were awarded a contract is usually six months and sometimes up to a year. Advocates, like those at NSAC member Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) that help farmers apply for NRCS funding, already encourage patience in navigating the process and caution farmers that it can be a long wait to find out if contracts are approved, and even longer before promised payments are actually received. 

The loss of NRCS staff is already being felt at many field offices and for farmers across the country. Speaking to public radio in Kansas City, a former NRCS district conservationist Jamey Wood said that: “Producers are requesting conservation plans so they can do better conservation work, so they can participate in conservation programs, so they can get financial assistance to help them do conservation…And now, and this is my estimate, you’re going to lose basically a generation of conservation planners.” Maine farmer Seth Kroeck told reporters at Civil Eats that the staff losses at his local NRCS office have threatened the technical support and contracts he has with the agency, saying: “There were two employees that were in that office that I’ve been working with directly on programs, and they’re gone…There were two engineers that were helping us on different irrigation contracts, and they’re gone. It’s kind of a mess.” 

Reorganization Amplifies Risks

The USDA reorganization plan threatens further disruptions to NRCS operations by consolidating its regional offices into five USDA hub locations, from where departmental agencies will be administered if the current reorganization proposal is adopted. Currently, the NRCS divides the nation into four regions, Central, Northeast, Southeast, and West. Each region is led by a Regional Conservationist, responsible for the agency operations, activities, and personnel in that region. 

Two of the four Regional Conservationist positions are currently vacant: the Central and Southeast regions. The planned USDA hubs in Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah do not align with any meaningful natural resource regions or existing personnel divisions of the NRCS. Relocating regional duties to these new hubs will likely lead to further staff losses as employees choose not to relocate. This will also create further disruptions in the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission to serve farmers as they endeavor to protect our natural resources. 

What’s at Stake

Farmers and ranchers are facing unprecedented challenges. More frequent flooding and drought, degraded soil and water health, and intensifying economic pressures have placed America’s farmers and ranchers in extreme vulnerability. NRCS delivers both technical assistance and financial assistance to farmers and ranchers to tackle these challenges, but only if the agency has enough staff to deliver them effectively. 

Farmers rely on local NRCS staff to deliver conservation solutions tailored to their land, and staff losses and the reorganization risk hollowing out the agency as farmers enter a time of unprecedented crisis and need. For the foreseeable future, every dollar that ends up on a farmer’s statement of cash flow is going to matter, and that includes cost share dollars delivered through conservation programs. Now is not the time to weaken a single tool in a farmer’s toolbelt.

Beyond the money, conservation planning and practices can lead to reduced input costs for producers, making sound technical advice just as financially valuable to producers as direct cost share. NRCS needs to swiftly change course if it is going to provide both.

NSAC encourages all farmers, advocates, and organizations to share their concerns with USDA by emailing reorganization@usda.gov before September 30, 2025.

The post USDA Staffing Crisis: Conservation Staff Losses Will Further Undermine Services to Farmers and Ranchers  appeared first on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

On July 24, 2025, Secretary Rollins released a memo (SM-1078-015) describing the planned reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) staff, drafted without any consultation with farmers or other stakeholders. USDA has already lost more than 20,000 staff since January 2025 and if the reorganization moves forward as planned, it will result in the likely loss of thousands more staff. This is the second post in a series discussing the loss of USDA staff since January 2025 and the expected impacts of the proposed USDA reorganization across issue areas. This post examines staffing losses and planned cuts across the research agencies at USDA and their devastating impacts on agricultural research and innovation. Our previous post describes the staffing losses across the USDA and states. 

USDA’s research agencies – the National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS), Economic Research Service (ERS), Agricultural Research Service (ARS), and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) –  have been hit particularly hard by recent staff losses and have significant cuts planned in the reorganization. These research staff and sites provide the human capital and infrastructure for agricultural research as well as data collection and analysis for commodities and rural communities. Unfortunately, recent history has shown that staff losses in these agencies leads directly to reduced productivity and support for stakeholders. In this post, we examine the toll of staffing declines and proposed cutbacks in USDA research agencies, and what they mean for the future of agricultural knowledge and innovation.

After widespread concerns about the proposed reorganization, USDA opened an adhoc public comment opportunity. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) encourages organizations and individuals to submit their comments, questions, and concerns regarding the reorganization to USDA at reorganization@usda.gov by September 30, 2025. NSAC remains  concerned about the lack of transparency involved in this comment period, given that the opportunity for public comment has not been formally provided through the Federal Register, as is standard practice for proposals of this scope.

Research Staff Have Been Gutted

The four major research agencies of USDA have already lost approximately 23% of their staff since January 2025. 1,600 employees left the research agencies through DOGE’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). DRP offered federal employees fully paid administrative leave through September 2025 if employees voluntarily resigned their positions. 351 research agency staff accepted the DRP in the first round beginning in January 2025 and an additional 1,249 research staff accepted the second round of DRP in April 2025.

Figure 1: Research Staff Losses

According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), approximately 370 additional staff separated from the research agencies between January and March 2025. Separations include staff who retired (voluntary, early, or for disability), quit, had their contracts expired or terminated, were fired, transferred to a different agency, or otherwise separated from employment.

Table 1: Research Staff Losses by Agency

NASS, the internal statistical branch of the USDA, has lost the highest percentage of staff since January 2025 among research agencies, losing approximately 30% of their staff to DRP and 4% additional staff who separated from the agency. NASS collects hundreds of surveys on agriculture and food and prepares a wide range of reports on virtually every component of American agriculture. They administer the Census of Agriculture every five years, the only dataset that provides information on every American county and farm over time. They also collect and analyze data on every commodity and market in American agriculture. NASS provides essential unbiased data on US agriculture that undergirds farmers’ decisions and the decisions of policymakers. 

ARS, the internal in-house scientific research agency of the USDA, has lost the largest number of employees since January 2025 among research agencies. ARS lost 1,225 employees to DRP and an additional 298 staff who separated from the agency between January and March 2025. ARS’s mission is to “deliver scientific solutions to national and global agricultural challenges” and they employ a wide range of scientists and staff at a network of research sites throughout the country, often in partnership with universities and private sector companies. The loss of ARS staff undermines the ability of the agency to fulfill its mission and provide the research needed by American farmers and ranchers. ARS researchers, in particular, are highly specialized scientists with skills that are very difficult to replace. 

The loss of ARS scientists means that several research projects vital to the resilience of American agriculture have already stopped. In an interview with Wyoming Public Radio, two former ARS researchers talked about the losses caused by the loss of staff such as themselves. According to one scientist: “I worked directly with a lot of farmers, visiting farms, going to meetings of farmers, and making sure that they had the most up-to-date research to inform their management decisions. Also listening to what challenges they were facing, and making sure that those challenges were being reflected in the research that the Agricultural Research Service was doing [and] bringing those concerns back to the researchers.” The scientist further shared: “All my projects revolved around helping smaller farmers deal with the impacts of drought in this region and all of those projects have been cancelled.”

The nearly 2,000 employees lost from USDA research agencies directly hinder the ability of the department to fulfill its mission to “advance scientific knowledge related to agriculture.” These staffing losses and administrative setbacks have already led to significant disruptions including delaying or deferring several NIFA research programs for fiscal year 2025. The Foundational and Applied Science Program, for example, was delayed so significantly that the fiscal year 2025 program was skipped altogether and the request for applications is now for fiscal year 2026. 

The Reorganization Will Further Degrade Research Agencies

USDA research agencies are already experiencing significant losses in their ability to serve stakeholders and the planned reorganization will cause further damage. 

ARS is hit particularly hard by the planned reorganization. The reorganization includes a plan to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), located in Beltsville, Maryland. BARC has operated since 1910. Comprising approximately 6,000 acres of agricultural research fields and facilities, BARC is the largest ARS research facility and hosts research on food animal production, animal health, entomology, food safety, water management, soil quality, air quality, rangeland systems, sustainable agriculture, plant genetics, plant diseases, crop protection, crop production and virtually every aspect of agricultural production systems. 

BARC has produced impactful research for over a century, benefiting American farmers and agriculture. For example, BARC researchers developed and licensed a patented antibody designed for wide-spectrum identification of potyviruses, a major group of plant viruses with high economic impact. These anti-viral technologies are now widely developed and sold by Agdia to detect and prevent potyviruses in a variety of crops such as beans, potatoes, and industrial hemp and prevent billions in lost productivity every year.

Closing and relocating the Beltsville facility will be extremely difficult and costly and will cause unavoidable damage to research productivity. Long-term field studies are particularly important to agricultural research to understand the long-term functioning of agricultural systems such as soil health and pest burden. The long-term field research at Beltsville cannot simply be relocated, and losing these field sites means losing irreplaceable scientific knowledge. Relocating facilities such as the Electron and Confocal Microscopy Unit (ECMU) would be extremely difficult and expensive, if possible at all. While the USDA reorganization plans to close and relocate BARC over several years to minimize research disruptions, experts are highly doubtful that the closure would be able to do so or would generate any cost savings. 

Despite claiming to want to move the Department closer to farmers, the reorganization also calls for the closure of ARS Area Offices. ARS is currently divided into five geographic areas: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Plains, and Pacific West. Each area has an Area Office that oversees the facilities and staff in that region, ensuring that the research addresses regionally significant topics and problems. Closing Area Offices would undermine the ability to prioritize regional issues and weaken connections to farmers and stakeholders in the region. It would also mean administrative processes such as hiring and facilities management would be funneled through a single national office, creating delays and inefficiencies and would undermine the important regional partnerships and networks with collaborators such as land-grant universities. Closing ARS Area Offices will not “streamline” services, it will weaken local accountability and slow down work.

Likewise, the reorganization calls for the closure of NASS regional field offices to be replaced with offices in five new USDA hubs. NASS has twelve regional field offices in the country, each responsible for the statistical work in that region. These field offices oversee the data collection and management in the states of their region and provide the data and statistics for those states. The field offices are essential to maintaining stakeholder relationships and making sure that farmers and ranchers in every state and region are adequately represented in national statistics. Consolidating NASS offices to the newly proposed hubs in Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah would leave large swaths of the country unrepresented. Farmers and ranchers in the Northeast  and West Coast, in particular, would have inadequate representation to ensure they are adequately included in agricultural statistics. 

NASS regional offices are essential to improving farmers’ trust of the agency and to boosting survey response rates from farmers. Ensuring every farmer is counted in national statistics is essential and regional offices are vital to that effort.

The Deterioration Continues: Staff Losses at ERS and NIFA Since 2019 Relocations

Despite significant public outcry, ERS and NIFA were relocated to Kansas City, Missouri in 2019 during the previous Trump Administration. ERS provides research on economics and agriculture, producing research on future commodity price projections, farm income, and essentially all aspects of American agriculture and rural communities. The economic reports and research generated by ERS are used by farmers, policymakers, and other stakeholders as they make major decisions for the agricultural economy such as changes to commodity programs or loans. NIFA oversees the department’s competitive grant programs, investing in research, education, and extension programs for American agriculture. NIFA funds universities and other partners to advance agricultural science, innovation, and education nationwide.

This relocation of ERS and NIFA led to hard-learned lessons concerning how destructive relocations can be. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), these staff losses reduced the number of reports and articles generated by ERS staff in half and led to the loss or delay of several vital industry reports. The loss of these publications and reports meant that farmers and other stakeholders had to make risky decisions with less information. Within NIFA, the relocation led to delays and suspensions of several grant programs and payments. For example, land grant universities across the country struggled as NIFA’s Capacity Grants that support basic research facilities were delayed by more than a fiscal quarter, undermining the research and services of those universities. When NIFA grants are delayed or suspended, vital research is threatened and American farmers and the agricultural sector suffer. 

It has taken years for ERS and NIFA to rebuild their capacity following the relocation and attempt to replace the lost institutional knowledge needed to serve American agriculture and stakeholders. But both agencies are again being decimated by staff losses. ERS has lost 27% of their staff to DRP and an additional 2% to other separations. NIFA has also experienced widespread staffing losses since January 2025. NIFA lost 11% of their staff to DRP and an additional 8% to other separations. These staffing losses have already led to delayed and deferred grant programs and will, we can infer based on recent history, lead to further losses in research productivity and delays that undermine American agriculture. 

USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics mission area that houses ARS, ERS, NASS, and NIFA is tasked with providing reliable scientific research, data, and analysis for America’s farmers, ranchers, rural communities, and stakeholders. The staff in these agencies are highly skilled and specialized workers who are dedicated to public service. Each of the four agencies have already lost overwhelming numbers of staff and the planned USDA reorganization will further compromise their ability to fulfill their missions. 

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On July 24, 2025, US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released a memo (SM-1078-015) describing the planned reorganization of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) staff. This reorganization plan was drafted without any consultation with farmers or other stakeholders. While the reorganization plan does not directly include planned layoffs or reductions in force (RIF), USDA has already lost at least 18,000 staff since January 2025. If the reorganization moves forward as planned, it will likely result in the loss of thousands more staff. 

After swift bipartisan pushback to the proposed reorganization, USDA opened an impromptu and unofficial public comment opportunity. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) encourages organizations and individuals to submit their comments, questions, and concerns regarding the reorganization to USDA at reorganization@usda.gov by September 30, 2025. NSAC also notes our concern that the opportunity for public comment has not been formally provided through the Federal Register, as is standard practice for proposals of this scope.

The dedicated USDA staff powers the Department to meet its mission to serve farmers and other stakeholders. Unfortunately, recent history shows that staffing losses directly reduce and delay USDA’s services to stakeholders. When USDA relocated the Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) offices in 2019, the agencies lost more than half of their staff. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), these staff losses cut the number of reports and articles generated by ERS staff in half, led to the loss or delay of several vital industry reports, and led to delays and suspensions of several grant programs and payments. It has taken years for the agencies to rebuild their capacity and attempt to replace the lost institutional knowledge needed to serve American agriculture and stakeholders. USDA must avoid replicating the problems of these previous staffing disruptions and further exacerbating the already ongoing staffing crisis at the agency. 

This is the first blog post in a series discussing the loss of USDA staff since January 2025 and the expected impacts of the proposed USDA reorganization across issue areas. This post sets the stage by examining the overall department staffing losses and the losses experienced by each state.  

USDA Staff Work in Your Communities

In recent years, USDA staffing numbers have hovered around 100,000 employees. In September 2024, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) reported that USDA had 98,473 employees. Across Republican and Democratic administrations, USDA staffing levels have remained fairly consistent – George W. Bush oversaw the department’s largest workforce, while Obama trimmed it back – until the Trump administration broke sharply with precedent by presiding over recent steep cuts. The first Trump administration saw a historical low in USDA-wide staffing in September 2019 following the relocation of both the ERS and NIFA from Washington, DC to Kansas City, MO. While staffing levels recovered slightly during the Biden administration, they remained below typical levels, and the department has had little time to rebuild the lost institutional knowledge and relationships with stakeholders. 

Figure 1: USDA Staffing Levels

• Data from the Office of Personnel Management

USDA staff work in every US state and territory, as shown in Figure 2 below. Only approximately 4.6% of USDA employees are located in the capital region, with the rest of the department staff spread across the country, working closely with farmers, ranchers, and stakeholders. 

While the reorganization memo claims that major disruptions are justified to bring “the USDA closer to its customers,” the reality is that the overwhelming majority of USDA staff are already living and working outside the capital region. 

Figure 2: USDA Staff by State

• An additional 1,063 USDA staff work throughout the US, but their location was suppressed by OPM to protect employee privacy; 794 USDA employees work in US territories, and 336 outside the US. 

USDA Staff Has Already Been Gutted

USDA has already lost at least 18,000 staff since January 2025. More than 15,000 USDA employees left the department through DOGE’s so-called Deferred Resignation Program (DRP). The DRP offered federal employees fully paid administrative leave through September 2025 if employees voluntarily resigned from their positions. Approximately 3,876 USDA employees accepted DOGE’s first round DRP offer, and an additional 11,298 USDA employees resigned in the second round of DRP. Many of these employees have years of experience and irreplaceable expertise. 

In addition to staff who have resigned through DRP, approximately 2,827 USDA staff members separated from the Department between January and March 2025, according to OPM. These separations include employees who quit, experienced a “reduction in force”, retired (early, voluntary, or for disability), were terminated due to an expired appointment or contract, transferred out, or had some other separation from the department. The separated employees have an average length of service of more than 12.4 years, with 38% of separated employees having more than ten years of service. 

The table below shows the number of employees in each USDA agency, the number who accepted the deferred resignation offer, and the number of other separated employees. 

Table 1: USDA Deferred Resignation and Separations by Agency

1. The DRP data differentiates between general FSA employees and FSA county employees; FSA county employees are typically not general service employees.

Every agency at USDA has experienced staff resignations and separations. Some have been hit particularly hard, like the Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement (OPPE), losing 53% of its staff to DRP and separations, Rural Development losing 36% of its staff, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) losing 22% of its staff. Reasons for these disparities are not fully understood. Future posts in this series will explore these agency losses and impacts in greater depth. 

Staff Losses Are In Your Communities

Despite claiming to prioritize serving farmers and to “bring USDA closer to its customers”, 94% of USDA employees who resigned were located outside of Washington, DC. Every state and territory lost USDA staff during DRP, as the map below shows, and every state except three (Hawaii, Oregon, and California) had more than 10% of its USDA staff resign. 

Figure 3: USDA Staff Losses by State

• An additional 73 USDA staff in US territories also accepted the Deferred Resignation Program

Like resignations, 94% of the separations between January and March 2025 were outside of Washington, DC. Every US state and territory had USDA staff separate between January and March 2025, adding to the loss of vital USDA staff. 

Reorganization Will Further Undermine USDA Services

USDA staff are dedicated public servants who support America’s farmers, ranchers, and rural communities. They work in every state and territory and bring their expertise and energy to tackling some of America’s greatest challenges. 

Since January 2025, USDA has already lost at least 18,000 employees. These staff losses mean less capacity to serve farmers and rural communities. The major staff losses experienced during the previous relocation of ERS and NIFA led directly to lost productivity and poor service to stakeholders. Those agencies lost their most experienced staff, and it took years to rebuild their internal capacity. 

The USDA is already experiencing a staffing crisis which means longer wait times for farmers and widespread cutbacks to programs serving American agriculture. The reorganization of USDA will further devastate the department’s workforce and ability to fulfill its mission to serve farmers and rural communities. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has said that she expects between 50-70% of USDA staff to accept the relocation required by reorganization, indicating that thousands of experienced and knowledgeable staff may soon choose to leave the Department, further undermining USDA’s ability to provide vital services to stakeholders.

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