USDA union leaders rally against proposed DC downsizing

A group of current and former U.S. Department of Agriculture employees are calling on the Trump administration to halt the mandated relocation of more than 2,500 employees from its Washington, D.C., headquarters to five regional offices across the country. 

In an online briefing hosted by federal union leaders Thursday, speakers said the reorganization process USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has led

Rollins’ effort, launched one year ago Friday, would move department staff away from the nation’s capital. The department should have no more than 2,000 employees in the region, according to a July 2025 memo Rollins signed. 

Kevin Shea, former acting secretary of the USDA under President Joe Biden, said the relocation could impact the department’s ability to carry out its core services such as fighting pests and diseases, protecting forest land and ensuring food safety. 

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

Department layoffs

Since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, the USDA has lost more than 20,000 employees,  according to Office of Personnel Management data. Most left through early retirement or buyouts offered by the U.S. Doge Service, union officials said. 

But speakers Thursday warned that thousands more will choose to leave instead of relocating across the country to a regional USDA office. Those offices, as outlined in Rollins’ July 2025 memo, include Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah. 

In that memo, she wrote that the relocation will ensure that the USDA is “closer to the people it serves while achieving savings to the American taxpayer.” 

But most USDA staff already work outside the nation’s capital. The department had about 4,600 employees in Washington when Rollins announced the reorganization efforts last year. A majority of the staff reductions have come from across the country. 

‘A forced choice’

Genny Kotyk, a Forest Service employee and president of the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, said the impacts of federal cuts are already being felt. 

She said that the employee reductions and reorganizations of the Forest Service, which is the largest U.S. firefighting agency, are affecting the response to the damaging wildfire season currently impacting Canada and some Midwestern and northern states. 

In 2025, the Forest Service saw more than 6,500 employees leave through a combination of layoffs, buyouts and early retirements, according to OPM. 

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

Kotyk said that her union polled nearly 3,000 of its bargaining unit employees about the reorganization, and only 7% said they’d be willing to relocate. 

Chearice Vaughn, who works for a USDA office that oversees grants and loans for rural development projects, said she and 45 members of her team received a notice to relocate from Washington to Dallas, Texas. She said of those who received relocation notices, 86% were people of color. 

“It’s a forced choice: uproot your entire life, or leave federal service,” Vaughn, also president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3870, said. 

Still, she said, it’s not about “45 names on a spreadsheet in Washington.”

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

Legal challenge

Although USDA is continuing with its relocations and department-wide reorganization, some employees are seeking to block the change. 

Several national labor unions, as part of their efforts over the past year to block the Trump administration’s reshaping of the federal government, filed a request for an injunction in federal court in San Francisco seeking to block USDA from ordering the relocations. 

The case is ongoing. 

USDA spokespeople did not return a message seeking comment Friday.