Trump Drains the Swamp, Relocates Thousands of USDA Workers Outside DC | The American Spectator

President Donald Trump campaigned on draining the swamp and revitalizing a bloated and entrenched bureaucracy, and his administration is implementing a new method to fulfill that vision. 

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced on Thursday that the administration would reorganize the USDA, moving thousands of department workers outside of Washington, D.C., and closer to the department’s “core constituents.” The move seeks to realign the department to its “founding mission of supporting American farming, ranching, and forestry.”

Commenting on the move, Rollins said, “President Trump was elected to make real change in Washington, and we are doing just that by moving our key services outside the beltway and into great American cities across the country.”

The USDA is a sprawling department totaling around 100,000 employees among 29 agencies and offices. Although the vast majority of employees are already located outside the D.C. area, a large bureaucracy of around 4,600 employees currently resides in the D.C. area, where salaries are especially high because the region has the “highest costs of living in the country.”

According to the press release, the department’s workforce has grown by 8 percent over the past four years, and employees’ salaries rose by 14.5 percent. The department hired “thousands of employees with no sustainable way to pay them,” yet the bloat presented no “tangible increase in service to USDA’s core constituencies across the agricultural sector.”

In light of the USDA’s growing costs, the fact that some USDA employees may choose to leave their jobs rather than relocate is a feature, not a bug. Rollins herself characterized the reorganization as “another step of the Department’s process of reducing its workforce” to make sure the USDA’s workforce is affordable. Thus far, the department has also reduced its workforce by 15,364 people through DOGE.’s famed Deferred Retirement Program.

By the time the reorganization is complete, the department expects to have “no more than 2,000” of the 4,600 employees remaining in the D.C. area. The employees will be relocated in the coming months to the USDA’s five “hub locations” in North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado, and Utah.

The reorganization will also save costs by closing most of the department’s buildings in the D.C. area, which were being underutilized and have mounting maintenance needs. One of the buildings, the South Building, has “$1.3 billion in deferred maintenance” but was only occupied by an average of under 1,900 employees even though it has space for over 6,000.

In a video addressed to USDA employees, Rollins sympathized that the move would create “personal disruption” for the department’s workers and their families. She said that the decision to reorganize was “not entered into lightly,” but it was necessary because “President Trump promised to realign federal spending, eliminate duplication and redundancy, and ensure all agencies are efficiently and effectively delivering services to our constituents.”