Department of Agriculture Reorganization Plan

On July 24, 2025, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a major department-wide reorganization through Secretary's Memorandum SM-1078-015, organized around four goals: aligning the workforce with available funding, moving staff closer to customers, eliminating management layers, and consolidating support functions. The plan would relocate much of USDA's headquarters staff out of the Washington, D.C. region — reducing a workforce of roughly 4,600 in the national capital region to no more than 2,000 — to five hubs in Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah, with some administrative staff moving to offices in New Mexico and Minnesota, and would vacate several Washington-area facilities, including the South Building. It also directed component restructurings — including the Forest Service's phase-out of its nine regional offices within a year — and consolidated civil rights, human resources, contracting, and other support functions in departmental offices, reducing the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business to a single position.

 The announcement prompted questions about whether the Secretary could carry out the reorganization without congressional authorization. USDA's plan stated that the department would not be "conducting a large-scale workforce reduction," relying instead on voluntary separations, and reported that 15,364 employees had voluntarily elected deferred resignation as of the plan's release. But the Secretary's Memorandum reserved authority to carry out focused, limited reductions in force with the Deputy Secretary's approval. Throughout 2025, however, USDA repeatedly warned employees of possible mass layoffs, with Senator Patty Murray objecting that employees received as many as 20 emails a day encouraging them to resign to avoid threatened layoffs. The department described the announcement as the first phase of a multi-month process, with offices to be notified of relocations in the following month. In the department's own analysis of feedback solicited on the reorganization plan, an "overwhelming majority" of comments were negative, citing concerns with the restructurings.