By admin 
When Laura Dodson received a notice in late June that her job as an agricultural economist was being relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, she knew what it would mean for herself and dozens of her coworkers in the same situation and for the services they provide to farmers, researchers and the public.
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During the first Trump administration, in 2019, the US Department of Agriculture reassigned many employees in her agency, the Economic Research Service (ERS), and in another small institute to Kansas City, saying it would save taxpayers money and shift workers closer to “stakeholders.”
However, many people refused to move, which resulted in the two agencies losing more than half their staff, producing fewer reports and journal articles, and processing grants more slowly for the next few years, according to a .
Those who remained were demoralized and had to contend with a chaotic work environment, said Dodson, who serves as vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403.
Now, Dodson fears that as many as 80% of her ERS colleagues who received relocation notices will choose to leave. Only 6% of those surveyed by Local 3403 said they would move. Another 25% said they were unsure.
“The USDA knows what happened; they know the results,” said Dodson, who received a work-related exemption that gives her until January to move hundreds of miles, though she is also actively looking for other jobs, including in the private sector. “They ran the experiment in 2019.”
Prompting staffers to leave is the main goal behind the USDA’s reorganization, according to Dodson and multiple other union members interviewed by CNN. Many call it a RIF, or reduction in force, disguised as a relocation — a view echoed in a lawsuit filed last month by the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward on behalf of a coalition of unions, municipalities and nonprofit organizations seeking to stop the effort.
When the USDA announced in July 2025 that it would reorganize its workforce, it said it was “refocusing its core operations to better align with its founding mission of supporting American farming, ranching and forestry.” But the department also said the initiative was another step in reducing its workforce to “make certain USDA can afford” it, noting that its headcount had grown in recent years.
In a statement to CNN, the department reiterated that the reorganization is “about aligning people, service delivery, and financial resources.”
“All current employees have a future with the Department if they so choose,” a USDA spokesperson said in the statement, noting that the USDA has said it will for those required to move.
The reorganization comes amid a deep downsizing at the department since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, with tens of thousands of staffers quitting, retiring and taking incentive programs to leave.
The coalition argues in the lawsuit that the USDA doesn’t have the authority to carry out the reorganization and that Congress did not approve the Trump administration’s request to overhaul the department.
The USDA counters that it has “broad statutory authority to reorganize its internal structure,” according to court documents. And the department said it has notified Congress of its reorganization plans.
CNN has reached out to the USDA for comment.
Tough choices
Some USDA employees have already received their relocation notices, while others are still waiting for official word — leaving them in limbo.
One worker who believes they would have to move hundreds of miles away has already decided that’s not going to happen. Their partner has a good job where they live now and they take care of a seriously ill family member nearby. Plus, mortgage rates are too high to allow them to buy a home in a different city. So they are ramping up their search for new employment.
“I planned to spend my career here and advance within the agency,” the staffer, who asked for anonymity to protect their job, told CNN. “Now I realize it’s just a matter of time before I’m effectively laid off.”
Another USDA employee said she had to stop thinking about the reorganization, which would also force her to move hundreds of miles away from where she lives now, or it would “consume me. It would make it impossible to work.”
Still, “It’s always in the back of my head — what if the next email is my relocation notice?” said the staffer, who did not want her name used to protect her employment.
Chearice Vaughn, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3870, is among the 45 union employees in USDA’s Rural Development agency who were told in June that they will have to relocate from Washington, DC, to Dallas. But they weren’t given a timeline, so they are now in a stressful holding pattern, she said.
About two-thirds of those who answered a union survey said it is unlikely that they will move because it would be a hardship. One has a son with autism whose doctors are in the area. Others have custody arrangements where they can’t take their children out of state. And still others are caring for elderly parents.
While Vaughn doesn’t have immediate family in the Washington, DC, area, she isn’t eager to uproot her life either. She’s waiting for more details about the relocation before she makes any decisions. But she has called some friends and family in Dallas asking about different neighborhoods and has started cleaning out her garage in case she has to rent or sell her home in coming months.
“I’m not going to let someone force me out of a 30-year career on their timeline,” she told CNN.
For some longtime USDA staffers, the reorganization is the last straw – even if they aren’t being forced to relocate.
One supervisor in the Forest Service was told that she will have essentially the same job in the same location. But the chaos and feeling of disrespect that she’s endured since Trump took office has left her so burned out that she applied to take an incentive her agency is offering for employees to leave by the end of October.
Doing so will entail major financial sacrifices, including possibly cashing out her retirement fund or selling her home. There aren’t a lot of high-paying jobs in the rural area where she and her child live. But staying with USDA isn’t worth the toll on her physical and mental health, said the supervisor, who requested her name not be used to protect her job.
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“The last year was the most stressful of all my years,” she said. “It’s not what I signed up to do.”
Massive reorganization
Initially, the USDA estimated the relocations would result in sweeping departures — close to half of the staff in several agencies. Its Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan, which was filed with two White House offices in the spring of 2025 but onlymade public in recent court documents, expected the headcount to shrink by 23% from its January 2025 level of roughly 103,000 personnel.
“USDA is anticipating that a significant number of employees will decline geographic reassignments out of the NCR (National Capital Region) or existing regional or state offices to the five target hub locations,” the plan says.
But the department now says that last year’s plan does not reflect its current strategy, according to a court filing. The latest plan calls for hiring roughly 16,000 employees, though that figure includes internal shifts and promotions of current workers. The USDA does not intend to conduct a reduction in force, and it does not expect staff attrition rates to be as high as they were in past relocations, in part because the Washington, DC, job market is weaker now, according to the filing.
Still, the USDA is moving forward with the reorganization effort, which will involve reassigning employees to other offices. And the coalition of unions and other plaintiffs is arguing in court that USDA’s updated plans for its agencies, which the department has shared with Congress, “mirror” last year’s plan with only “insubstantial” adjustments.
At the Food and Nutrition Administration, for instance, the latest plan calls for shifting from seven regional offices to five hubs, according to documents on an agency reorganization website that was last updated on July 30. Hubs in three new cities will join existing offices in Denver and Dallas. Multiple regional offices will be closed, according to a court filing.
Last year’s plan forecasted that the agency would lose about 46% of employeesas a result of the reorganization.
On the reorganization website, the agency calls the accusation that it is trying to get rid of employees a “myth.” The effort does not include any layoffs, it noted.
Meanwhile, the two agencies that relocated many employees to Kansas City in 2019 — ERS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) – will once again reassign certain staffers there, according to the agencies’ reorganization websites. In last year’s plan, the moves were forecasted to reduce staff by 43% and 39%, respectively.
The USDA has already been bleeding staff since Trump took office. More than 28,000 people have left, including through the administration’s deferred resignation program, other incentive offers, retirements and resignations, according to the Office of Personnel Management. (Taking into account new hires, the department’s workforce is down nearly 16,000 people.)
The USDA’s reorganization is one of the more aggressive changes to the federal government under the second Trump administration. The president has vowed to overhaul federal departments and shrink the federal workforce, which he views as an obstacle to his implementing his policy objectives.
In addition to dismantling the US Agency for International Development and hobbling the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the Trump administration is shrinking the Department of Education by shifting many of its responsibilities to other departments. Other agencies, such as NASA and the Army Corps of Engineers, are ending leases or moving to other offices. And still others, such as the Department of Energy, are shrinking their footprint in the Washington, DC, metro area.
Notably, only a small share of USDA’s workers are located in the DC metro region — less than 7%.
Harming the mission
Multiple USDA staffers that CNN interviewed said they feared that the resignations sparked by the reorganization will only harm the service that the department provides to low-income Americans, farmers, state and local agencies, and other stakeholders.
Vaughn and her colleagues underwrite and service loans and grants for rural water systems, electric co-ops, broadband networks and small businesses across the nation — the kind that private lenders typically don’t touch, she said. Their projects include funding for a Georgia hospital to build an emergency obstetrics care unit that’s open around the clock; a grant to connect Washington state residents to high-speed internet; and a loan to rebuild power lines in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina.
The reorganization will involve spending taxpayer dollars on relocation expenses, on severance for those who leave and on hiring or training replacements, Vaughn noted.
“All these additional costs don’t improve service, don’t make us closer to communities since we serve all states,” she said. “It just risks losing the people who know how to do the work.”
The potential departure of experienced staffers is a major concern for the National WIC Association, which represents the 12,000 state and local agencies that provide nutrition services for nearly 7 million pregnant women, new moms and young children in the WIC program. Funding is tight, and money is regularly reallocated among state agencies.
That means the providers must keep in close touch with USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration employees over funding and policy matters, said Ali Hard, public policy director at the association, which is a plaintiff in the coalition’s lawsuit. Already, the staff downsizing led to two states coming close to having to temporarily turn off benefits because of funding shortfalls last year, she said.
“If we don’t have really qualified, experienced folks in those regional offices who are that first line of communication with the states, we’re really worried that funding could end up not being in the right place at the right time,” Hard said. “We can see states really in trouble of just not being able to serve everyone.”
The USDA said in a court filing that the funding delays were not due to staffing, but to funding availability and standard fiscal processes.
In some cases, the reorganization will put more distance between USDA staffers and the states and people they support. For instance, the closing of the Northeast regional office in Boston means New England states will be served by the new hub in Raleigh, North Carolina, Hard noted.
One of the staffers CNN interviewed agreed, saying the reorganization will only make it more difficult and expensive for her and her colleagues to visit the state officials with whom they work and to attend in-person meetings at state agencies.
“I shouldn’t have to uproot my personal life to be farther away from the people that I serve,” the USDA worker told CNN.