One of the most under-reported stories of 2025 — the departure of more than 20,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture employees — finally surfaced just before the quietest, most unwatched news periods of any year, the week between Christmas and New Years.
Still, USDA losing 20,300 of its 110,300 employees from mid-January through mid-June is big news. Even bigger will be working around that steep drop in experienced staff as USDA attempts to deliver its projected budget of $234 billion in farm, food and rural programs for FY 2026.
And that amount doesn’t include the billions in additional “emergency” assistance already announced by the White House.
Some early hints of future trouble spots came courtesy of USDA’s Office of Inspector General which compiled the staffing report through paycheck data. In broad terms, the OIG found:
• Every state lost an average 370 USDA employees.
• Also 15,114 of the 20,306 employees that left USDA during the January-to-June 2025 period left under the “Deferred Resignation Program” offered by the White House to cabinet agencies that encouraged government workers to leave.
• Additionally, 1,636 employees were fired, 1,280 retired and 1,196 resigned.
• Hard hit were farm- and ranch-focused departments: Animal and Plant Inspection Service, down 25%; National Agricultural Statistics Service, down 34%; the Economic Research Service, down 29% and the Farm Service Agency, down 24%.
Two other critical agencies, the Forest Service and the Natural Resources and Conservation Service, were hit especially hard. The USFS, “which oversees millions of acres of federal land,” noted Politico, “lost 5,860 workers,” while the NRCS lost 2,673 employees.
Both, Politico added, were “the highest number of exits across all of USDA’s agencies.”
The loss of experienced USDA program managers and staff, warned Minnesota’s Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Ag Committee, “weakens” USDA’s “ability to respond to challenges facing our farmers, leaves our food supply chains more vulnerable… and undermines efforts to drive the rural economy forward.”
True, and especially true with farmers now laying the groundwork for another $10 billion in farm aid for early 2026, the continued challenges of diseases like avian flu and (cattle) screwworm that are driving U.S. food prices higher, and rural America now buckling under another wave of farm and agbiz consolidations.
None of these past cuts and their farm and food consequences, however, are accounted for in another aggressive Trump Administration plan to move more USDA staff out of the Washington, D.C area in 2026.
For example, reported Government Executive Dec. 12, “While just 10% of the USDA workforce is currently in the Washington area, [USDA] is looking to relocate around 2,600 employees to… five regional hubs” in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kansas City, Missouri, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, and Fort Collins, Colorado, while “slashing other regional offices around the country…”
USDA “received overwhelmingly negative feedback on its plan,” the report continued, “…as employees, lawmakers and stakeholders said it could lead to significant brain drain and disruptions to key farmer-support programs.”
It was more than overwhelming: Of the 14,000 comments that were “not part of an organized campaign… 82% expressed a negative sentiment” and “… (j)ust 5% expressed a positive tone.”
That means for every person in favor of the continued USDA reorganization this year, 16 others oppose it.
But none of these facts nor any of their impacts on American farmers and ranchers are “expected to deter the Trump administration as it reshapes” USDA, says the report.
That’s not a surprise; so why would 2026 be any different?
(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, recommended reading, and contact information are posted at farmandfoodfile.com. © 2026 ag comm)
