USDA to move about half of DC capital region employees to hubs closer to farmers, ranchers across US

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says she'll move roughly half of the employees working in the Washington, D.C., region to regional offices closer to farmers, ranchers and producers across the U.S.

In the announcement Thursday, the USDA said the agency's workforce increased by 8% over the last four years, with salaries raised by 14.5%, resulting in "hiring thousands of employees with no sustainable way to pay them."

The agency also said the growth and spending occurred "without any tangible increase in service to USDA’s core constituencies across the agricultural sector" and that the USDA’s footprint in the National Capital Region is "underutilized and redundant, plagued by rampant overspending and decades of mismanagement and costly deferred maintenance."

The department has 4,600 employees in the capital region, but is looking to keep no more than 2,000 in the area.

Moving the staff to five hub locations around the country will also decrease costs for USDA, as the federal salary locality rate for the D.C. area is nearly 34%. The other locations have federal salary locality rates that range from 17% to nearly 31%.

The hubs to which most of the staff will relocate will be Indianapolis; Salt Lake City; Fort Collins, Colorado; Kansas City, Missouri; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

USDA said that it will also vacate other facilities including the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, in suburban Maryland and is considering whether to continue to use several other facilities.