The Trump administration’s plan for reorganizing and downsizing USDA should be out by the middle of May, and it will likely call for consolidating some programs with other agencies, according to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.
During an interview with Agri-Pulse on Tuesday after a series of events in the Fargo, North Dakota, region, Rollins indicated some aspects of USDA Rural Development could be among functions of the department that get moved elsewhere.
“There's seven agencies that deal with housing, including USDA,” she said. “There are 12 agencies that deal with rural prosperity and rural programming, and not that some of that won't remain, but this is the first time maybe that our country is taking a really hard look at how we organize our government.”
Rollins also suggested federal firefighting services could be consolidating. Major land management agencies are largely split between USDA and Interior. The Forest Service is part of USDA, while the Bureau of Land Management is under Interior.
“Maybe we keep ours, they keep theirs, but we’ve got to be more effective and efficient in how we fight the wildfires and how we build our firefighters, how we train them. And there’s a better way to do it than the way that we’re doing it,” Rollins said.
She stressed that the reorganization was intended to make government services more efficient.
"We're not taking a look at, 'Are we going to take food away from hungry kids', or 'Are we going to stop fighting those wildfires" — but looking at all of those layers of bureaucracy to make sure we're doing it in the most efficient and effective way possible with the taxpayer dollars,” she said.
USDA is finalizing a second round of buyouts and has been expected to announce more layoffs as part of the downsizing.
“The ultimate planning and reorganization should be finished in terms of at least the announcement by early to mid-May. So, we’re getting really close to sort of the final plans,” Rollins told reporters at a stop earlier Tuesday.
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Rollins told Agri-Pulse she wasn’t ready to announce how many employees had been allowed to take the buyouts because some of the applications were being turned down. For example, she said applications from Farm Service Agency field staff had been declined.
“It's a bit of a moving target, because some of them … we pull back,” she said.
She said the four years Trump was out of office allowed his advisers to plan the government downsizing.
“The four years in between term one and term two allowed a lot of work to be done to really be much more intentional on how we do just that, how we right-size the federal government, across every single agency,” Rollins told reporters.
The downsizing has already been significant, with news outlets including Agri-Pulse reporting the loss of well over 10% of employees at the agency of approximately 100,000 employees.
Kevin Shea, former administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told Agri-Pulse Monday that “well over” 1,000 people at APHIS are leaving the agency, and that the loss in personnel is approaching “20% of the workforce.”
In the Plant Protection and Quarantine area alone, 700 to 800 people out of approximately 3,000 will no longer be on the job — about a quarter of the workforce.
The Agricultural Research Service lost well over 1,000 employees in the latest buyout, which follows about 800 employees leaving through the first one. That’s out of an organization of about 7,000 people, according to the agency’s website.
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