Last week, Secretary Brooke Rollins issued a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) “refocusing its core operations to better align with its founding mission of supporting American farming, ranching, and forestry.”
After a thorough review, the Secretary has concluded the USDA is “a bloated, expensive, and unsustainable organization.”
To remedy this, she intends not only to downsize the Department by reducing the D.C. employees from 4,600 to 2,000, but vacate multiple federal buildings in the capital, and relocate much of the agency’s workforce to five hub cities – Raleigh, North Dakota; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Nationwide, the agency says much of the workforce reduction is being made through voluntary retirements and the federal Deferred Retirement Program that provides incentives for employees to resign at a future date. So far, USDA says 15,364 workers have opted into this program and targeted layoffs may follow if voluntary measures fall short.
Read Epoch Times summation of Rollin’s downsizing of the USDA here.
