Safeguarding Agricultural Research and Development Capacity
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) experienced a dramatic reduction in staff capacity in the first few months of the second Trump administration. More than 15,000 employees departed the agency through a combination of firings of probationary staff and two rounds of a deferred resignation program, shrinking USDA’s total workforce by 15%.
The administration’s government downsizing campaign is just getting started. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently unveiled a reorganization plan aimed at moving key agency functions outside of the National Capital Region. While the plan does not include new reduction in force targets, further staff attrition is expected as positions are relocated.
The agency’s reorganization plan is not just an organizational change in the name of shrinking the administrative state or reducing bureaucracy. The reorganization, replete with planned office closures and an explicit shrinking of agricultural research capacity, is poised to reshape the American food system, a driver of public health, environment, and economic outcomes across the country.
Why Agricultural R&D is a Crucial Investment
The federal government has historically played a significant role in improving the productivity of U.S. agriculture. By boosting yields and output, public agricultural research and development (R&D) has in turn reduced food prices, enhanced food security, and enabled farmers to produce more with less land and other inputs. Today, with farmers facing high input costs relative to returns, growing pest and disease pressures, and a rapidly shifting trade landscape, new innovations are needed to help producers face challenges.
Every dollar invested in public agricultural R&D has generated $20 in returns—a huge historic return on USDA’s already small research budget. This is especially true relative to other industries. The Department of Energy spends roughly 7 times more on R&D than the Department of Agriculture. When it comes to climate-focused funding in particular, the federal government spent 22 times more on clean energy innovation than R&D agencies spent on climate mitigation in agriculture.
Continued agricultural R&D investments are expected to generate significant economic returns on investments and contribute to improved climate resilience, food security, and regional and rural economic development outcomes. For example, doubling public agricultural R&D funding over the next decade would increase U.S. productivity by about 60% compared to a business-as-usual scenario, while also expanding crop and livestock output more than 40%, reducing prices by more than a third, and substantially cutting greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from avoided deforestation.
Despite the value for farmers and consumers alike, public investment in U.S. agricultural research from USDA, other federal agencies, and states declined significantly from $7.64 billion in 2002 to $5.16 billion in 2019—a nearly 30% reduction, adjusting for inflation. This decline is the leading contributor to a slowdown in agricultural productivity growth. The 2024 Global Agricultural Productivity Report found that U.S. agriculture has not been growing more productive, while India, for example, has a robust annual productivity growth rate of 1.7 percent.
Instead of doubling down to strengthen the nation’s agricultural research capacity and reverse this trend, the administration’s reorganization plan bets on consolidation as a path to efficiency.
Region-Specific Research is at Stake
Preceding USDA’s reorganization announcement, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo advising all federal agencies to develop plans for programmatic reorganization and significant reductions in force. The memo emphasized several key principles to guide a government-wide reduction in force, including a reduced real property footprint. It is therefore no surprise that several branches of USDA that have vast networks of local and regional offices spanning the nation, including the Agricultural Research Service and Forest Service, would come under scrutiny.
The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is USDA’s in-house research agency. At the start of 2025, there were 95 ARS laboratories and research units across 42 states employing 8,000 scientists and support staff. This vast network includes soil scientists improving crop water productivity in Texas, experts leading dairy forage systems research in Wisconsin, and plant breeders developing improved protein content in soybeans in North Carolina. On the surface, the real estate footprint of ARS could look inefficient. But, this interpretation fails to recognize the importance of region-specific research and the ability of researchers to deliver farmer-focused, regionally-relevant breakthroughs, exactly the type of service to USDA’s customers the Secretary claims as a goal in the reorganization plan.
The administration justified the overhaul by citing the need to locate agency functions closer to USDA customers. However, more than 90% of USDA’s employees already work outside the National Capital Region, including all but one ARS site. The ARS site slated for closure in the reorganization plan is located in Beltsville, Maryland, outside of Washington, DC.
Appearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Stephen Vaden assured Senators that only four research centers would be affected by USDA’s reorganization in addition to the closure of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center.
USDA has yet to announce which four ARS sites will be affected and whether the research done at the ARS location in Beltsville will be relocated and continued, or cancelled entirely.
USDA’s reorganization comes as the agency implements a broader funding freeze on competitive research grants, further threatening the non-federal agricultural scientific research workforce. The administration’s decision to conduct an extended program-by-program review that significantly delayed research grant cycles impacts agricultural research programs at land grant universities across the country. ARS sites are often co-located with public Land Grant institutions, with both benefiting from shared resources and often partnering on research efforts. These delays and ongoing uncertainty threaten the economic returns that publicly funded research has consistently generated for both farmers and consumers.
Consolidation is Not Always a Solution for Efficiency
The Trump administration has often cited consolidation as a path to efficiency. But history shows that USDA reorganizations have weakened, not strengthened, the agency’s capacity. From the Obama administration’s 2012 “Blueprint for Better Services” to the 2019 Trump administration relocation of USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), past efforts framed as efficiency measures instead led to staff attrition, loss of institutional knowledge, and setbacks in core research and grantmaking functions. The reorganization now under consideration risks repeating those mistakes at a far greater scale.
For example, the 2019 relocation of ERS and NIFA to Kansas City led to significant staff attrition and a loss of institutional knowledge. This worsened productivity at all levels, a performance hit that took years to bounce back. In fact, it took USDA more than two years to recover from mass staff attrition and the agency is still facing challenges from the decision to relocate two of its major research facilities from Washington, DC. Two years after relocating, ERS and NIFA’s workforce size and productivity declined significantly. Many of the positions that were lost or left vacant were central to the agency’s functions. As a direct result, the relocation reduced the number of ERS reports and NIFA took longer to process scientific research grants. The Government Accountability Office found that USDA did not account for the cost of staff attrition that results from moving federal facilities and did not follow best practices for effective agency reforms and strategic human capital management. The 2019 relocation effort minimally involved USDA employees, Congress, and other key stakeholders. In addition, both agencies did not follow best practices related to strategic workforce planning, training, and development, which may have contributed to the time it took to recover to baseline staffing levels.
We’re seeing a similar scenario replay in real time with the reorganization plan that was announced in July, but at a much broader scale that can have severe impacts to U.S. agriculture. So far, USDA has not released a detailed reorganization plan or provided any economic or workforce analysis to evaluate how relocation and consolidation would affect its mission or the communities it serves. USDA’s decision to shutter the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, its flagship research site near Washington, D.C., has drawn criticism from Congress, farm groups, and scientists alike. The agency conceded it had no supporting analysis for the closure, even as the decision threatens to upend vital research programs and dismantle longstanding collaborations.
Unlike the Obama administration’s 2012 proposal to end a dozen ARS programs, which was a direct response to a significant 12% reduction in discretionary funding from Congress, the current reorganization proposal has been announced during a period of strong bipartisan support for agricultural research. Thanks to this support, USDA’s R&D funding has recently rebounded, with funding for ARS and other research agencies surpassing $3.6 billion in 2024, just shy of the funding levels in the early- and mid-2000s. The administration’s reorganization plan threatens to stall or reverse this progress, jeopardizing whether the agency will be able to administer research funding allocated by Congress. Willingness to push forward a reorganization with little regard for legal or procedural constraints or Congressional oversight will cause staff and mission capacity to bear the brunt of the fallout.
Policy Implications
Loss of Institutional Knowledge and Capacity
USDA has begun to grapple with the implications of an unprecedented loss of experienced personnel. This mass exodus spans critical agencies from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and Farm Service Agency to research divisions like ARS, NIFA, and ERS. These losses undermine food safety, rural development, and science-based policymaking. Pressures on staff to take deferred resignation offers earlier this year culled some of the most seasoned and deeply knowledgeable staff. In a letter to Congress, union groups representing USDA employees outlined that “despite the importance of ARS research, 98 out of 167 food safety scientists have recently resigned”, leaving the future of food security research for all Americans at risk.
Reducing staff capacity also risks the agency’s ability to administer its slate of competitive grant programs that fund critical research. Even if Congress continues to fund research programs at existing discretionary spending levels, research funding will backslide if USDA lacks adequate staff to review applications and get funding out the door each year. Such delays could lead to rescission requests for unspent funds despite existing NIFA programs being regularly oversubscribed with applications from scientists at land-grant universities and other research institutions. The loss of experienced staff not only jeopardizes the continuity of ongoing agricultural R&D, but it also hobbles USDA’s capacity to pivot swiftly in crises like disease outbreaks, market shocks, or climate emergencies. Replacing this intellectual capital will be difficult, costly, and time-consuming, with long-lasting ramifications for program effectiveness, policy depth, and trust in USDA’s scientific and operational integrity.
Decline of U.S. Agricultural R&D Capacity
Sweeping freezes and cancellations of USDA research grants are dealing a severe blow to the non-federal agricultural R&D community, with entire programs suddenly paused or eliminated. The National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition estimates that across all programs, $6B of USDA grants have been frozen or terminated. These disruptions to extramural competitive research are compounded by the ongoing exodus of USDA’s most experienced in-house research staff, threatening to set back U.S. agricultural science for years. China already invests more heavily in agricultural R&D than the U.S., and these setbacks further erode America’s ability to compete on food security, climate resilience, and rural innovation. Unlike other scientific fields, agricultural research has direct and immediate end users. Farmers depend on improved cultivars, conservation practices, access to cheap energy, and pest management tools. When R&D pipelines stall, the consequences eventually ripple into the fields, orchards, and markets that sustain rural economies and national resilience. Agricultural research can have long lag times, making it even more dangerous to abandon investments in agricultural innovation today that will leave U.S. producers empty handed and less competitive in the years ahead.
Erosion of Trust and Stability in Rural Communities
Beyond the immediate impacts on research institutions, the sudden freezing and cancellation of USDA programs destabilize the very communities those programs are designed to serve. Farmers, rural co-ops, and community organizations build their planting, labor, and investment decisions around multi-year USDA commitments. When those commitments are abruptly halted, producers face stranded costs, disrupted harvest cycles, and foregone markets. Community-based organizations and local governments lose confidence in USDA as a reliable partner, undermining adoption of conservation practices, renewable energy, and local food initiatives. This breakdown in trust makes it harder to recruit farmers into new R&D pilots or climate-smart initiatives in the future, even if funding is later restored. The long-term result is a weakened feedback loop between federally funded science and its most critical end-users. This could lower the utility and on-farm adoption of tools, technologies and practices informed by future research. This weakens the economic return on taxpayer dollars dedicated to research projects. At worst, this broken feedback loop leaves rural economies more vulnerable to economic shocks.
Policy Recommendations
Congress holds the ultimate authority over federal appropriations and agency oversight, and thus has significant leverage to shape the future of USDA’s reorganization. How lawmakers exercise that authority will determine whether this reorganization strengthens or undermines the nation’s agricultural research and rural service infrastructure. Through targeted oversight, Congress can insist on transparency, protect against unlawful impoundments or relocations, and ensure continuity so that farmers and rural communities continue to benefit from the innovations generated by USDA’s research agencies. Options available to Congress include:
- Directing the USDA Office of Inspector General to assess USDA’s budget and legal authority for reorganization and relocation, ensuring taxpayer dollars are used lawfully and effectively.
- Requiring USDA to conduct an economic and workforce impact analysis with direct engagement of USDA staff to measure how reorganization affects agricultural research, rural economies, and service delivery.
- Calling for USDA to provide transparent justification for its decision to consolidate into five hubs, including criteria, alternatives considered, and implications for farmer access to research, extension services, and technical assistance.
- Requesting details on how USDA plans to retain staff expertise and capacity to operate existing grant programs at their current size, in accordance with funding appropriated by Congress, ensuring the continuity of vital agricultural research and services.
The proposed consolidation and reorganization of USDA illustrate both the risks and the possibilities ahead. Without careful oversight, these moves could erode research capacity, diminish workforce expertise, and disrupt vital services for farmers and rural communities. Yet we also know there are champions inside and outside government, across party lines, who recognize the value of agricultural R&D and its central role in national food security. With their leadership, there remains a pathway to repair what is broken, ensure transparency and accountability in reorganization efforts, and ultimately build an agricultural R&D infrastructure that delivers lasting benefits for all.
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