More Than 21% Of USDA Workforce Gone In Year 1 Of Shitstain 2; Climate, Conservation, Inspection, Research Hard-Hit
EDIT
“All federal agencies got hit hard, but USDA got hit really, really hard,” said Becky Schewe, a policy analyst for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition who extensively analyzed USDA staff cuts last year. “And NRCS got hit particularly hard. These are the people providing technical guidance and assistance and support for farmers; they’re the ones managing and paying out working lands conservation programs. … All of those staff losses have a direct conservation and climate impact.”
The vast majority of these cuts, Schewe noted, were staff who left the agency voluntarily, through the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred resignation program in which employees agreed to leave federal agencies in April of last year, but got paid through September. “A large part of it has to do with morale,” Schewe noted. “They thought they were going to lose their jobs anyway.”
Most of the staff who left the agency served or lived in rural areas and were not based in or near Washington, D.C., even though the administration had said Washington-based employees were its primary target for termination. While the agency’s Washington headquarters lost 12 percent, and offices in suburban Maryland, home to major research and inspection wings of USDA, lost about 40 percent, some ag-heavy states, including Kansas and Illinois, lost as much as 30 percent. "There’s this disconnect between the rhetoric that we’re, quote, moving service closer to farmers and the fact that they are, in fact, laying off or separating or moving staff who serve farmers directly and are already in the field,” Schewe said.
Many of the highly trained soil scientists and engineers who consult with farmers on how to implement and assess conservation practices are now gone, and those still serving these areas are often stretched thin over several counties rather than one or two. The NRCS staff “work in extremely close partnership with farmers on a day-to-day basis,” said Rebecca Bartels, executive director of Invest in Our Land, a newly formed group focused on protecting conservation dollars for farmers. “We see a lot of concerns, both on the delivery of the programs and also for farmers’ ability to navigate how the conservation practices that the program facilitates can help them overcome very real day-to-day challenges like extreme weather.”
EDIT
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08042026/trump-usda-staff-cuts/