USDA Reorganizes to Support American Farmers Better

Jul 25, 2025
By Farms.com

New USDA Plan Focuses on Core Agricultural Mission

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is undergoing a major reorganization to refocus on its core goal—supporting American agriculture. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins announced that this reorganization will reduce costs, cut excess management, and relocate staff from Washington, D.C. to more affordable regions.

USDA’s workforce had grown by 8% over the last four years, with a 14.5% increase in salaries, but without a matching increase in services to farmers and ranchers. Many USDA buildings in the capital region are underused and face costly repairs. For example, the South Building has $1.3 billion in maintenance needs.

The reorganization focuses on four key areas: making the workforce size match available funding, bringing USDA services closer to communities, cutting extra layers of management, and combining repeated support roles.

USDA plans to move employees to five regional hubs: Raleigh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Fort Collins, and Salt Lake City. These areas have lower living costs and already host USDA offices. Only around 2,000 staff will remain in Washington, D.C., ensuring the department still has a presence there.

Important services like wildfire response, food inspection, and national security roles will continue without interruption. Many staffing reductions will be voluntary, through retirement programs.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids