Congress Held Farm Extension Funding Flat. The Workforce It Pays For Has Shrunk 25% Since 1979.
Summary
The administration's FY2026 budget proposed eliminating the $265 million Hatch Act research fund outright and cutting Smith-Lever Extension grants 46%, from $325 million to $175 million — a combined $437 million cut. Congress enacted both at prior-year levels instead. But the 112-year-old Cooperative Extension System those dollars support employed 13,188 professional staff nationwide in 2024, down from a 1979 peak of 17,694, while the federal share of its roughly $2.8 billion annual budget fell from 42.4% in 1973 to 17.7% in 2024.
The cut that didn't happen
The administration's FY2026 budget asked Congress to zero out the Hatch Act — the $265 million formula program that funds agricultural experiment stations at land-grant universities — and to cut Smith-Lever Extension grants, the money that pays the salaries of county-level agents, nearly in half: from $325.0 million to $175.0 million for the main capacity grant, and from $88.6 million to $66.6 million for its smaller companion fund covering special-needs, urban, and 1890 land-grant institution set-asides. Combined, the request would have cut $437 million from a $678.6 million base — a 64% reduction across the three formula programs in a single year.
View data as table
| Hatch Act | $265.0M cut requested | of $265.0M FY2025 base — eliminated entirely |
|---|---|---|
| Smith-Lever 3(b)&(c) | $150.0M cut requested | of $325.0M FY2025 base — 46% |
| Smith-Lever 3(d) | $22.0M cut requested | of $88.6M FY2025 base — 25% |
None of it happened. Congress enacted a full-year Agriculture appropriations act on November 12, 2025 — P.L. 119-37, passed as part of the three-bill minibus that ended a 43-day government shutdown — and funded all three programs at their exact FY2025 levels: Hatch Act at $265.0 million, Smith-Lever 3(b)&(c) at $325.0 million, Smith-Lever 3(d) at $88.6 million. The House and Senate appropriations committees had already rejected the administration's numbers in their own bills before the shutdown forced a final deal, per the same tally — the elimination and the 46% cut never had support in either chamber.
The decline nobody proposed
Holding the line in one budget cycle doesn't undo four and a half decades of a different trend. A May 2026 analysis by Economic Research Service economists Tatiana Borisova, Keith Fuglie, Sun Ling Wang, and co-author Benjamin Garber, published in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, reconstructs Extension's funding and staffing back to the 1970s. Extension was designed as a roughly equal three-way split among federal, state, and county money. It isn't anymore: the federal share of the system's total budget — around $2.8–2.9 billion a year as of 2024 — fell from 42.4% in 1973 to 17.7% in 2024, as state and county governments absorbed a growing share of a system Washington helped start but increasingly doesn't fund.
View data as table
| 1973 | 42.4% | federal share of total Extension funding |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 17.7% | federal share of total Extension funding |
The people doing the work followed the money down. The same analysis counts 17,694 professional staff — county agents, specialists, program coordinators — working in Extension nationwide at its 1979 peak. By 2024 that had fallen to 13,188, a decline of 25.5%, even as the U.S. population the system serves grew from about 226 million in 1980 to 340.1 million in 2024 — roughly 50% growth, per the Census Bureau's own population estimates.
View data as table
| 1979 peak | 17,694 | professional staff, FTE |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 13,188 | professional staff, FTE — down 25.5% from the 1979 peak |
The takeaway
- Congress rejected the cut, in full. The administration proposed eliminating the Hatch Act and cutting Smith-Lever Extension funding by up to 46%. The enacted FY2026 agriculture appropriation funds all three programs at exactly their FY2025 levels.
- The federal share has been shrinking for fifty years regardless. Extension's federal funding share fell from 42.4% of the system's budget in 1973 to 17.7% in 2024 — a decline that predates and outlasts any single year's budget fight, as state and county governments picked up the difference.
- The workforce shrank with it. Extension's nationwide professional staff peaked at 17,694 in 1979 and stood at 13,188 in 2024, a 25.5% decline, even as the population the system serves kept growing.
Appropriations figures are nominal dollars as enacted for the federal fiscal year cited, not inflation-adjusted. The 1973–2024 funding-share and staffing figures come from a single peer-reviewed reconstruction of historical Extension records and reflect that study's own methodology and rounding; state-by-state funding and staffing patterns vary considerably and are not broken out here.
Sources
- Congressional Research Service, Agriculture and Related Agencies: FY2026 Appropriations (R48564, updated Feb. 17, 2026) — FY2025 enacted, FY2026 Administration request, and FY2026 final enacted (P.L. 119-37) figures for the Hatch Act and Smith-Lever 3(b)&(c) and 3(d) programs, and the shutdown/minibus timeline. congress.gov/crs-product/R48564
- Congressional Research Service, The Agricultural Cooperative Extension System: An Overview (R48071, May 20, 2024) — the three-tiered federal/state/county structure, the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and the system's geographic scope (50 states, D.C., and five territories). congress.gov/crs-product/R48071
- Tatiana Borisova, Keith Fuglie, Benjamin Garber, and Sun Ling Wang, "Long-term trends in resources for Cooperative Extension in the United States," Agricultural and Resource Economics Review (Cambridge University Press, published online May 7, 2026), DOI 10.1017/age.2026.10024 — total Extension System funding (~$2.8–2.9 billion, 2024), the federal funding share (42.4% in 1973 vs. 17.7% in 2024) and underlying real-dollar federal spending figures, and nationwide professional-staff counts (17,694 in 1979 vs. 13,188 in 2024). cambridge.org
- U.S. Census Bureau, "New 2024 Population Estimates Show Nation's Population Grew by About 1% to 340.1 Million Since 2023" — the 2024 national population estimate used for context on Extension's population growth since 1980. census.gov
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The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 built a three-tiered machine: the U.S. Department of Agriculture sets the terms, a land-grant university in every state runs the program, and an extension agent in nearly every county delivers it — soil tests, crop advice, 4-H, nutrition classes, disaster response for farmers. It runs today in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories, per the Congressional Research Service's overview of the system. Its money comes from three governments at once — federal, state, and county — and Congress just finished deciding how much of the federal third survives another year.