USDA's Farm Lender Grew Its Loan Book 25% the Same Year It Lost a Quarter of Its Staff
Summary
The Farm Service Agency obligated $6.7 billion in direct and guaranteed farm loans in FY2025, up from $5.4 billion in FY2024, per its own year-end report. Over roughly the same five months, USDA's inspector general found FSA's state offices had lost 24% of their staff — while the 15,837-person county-office workforce, where farmers actually apply, lost 7%.
The loan book grew across every category
's fiscal year 2025 executive summary shows obligations up in all five loan categories it tracks — direct and guaranteed farm ownership loans, direct and guaranteed operating loans, and emergency loans for disaster losses. Emergency loans grew fastest by far, more than tripling off a small base.
View data as table
| Direct Farm Ownership | $2.33B | +13% vs FY24 |
|---|---|---|
| Guaranteed Farm Ownership | $2.09B | +41% vs FY24 |
| Direct Operating | $1.25B | +16% vs FY24 |
| Guaranteed Operating | $1.05B | +37% vs FY24 |
| Emergency | $26.0M | +207% vs FY24 |
Add the categories up and the total obligated in FY2025 was $6.74 billion, against $5.39 billion the year before — a 25% increase — spread across 27,792 loans, up 13% on FY2024's 24,555. Both totals are 's own, reconciled directly against the category-level rows in its executive summary.
View data as table
| FY2024 | $5.39B | 24,555 loans obligated |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | $6.74B | 27,792 loans obligated, +25% |
The people processing that book got thinner — unevenly
runs through two layers: county offices, where a farmer walks in, applies, and gets serviced, and state and headquarters offices that supervise and support them. 's Office of Inspector General tracked attrition department-wide from January 12 to June 14, 2025, and broke it out by agency. 's county-office workforce — 15,837 employees at the end of 2024 — lost 1,082 people, or 7%, the lightest attrition rate of any sub-agency the measured. 's separate state and headquarters staff, 3,402 employees, lost 806 — 24%, more than three times the county-office rate.
View data as table
| County offices, Dec 2024 | 15,837 | employees |
|---|---|---|
| County offices, June 2025 | 14,755 | -1,082, -7% |
| State & HQ offices, Dec 2024 | 3,402 | employees |
| State & HQ offices, June 2025 | 2,596 | -806, -24% |
The 's review period runs through mid-June 2025 — three and a half months before 's fiscal year, and its record loan volume, closed out on September 30. The agency's front counter held its staff roughly steady. The layer above it, the one setting policy and clearing exceptions for those counties, did not.
The takeaway
- Demand went up, dollar for dollar. obligated $6.74 billion in farm loans in FY2025, a 25% jump from FY2024, across every loan category it tracks.
- Staff losses landed unevenly. County offices — the ones farmers actually walk into — lost 7% of their staff. The state and headquarters layer that supports them lost 24%, more than three times that rate, according to 's own inspector general.
- The two trends overlapped in time, not in agency reporting. No single document ties the loan growth to the staffing loss; this is two independently verified data sets — one from , one from 's Office of Inspector General — read side by side.
Loan figures cover 's fiscal year, which ends September 30, 2025; staffing figures cover the 's review window, January 12 through June 14, 2025 — the two periods overlap but are not identical, and neither source draws a direct causal line between them.
Sources
- Farm Service Agency — Executive Summary, Farm Loan Programs, 2025 (as of September 30, 2025), the source for all loan-obligation and loan-count figures, by category and in total. fsa.usda.gov (PDF)
- Office of Inspector General — U.S. Department of Agriculture Staffing Levels, OAI Report 25-064-01 (December 17, 2025), the source for and County Office headcounts and attrition rates, January 12 – June 14, 2025. usdaoig.oversight.gov (PDF)
Comments
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The Farm Service Agency is the part of that actually writes farmers a check or co-signs their note: direct loans the agency funds itself, guaranteed loans a bank makes with backing up to 90 percent of the loss. In fiscal 2025, farmers borrowed more from and through than the year before, in a bigger dollar total and a bigger loan count. In the same stretch of calendar 2025, the USDA Office of Inspector General found that 's own workforce had shrunk — unevenly, but sharply, at the state level where county offices get their support.