The Grain Inspector's Cash Reserve Went Negative. Then It Cut Staff.

Every export cargo of U.S. wheat, corn, or soybeans that leaves the country by grade gets there because a federal or federally supervised inspector graded and weighed it.▸ The service is mandatory under the U.S. Grain Standards Act, and it isn't paid for by taxpayers — it's paid for by the exporters who use it, through hourly and per-ton fees that, by statute, are supposed to keep three to six months of operating cash sitting in reserve. In fiscal 2023, that reserve broke below zero.

The Congressional Research Service's June 2025 review of the Grain Standards Act compiled five years of the Federal Grain Inspection Service's own user-fee accounting and found the fund covering FGIS-conducted export inspections missed its statutory reserve minimum in four of the five years — and, in fiscal 2023, went negative outright.▸ The requirement itself isn't ambiguous: 7 U.S.C. § 79 directs USDA to set fees "adequate to maintain a reasonable reserve" of three to six months of operating expenses, reviewed annually. CRS states it plainly: the inspection account "was not within the statutory limits for FY2021-FY2024."

The pattern is visible without the negative number: in FY2020 and FY2023, what FGIS spent running the inspection program (obligations) outran what it collected in fees (revenue).▸ By FY2023 that gap had been compounding for years, and the reserve cushion built up earlier in the decade — $10.01 million in FY2020, equal to 3.4 months of cost — had been drawn down to nothing and then through it: −$0.50 million, −0.2 months, in FY2023. FGIS's own December 2024 Federal Register final rule states the agency "operated at a net loss for five consecutive years," even after charging the maximum fee increase its regulations allowed — capped at 5% a year — on top of four earlier years of fee decreases and a stretch of the highest inflation in four decades.

FY2024 shows a reserve technically back above zero, at $3.26 million — but that recovery came almost entirely from cutting costs, not from charging exporters more.▸ FY2024 revenue, $29.45 million, was barely different from FY2020's $30.26 million. What changed was obligations: $25.69 million in FY2024, the lowest of the five years in CRS's table, down from $31.75 million just one year earlier. FGIS's own account of how it got there, stated in the same Federal Register notice: it "detailed over 10 percent of its staff, froze hiring and awards, reduced overtime, and stopped travel unless mission critical."

FGIS's entire workforce — headquartered in Washington, D.C., with most staff at the National Grain Center in Kansas City and six field offices from Toledo to Portland — numbered 379 permanent employees, 54 temporary, and 15 intermittent in FY2023: 448 people doing mandatory inspection and weighing work at 29 export facilities nationwide, or supervising the state and private agencies that do.▸ "Detailed over 10 percent" means, at that scale, somewhere north of 45 of them were pulled off their normal duties. The agency did not say for how long, or fully restored.

The reserve and revenue/obligation figures cover FGIS's fund for FGIS-conducted export inspections only — the larger of its two user-fee accounts. A second, smaller fund covering FGIS's supervision of delegated and designated state and private inspection agencies shows a similar pattern of missed statutory minimums in FY2020–FY2023 per the same CRS table, but is not charted here. The FY2023 headcount and the "detailed over 10 percent" figure come from different points in time (FY2023 and a cost-cutting step described in a notice covering FY2025 rates, published December 2024) and are presented separately rather than combined into a single number.