USDA Sends Its Research Agencies Back to the City Where It Lost Three-Quarters of Their Staff

USDA has already run this experiment once.▸ In 2019 it moved the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) from Washington to Kansas City, promising $300 million in savings. Three-quarters of the staff ordered to relocate left instead, according to a Congressional Research Service report on the move. In April 2026, Government Executive reported that USDA is sending both agencies back to Kansas City — a second attempt at the same relocation, on the same agencies, with the results of the first one already on the record.

USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue announced the ERS/NIFA relocation in August 2018.▸ On June 13, 2019, the department released a cost-benefit analysis concluding that moving to Kansas City would save taxpayers $300 million over 15 years compared with staying in the Washington area. The Agricultural and Applied Economics Association reviewed that analysis and concluded USDA had overstated the cost of remaining in Washington and failed to follow federal guidelines for a cost-benefit study; accounting for the value of research lost when experienced staff quit rather than move, it put the real cost of the relocation at $83 million to $182 million. A 2022 GAO review of the decision — Evidence-Based Policy Making: USDA's Decision to Relocate Research Agencies to Kansas City Was Not Fully Consistent with an Evidence-Based Approach — found the department's economic analysis "omitted critical costs and economic effects from its analysis of taxpayer savings, such as costs related to potential attrition," and concluded USDA's savings estimate was unreliable.

The attrition wasn't a rounding error in an otherwise sound plan — it was most of the workforce.▸ NIFA had 315 government employees when USDA wrote its cost-benefit analysis; four months after the October 1, 2019 move, it had 105. ERS went from 329 to 106 over the same window. Grantees felt it directly: NIFA delayed capacity and competitive grant awards to land-grant universities by three to five months, and, per media reports citing internal USDA memos cited by CRS, ERS delayed or discontinued numerous economic reports — prompting Senator Debbie Stabenow to write USDA directly about the disruption.

Before this year's second Kansas City move even starts, USDA has lost a fifth of its entire staff.▸ A December 2025 Office of Inspector General report found the department went from 110,384 employees on January 11, 2025 to 90,078 by June 14, 2025 — 20,306 people, or 18%, gone in five months, most of it (15,114 employees) through the Deferred Resignation Program. Every agency lost staff, "with percentages ranging from 7% to 67%," the OIG wrote. NIFA — the same agency that lost three-quarters of its Kansas City staff in 2019 — had already lost 35% of its current employees before the 2026 relocation was even announced. ERS had lost 29%.

USDA's 2026 reorganization moves roughly 2,600 employees out of the Washington region into five new regional hubs — Kansas City, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Fort Collins, and Salt Lake City — according to Government Executive's April 2026 reporting.▸ ERS and NIFA go back to Kansas City. The Food Safety and Inspection Service is sending two-thirds of its Washington headquarters staff to a new National Food Safety Center in Urbandale, Iowa, and a science center in Athens, Georgia — though its roughly 8,300 frontline meat and poultry inspectors, who make up 85% of FSIS staff, aren't part of the move. The Agricultural Research Service is shifting employees out of its Beltsville, Maryland complex to field locations nationwide, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service — the agency that produces the crop and livestock reports commodity markets price off of — is sending staff to St. Louis and other sites. USDA is targeting completion by the end of 2026 so relocating employees' children can start the school year at a new address. Federal News Network reported in June 2026 that roughly 75% of surveyed researchers and 80% of surveyed SNAP and WIC staff told their union they would not relocate — the same signal the department had in 2019, before three-quarters of ERS and NIFA's staff left rather than move. USDA has requested $55 million in its FY2027 budget for relocation costs and building preparation, Government Executive reported; federal employee unions have sued, arguing the reorganization functions as an unauthorized reduction in force.

Figures describing the 2019 relocation and the 2025 attrition period come from primary government and independent economic-analysis sources named above; figures describing the 2026 relocation still in progress — including the $55 million budget request and the researcher-survey percentages — are drawn from contemporaneous news reporting that itself cites USDA officials, budget documents, and employee unions, disclosed here because the underlying documents were not independently locatable.