How Will Trump Sabotage Government? Look At What He Did To The USDA’s ‘Crown Jewel.’

Five years ago, President Donald Trump’s budget director and acting chief of staff flew home to South Carolina for a Republican Party gala and celebrated the slow decay of the federal government.

Referring to Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” — hedidn’tmeanlobbyists — Mick Mulvaney brought up two obscure research agencies within the Department of Agriculture, the total combined personnel of which made up less than 1% of the USDA workforce.

It’s “nearly impossible” to fire federal workers, Mulvaney said. But the USDA had defied the odds.

A few months prior, then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told the vast majority of workers at the agencies, largely economists and researchers, that they would have to pick up their lives and move 1,000 miles across the country, from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City. They were given just a fewweeks to decide if they would move or else face termination “for declining a directed reassignment.”

Most of the civil servants — with children entering high school, spouses employed in D.C., aging parents to care for, and retirements not far away — balked. Hundreds left the civil service, stalling major scientific priorities and setting American agricultural research back years.

“More than half the people quit!” Mulvaney raved at the gala.

All it took to drain the swamp was telling people they had to move from the nation’s capital to “the real part of the country,” he said. “What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”

With Donald Trump’s hands yet again on the levers of power, what happened at the USDA is just the start.

Just as this story was published, reports emerged of an executive-branch-wide email to, apparently, millions of federal workers. It offered them buyouts — and warned of “physical office relocations for a number of federal workers” who remain in the civil service.

Trump campaigned last year on a promise to “dismantle the deep state,” and his pick to lead the White House budget office — Mulvaney’s successor and key Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought — has said that federal workers are “villains” who should be “traumatically affected” when they go to work. Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” cheerleader Elon Musk has written about the “relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area” as a way to “curtail administrative overgrowth.”

And Trump himself, in a campaign video, said he would “continue the effort, launched during his first term, to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington swamp.” He said such moves could “immediately” affect 100,000 civil servants.

Five years after the relocation, current and former employees at the two USDA agencies, the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), have said that the mass departure of experts in agriculture and agricultural economics marked a dramatic, tangible loss for the public — and should now be a bright red warning sign for the next four years of Trump’s second term in office, when the president will no doubt attempt similar moves at other agencies.

“Very little happened for the first two or three years after the relocation because there just wasn’t anybody there,” said Susan Offutt, who was administrator of ERS between 1996 and 2006 before serving as the chief economist of the Government Accountability Office for eight years.

Even today, after staffing levels at the agencies have rebounded, thanks in large part to COVID-19 remote work policies — which Trump has sought to reverse in an executive order — the loss of a generation of highly skilled agricultural economists, scientists and other experts has left a deep mark on the USDA.

“There’s still not much that would be [considered] policy-sensitive, or policy-relevant,” Offutt said. “The portfolio no longer includes as much policy analysis as it had previously.”

James MacDonald, a former branch chief at ERS who retired in September 2019 due to the move to Kansas City, came back to the agency two months later as a rehired annuitant — a retiree working on a part-time basis — and then as a part-time contractor. Widely recognized as an expert in the organization of the American agricultural sector, he’s also now a research professor at the University of Maryland.

“We’re doing fewer, big, informed, difficult reports,” MacDonald told HuffPost of ERS. “We do have a lot of publications, but I think many are kind of short, simple, easy things. Producing a serious research product is a real challenge, and I don’t think we’re nearly back to that level yet.”

If what happened to ERS and NIFA is any indication, forced agency relocations could cut “administrative overgrowth” at the cost of thousands of years of collective expertise from departing federal employees. Laura Dodson, a current ERS agricultural economist and acting vice president of the agency’s union local, told me in 2019 that she feared the relocation was a “test case” for what the Trump administration might try to do to larger agencies.

In retrospect, she said recently, it’s “pretty clear that the relocation was a way for them to enact a mass layoff” without following federal regulations for layoffs, or “reductions in force.”

“We had a lot of people who had spent their careers working on very specific fields — very niche questions,” Dodson said. “And when they left, it was so sudden and abrupt that there wasn’t time to bring in the next generation. You had to just leave all of your work and go.”

Built To Irritate

Prior to the move, ERS and NIFA had spent decades providing unbiased economic research and scientific funding focused on the nation’s agricultural systems. Under its current name, ERS goes back to 1961, but predecessors in its mission to provide economic statistics and analysis on the agricultural sector and policy go back a century. It’s one of 13 principal statistical agencies in the U.S. government, alongside the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others, and its ranks are dense with economics PhDs and statistical whizzes.

NIFA, the USDA’s “extramural research agency,” administers over $1.5 billion in federal science funding — supporting discoveries in fields as diverse as bioenergy, soil management and workforce development. It was created by name in 2008, but its earliest predecessor dates back to 1888 when the “Office of Experiment Stations” coordinated publicly funded research between land-grant colleges.

And though both ERS and NIFA had small footprints even before the move, the impact of their work was felt across the country.

“When I go to the grocery store, all the time, I’m going, ‘I know the person that bred that apple, I know the person that bred that grape,’” said Tom Bewick, the acting vice president for NIFA’s union, which like ERS’s is an affiliate of the American Federation of Government Employees.

At ERS, statisticians track and analyze data on things like commodity pricing, farm income, pesticide use, the immigration status of farmworkers and Americans’ diets. Employees have published research on everything from raw milk consumption, egg production amid bird flu outbreaks and the impact of agricultural tariffs. Current and former employees stressed that given the influence of the stakeholders who use ERS research — corporate behemoths, powerful politicians, nongovernmental groups, universities — the agency took scientific integrity seriously.

“Our whole career, we’re told we’re not supposed to comment on policy, or advocate one way or the other,” said Constance Newman, an ERS economist for nearly 20 years who left the agency as a result of the directive to move to Kansas City. At ERS, Newman studied participation in the SNAP program, previously called food stamps. “There’s important decisions being made on all these facts, all these stats that are being put forward. So let’s make sure that we have the best quality statistics, and not just someone doing it from an advocacy point of view.”

Though the public and private industry both benefit from ERS research — it’s all publicly available — many argue the agency’s most important clients are policymakers, both in Congress and the executive branch. Measuring policy outcomes on subjects like tariffs, disease, nutrition and climate change, ERS research often tells hard truths backed by ironclad data, even when it goes against corporate interests or political slogans.

ERS research “had a cachet of being unbiased — not coming from just the farmer-rancher side, [nor] the up-the-chain packers, processors, and distributors side,” said Dale Moore, who served multiple USDA secretaries as chief of staff between 2001 and 2009, and was later executive director of the American Farm Bureau Federation until 2022.

“The ERS existed for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations,” Offutt said, “and it irritated both.”

The Purge

The first sign of trouble was the Trump White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2019, published in February 2018, which would have slashed ERS’s budget nearly in half and proposed doing so “by eliminating low priority research that is being conducted within the private sector and by non-profits and focusing on core data analyses in line with priority research areas.” Congress ignored the suggested cut, but it was a shot across the bow.

Then, in August, Perdue formally announced the move that would actually cut ERS’s and NIFA’s workforces in half. The vast majority of the agency’s personnel would be relocating out of Washington, he said, to a new location that would be announced later.

The same morning Perdue announced the move, ERS employees learned that the agency’s administrator, Mary Bohman, a veteran agricultural economist who’d been in the job for seven years, would be transferred to a different part of the USDA altogether, leaving others to handle the transition. (Perdue did not respond to HuffPost’s interview request.)

Citing Washington’s “high cost of living and long commutes,” a USDA press release said the move was meant to improve recruitment, place USDA resources closer to stakeholders, and “benefit the American taxpayers” with savings on salaries and rent.

But when economists and statisticians familiar with ERS’s and NIFA’s work started crunching the numbers themselves, they never seemed to add up.

In a conference call in September that year, hosted by several statistical and research-related associations, Catherine Woteki, the USDA undersecretary who oversaw NIFA, ERS and related agencies during the Obama administration, said the move was “ill-conceived at best and possibly in violation of the law.”

The USDA’s inspector general’s office later bolstered this claim, finding that the department had violated provisions of the 2018 spending bill that Trump had signed into law. The USDA responded by asserting that the budget language was itself unconstitutional.

Referring to Perdue’s justifications for the move, Woteki said, “None of them make sense.”

Others agreed. Over a thousand scientists and economists signed a letter opposing the move. Affected employees, multiple previous administrators of the agencies and dozens of professional associations and nongovernmental groupspointedout that policymakers in Washington, including USDA leadership and Congress, were crucial stakeholders in ERS’s and NIFA’s work, as were other statistical and research agencies headquartered in the city with whom they often teamed up on projects.

The agencies had also historically had success recruiting sought-after economists, researchers and administrators in Washington. And though the cost of living was high, the city seemed to make up for it. The cost-saving claim was similarly dubious: Even now, years after the relocation and the start of the pandemic remote-work era, ERS’s annual budget has actually gone up.

Other justifications simply didn’t compute. After USDA officials claimed in a media call that ERS had an unusually high attrition rate, the American Statistical Association dug into the numbers and found the department was using an inflated figure — by counting summer interns as employees.

“We did a pretty careful analysis of what we were told, and we didn’t think that the reasons provided were very convincing,” said Steve Pierson, the ASA’s director of science policy.

‘Consider The Total Picture’

Without a satisfying explanation for the move, speculation reigned.

Offutt, on the 2018 conference call, wondered whether “this is a move that is intended to still the voice of ERS as an independent and objective agency.”

In May 2019, Politico reported on ERS employees’ belief that the agency had “run afoul of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue with its findings on how farmers have been financially harmed by President Donald Trump’s trade feuds, the Republican tax code rewrite and other sensitive issues.”

The story pointed to a 2018 ERS report that had wound up in The New York Times, and which found that much of the benefit from tax breaks in Trump’s tax bill “are accrued by higher-income farm households.” The Times quoted unnamed ERS economists who believed the move was “retribution for producing work that clashed with the administration’s agenda.”

USDA leadership consistently denied the move was meant to silence or retaliate against ERS or NIFA. But critics noted the irony of the highly regarded research agencies being kicked out of Washington based on what seemed like remarkably shallow reasoning.

“The deputy secretary only talked about the savings to USDA,” said Gale Buchanan, the USDA’s former chief scientist, on the conference call, after USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky had cited high rent, personnel costs and “quality of life issues” as motivations for the relocation.

“But in any kind of relocation, you’ve got to consider the total picture. This is what economists do so well!”

Investigators with the Government Accountability Office later supported Buchanan’s criticism, finding that the USDA had “omitted critical costs and economic effects from its analysis of taxpayer savings,” such as “costs related to potential attrition or disruption of activities for a period of time.”

The Agricultural & Applied Economics Association also estimated that “the cost to the nation of lost research amounts to $149–215 million,” and a group of statisticians working with the American Statistical Association wrote in 2022 that the ERS relocation “was marked by its abruptness, speed, and lack of consultation with Congress and stakeholders” and “epitomizes the ineffectiveness of internal agency agreements when officials in charge seem not to be acting in good faith for the mission of a statistical agency.”

After Mulvaney’s remarks in August 2019 — that the relocations and subsequent mass resignations were “a wonderful way to streamline government” — the Trump administration’s motivations grew clearer.

“When I heard [Trump say] ‘We’re going to drain the swamp,’ I thought he was going to get rid of all the lobbyists, but what he meant was, ‘We’re going to get rid of all of these federal employees,’” said Bewick, the NIFA union leader. Referring to Mulvaney’s comments about the relocation leading to resignations at ERS and NIFA, Bewick said, “That’s exactly what happened. And that, I think, was the whole purpose. To take these senior people, and really pressure them [to leave].”

“I think the people at the head of the [White House budget office] at the time were the people who were actually hostile to government research and government statistical agencies, and I think they were perfectly happy to see if they could damage them,” MacDonald said. “I think they took a day making up reasons after they made their decision.”

Moore said that even if he sympathized with Perdue’s stated reasons for the relocation, Mulvaney’s remarks described “a rather mercenary way to handle an issue.”

Offutt was more direct. When Mulvaney bragged about “draining the swamp” by forcing people to move cross-country, she said, he’d simply “said the quiet part out loud.”

The USDA’s Crown Jewel

Perhaps most frustrating for affected employees were the seemingly hollow reassurances from the USDA’s leaders. Perdue, for example, had said in his announcement of the relocation that “none of this reflects on the jobs being done by our ERS or NIFA employees,” and Dodson described a heated meeting with USDA officials, including Deputy Secretary Censky, that “devolved into them telling us that we were ‘a crown jewel of USDA,’ and us shouting at them, ‘Then why are you doing this to us?’”

A spokesperson for Censky, who served as CEO of the American Soybean Association both before and since his brief stint in the Trump administration, declined an interview request.

Nevertheless, the move chugged along. As dozens of interested cities put their names forward to host the USDA researchers, the USDA hired Ernst and Young, the prominent accounting firm, to narrow down the options. In March 2019, a Perdue advisor told members of Congress that 253 ERS employees and 315 NIFA employees would be relocated, compared to just 96 employees between the two agencies who would be left in Washington, many of whom worked on sensitive commodities programs or in administrative offices.

Soon after, employees at both agencies voted overwhelmingly to unionize with the American Federation of Government Employees, with many citing frustration with the relocation as their reason for joining the effort.

“There’s been no interest in finding out how this would affect our work, or what it would do to the stats we create on a weekly or monthly basis,” one unnamed ERS employee told Government Executive in February 2019 in the midst of the union drive. The relocation, the person added, is “just one example of the many ways there can be threats to our ability to further our mission.”

Workers were right to be worried about the relocation’s impact on their research.

In May, employees tracking the exodus found that non-retirement departures from ERS had more than doubled over the previous three-year average, Politico reported.

By the time USDA officials announced in June 2019 that the majority of both agencies would relocate to the “Kansas City Region” — they didn’t specify which state, although the agencies currently share an address in Missouri — ERS and NIFA were already hemorrhaging staff. At NIFA, Bewick said, “We had essentially lost half of our workforce” in less than a year.

At an all-hands meeting for the Kansas City announcement, employees stood and turned their backs on Perdue in protest. They were given just a month to declare their intentions, though the timeline was later extended until Sept. 30.

“This is the brain drain we all feared, possibly a destruction of the agencies,” Jack Payne, then the University of Florida’s vice president for agriculture and natural resources, told The Washington Post in July after a USDA tally showed around two-thirds of affected employees declining the relocation.

By early October 2019 — just after the deadline to accept the move to Kansas City — ERS vacancies had skyrocketed. The Washington Post reported that staff numbers at both ERS and NIFA had dropped about 75% since the relocation. The Congressional Research Service later found that “about 75% of affected employees declined to relocate and left the agencies.” The same report, published in May 2020, found that compared to what the USDA said would be full staffing levels, “NIFA and ERS are operating with approximately 33% of their staff.”

‘The Agency Couldn’t Function’

The impact was immediate.

“Within the next six months [of the relocation], they realized the agency couldn’t function,” Dodson said. Management started hiring back people who’d left as short-term contract workers and rehired annuitants, but the losses were dramatic. “I would go into the office and there’d be nobody there. I didn’t have a supervisor, I didn’t have any teammates. People who I’d worked with on a 12-person team as a coordinator — everybody left.”

“The quality of things we’re working on is diminished from where we were before,” she said.

By the end of the year and into 2021, staffing at the agencies began to rebound, particularly following the onset of the COVID-19 remote work policies. Today, staffing levels are roughly at pre-relocation levels, though only a fraction of employees work in or near Kansas City, the union officials said, while most have been allowed to work from around the country, the result of remote work allowances that began after the start of the pandemic.

But the raw numbers belie a generational loss in expertise. The GAO report found that by the end of fiscal year 2021, “the majority of ERS (66 percent) and NIFA (79 percent) permanent full-time staff had worked there for 2 years or less” — the inverse of the pre-move statistics, when the vast majority of staff at both agencies had been there for longer than two years. “I calculated that more than 2000 years of ERS experience vanished in 3 months,” Marca Weinberg, a senior ERS economist who served as acting administrator during the move, told Science recently.

“I’m certain you’ve got some young and energetic new researchers for whom this is a great opportunity,” said one former ERS employee, who asked not to be named because he’s now working elsewhere in government. “But I do know that if somebody’s a career researcher, they’re often building on decades of work. And so you’re starting with a new group of folks who will need another decade or two to build that level of background work.”

“The organization was gutted,” the former employee said.

As a result of the move and subsequent staff exodus, “the agency’s statistical programs have been abridged and federal and state governments are suffering from inadequate agricultural statistics generally, but especially statistics to inform rural development, food assistance and security, and agriculturally related natural resource conservation policies,” the American Economic Association wrote in January 2021. That July, Spiro Stefanou, who had been tapped as ERS administrator the previous year, said ERS was “on a rebuilding mission – we are hiring aggressively after having lost about 70-plus percent of our staff.”

The number of reports produced by ERS plummeted, and researchers’ work grew more focused on key reports, just as the White House’s 2019 budget proposal had called for. Amid the turmoil, MacDonald said that ERS’s mandated data products — farm income forecasts, agricultural productivity growth estimates — became the priority and were published on time.

Even today, “I think we’re producing noticeably fewer [research products] than we would have done six or seven years ago,” he said, referring to fields like precision agriculture, genetic engineering and changes in antibiotic use in livestock production, a field where ERS has been a major player for years.

In recent years, consumers have demanded less antibiotic use in livestock, and producers, in turn, havedecreased it. But since the relocation, the ERS team studying these dynamics essentially “doesn’t exist anymore,” MacDonald said.

“There does appear to be significant reductions in antibiotic use in livestock,” he said, particularly in Europe and the United States. “We know there’s a lot going on, but we don’t have a great handle on it. And that’s what’s missing — that’s what we lost by losing that team of people.”

At NIFA, remaining staff scrambled to take on their departed colleagues’ work.

“I went from managing one program, and providing support for other programs, to managing seven programs,” Bewick said, stressing that his colleagues poured themselves into keeping the agency running.

Some programs weren’t offered at all; some grants were switched from competitive to noncompetitive, given the new difficulty of recruiting scientists for expert panels to review applications. “We used some administrative tools that we don’t normally like to use, but that are available to us,” he said.

“It was a quagmire, it was a slog,” said Jane Kolodinsky, professor emerita of community development and applied economics at the University of Vermont, who’s worked on NIFA-funded projects for years. “We were awarded a grant in 2019 that really didn’t get started until 2021, because of administrative burden and people having to re-learn the ropes… the wheels stopped turning.”

Lapses in institutional knowledge about long-term data-gathering projects also led to onerous efforts to reconstruct departed colleagues’ work. Dodson, for her part, had to learn a decades-old statistical program that her more senior predecessors had relied upon before leaving the agency.

“A lot of us were stuck learning the old code that people had left behind, trying to forensic-science our way into how it was done,” she said.

“It took several years to get the production of publications back to previous levels (if they are) due to the loss of researchers as well as editorial support staff,” Newman told HuffPost in an email. “Major research projects were abandoned mid-stream either because the authors left or parts of a research team left.”

The quality of ERS data itself was imperiled, as well: A 2022 report from the USDA’s inspector general found that a special ERS council created in 2014 to periodically “provide comprehensive evaluations of the agency’s data products” had in fact not completed any reviews between mid-2019 and late 2021. An ERS official said “the agency did not have the personnel to complete them.”

In a statement to HuffPost prior to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, a USDA spokesperson called ERS and NIFA “two of our nation’s premier scientific institutions” and said that under the Biden administration, both “have reached their hiring goals.”

“ERS continues to work with stakeholders to further expand the pipeline of agricultural economists and other technical positions,” the statement said. “NIFA leveraged several recruiting tools to attract national experts to meet the agency’s workforce needs.”

‘You Don’t Start With Social Security’

As current and former ERS and NIFA employees look back on the past five years, many do so with a wary eye toward the future.

Trump, in his first days back in office, has taken aim squarely at federal workers, going to war against “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” programs, purging over a dozen inspectors general, and instituting a gag order at health agencies. Grant reviews at the National Institutes of Health, which calls itself the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, have reportedly been frozen.

The only post in NIFA’s newsroom since Trump’s inauguration, titled “Notice: Funding Opportunities Under Review,” is just a few words long: “All NIFA Requests for Applications are currently under review,” it says, linking to a third-party email form for future updates.

Trump has also pursued an aggressive stance against remote work and could ultimately require ERS and NIFA employees to report to Kansas City after most have been working from all across the country for years. Still, current and former employees who spoke to HuffPost didn’t dwell on personal hardship: All who left ERS found jobs elsewhere, mostly within the federal government or in related fields.

Instead, they were worried about others in the federal government whose work might put them in the new administration’s crosshairs.

“Maybe there was a logic to starting with two really obscure agencies at USDA,” Offutt said. “If you’re going to do it as a test, you don’t start with Social Security.”

Now Trump — flanked by JD Vance, Russ Vought and Elon Musk — has made what Steve Bannon once called “deconstructing the administrative state” a key priority.

Project 2025, the authors of which now populate the Trump administration, calls for relocating regional EPA offices, putting the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in Pittsburgh — “to recognize that the agency is field-driven and should be headquartered in the coal field” — and separating the Air Traffic Organization from the Federal Aviation Administration “and relocat[ing] it to separate headquarters outside the District of Columbia.”

Project 2025 also calls for moving the Bureau of Land Management back to Grand Junction, Colorado. The bureau was moved there during Trump’s first term in a relocation strikinglysimilar to the USDA relocations. But the Biden administration partially reversed the move in 2021, with a BLM press release saying that the move “failed to deliver promised jobs across the West and drove hundreds of people out of the agency.”

After both the BLM and USDA agency moves, the diversity of bothagencies’ workforces plummeted.

The New York Times also reported a few days after Election Day that some on Trump’s transition team were discussing moving the EPA headquarters — and 7,000 EPA employees — out of Washington, D.C.

ERS and NIFA veterans said if Trump emulated their relocation experience elsewhere, particularly at other research agencies, it risked empowering big players with their own research budgets, ceding ground to those with corporate or partisan agendas.

Without unbiased research, MacDonald said, “you’re left relying on people with an ax to grind, which might be industry people, or it might be advocates for tighter or looser regulation, each of whom is arguing in their own interests, and often with cherry-picked or poor information.”

“There’s always going to be lots of partisan voices out there,” Newman said. With the loss of institutional knowledge at ERS, “It just means there’s oneless source that can be considered neutral,” she said. “There’s one less voice that’s going to be a completely trusted, neutral source.

“Public goods are hard to measure. They’re hard to value. It is, then, difficult to say what is lost,” Offutt reflected. “In the case of ERS, there’s less knowledge available outside a very small part of the government about what your tax dollars are doing. People should know these things.”

Otherwise, she said, “it opens the door for special interests to control the agenda.”