The Agriculture Department did not show that it analyzed how its sweeping reorganization would affect the economy, public services or taxpayer dollars before officials ordered thousands of employees to relocate across the country, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.
According to GAO auditors, the Trump administration ignored six requests over the past year to explain the math behind Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ July 2025 plan to relocate some 2,600 USDA jobs from Washington, D.C., to hubs across the country.
“Without such analysis, it’s not clear if USDA’s plans were based on leading practices, like strategic workforce planning, that would better position the agency to address possible effects,” the report reads.
Rollins’ announcement came amid a mass exodus of USDA employees driven by the Trump administration’s efforts to restructure the federal government. The USDA’s workforce shrunk by roughly 20% between December 2024 and March 2026, dropping from approximately 91,000 employees to less than 73,000, according to the GAO report.
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After receiving relocation notices this summer, many USDA employees based in the capital reported that they planned to leave their jobs.
A federal judge in the Northern District of California stayed much of the reorganization last month, finding USDA likely violated spending restrictions by using appropriated funds for the effort without notifying Congress. The department appealed to the 9th Circuit, which has left the stay in place for now.
During their eight-month investigation, GAO investigators said the USDA provided “little transparency” on the analysis driving Rollins’ reorganization decision — or whether any was conducted at all.
When given a draft of the watchdog report in September, she accused GAO auditors of “partisan shenanigans,” the report states. She also blamed the Biden administration for increasing the USDA’s workforce and pay despite no increase in its core constituencies.
Alongside her response, Rollins provided raw workforce attendance data for four of the department’s D.C.-area buildings and a 2024 Forest Service financial report.
They weren’t the records GAO auditors had been asking for.
“We analyzed these materials,” the report says, “but none of them represents documentation of analysis that informed the specific decisions laid out in the Secretary’s July 2025 memorandum, such as how the reorganization would impact service delivery and the economic effects of the reorganization.”
The GAO report also analyzed the impacts of previous relocation plans.
When the USDA moved two agencies to Kansas City, Missouri, in 2019, more than half of their staff left. Though employment numbers eventually rebounded, the number of employees with two or more years of experience fell by 60% at one of the agencies and 74% at the other.
The USDA’s reorganization plan called for relocating at least 2,600 of USDA’s roughly 4,600 headquarters and D.C.-area employees to five hubs in other cities, with a goal of keeping no more than 2,000 in the capital region. Rollins argued that vacating D.C. would save the department money.
Under the plan, the USDA would shutter D.C.-area offices at the South Building and Braddock Place, phase out the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center over several years while keeping the Whitten Building as headquarters.
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