Some of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 4,600 Washington, D.C.-based employees will soon be moving to the Kansas City area.
In a video shared with employees on July 23, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that more than half of the department’s D.C.-based employees will be relocated to five cities across the country, including Kansas City, Missouri.
The department is “moving our key services outside Washington, D.C., to ensure that USDA is located closer to the people we serve while also providing a more affordable cost of living for our employees and their families,” Rollins said in the video.
Only 10% of USDA staff currently work in and around Washington, but those employees receive a 33.94% adjustment to their base salaries, known as a “federal salary locality rate,” to adjust for the cost of living.
The D.C. rate is one of the highest in the country, Rollins said in a news release. In the Kansas City region, the federal locality rate is 18.97%.
By relocating staff to other areas, including Salt Lake City; Fort Collins, Colorado; Indianapolis; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Kansas City, the department will be able to pay lower locality rates and reduce employees’ salaries.
The announcement comes after the Trump administration spent months cutting federal positions and agencies in an effort to reduce what it considers bureaucratic bloat and overspending.
“I want to be clear here that this is an announcement of a reorganization, not a large-scale workforce reduction,” Rollins said in the video. “This reorganization takes into account the employees that made the decision to opt into the Deferred Resignation Program, or DRP, earlier this year.”
During the first few months of the Trump administration, more than 15,300 USDA employees opted into the Deferred Resignation Program, which offered qualifying federal employees across departments the opportunity to resign from their positions with an eight-month paid buffer period through September 2025.
The department is reportedly looking to reduce the number of staff in the D.C. area from 4,600 to 2,000. It is not yet clear how many of those employees may be moving to the Kansas City area.
Rollins said her announcement “is only the first phase of a multi-month process.”
“Over the next month and where applicable, USDA senior leadership will notify offices with more information on relocation to one of the regional hubs,” she said.
Kansas City has a long history with the USDA and in 2019 was home to thousands of department employees.
In 2019, President Trump’s then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced the department would be moving its Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture from Washington to Kansas City.
The move drove the exodus of more than half of both agencies’ staffs and caused a significant drop in productivity, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. The report said that although the agencies rebounded over the next several years, they continued to be plagued by a loss of institutional knowledge and lack of diversity as a result of the move.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
