On a recent AgriTalk appearance, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden gave an update on the USDA reorganization which was first announced last year.
Most notably for farmers, he says the ongoing restructuring does not affect local Farm Service Agency offices.
“I’ve got good news for your listeners: our county FSA offices are completely unaffected by the reorganization. We’ve said that since the initial announcement that we were going to do this in the summer of last year. Those employees, whether they be in FSA or other farmer-facing agencies at the county level, they’re exactly where we want them, helping producers and not in Washington, D.C. There’s nothing to change there,” he told Chip Flory.
The focus of the restructure is two-fold:
- Right-size the agency to its budget
- Align agency staff closer to rural America
“What this reorganization primarily affects is our Washington, DC footprint, and shrinking it to fit the budget that the taxpayers can afford to provide us with, while ensuring that our employees are in locations closer to the communities that we serve, and they can take advantage of a much lower cost of the living than is here in Washington, DC, so they have a better quality of life,” he says.
As an example, he highlights the agency’s research facilities. Vaden says the agency eyes its partner Agricultural Resource Labs located at Land Grant Universities as the model to move into the future with.
The agency currently has 94 ARA labs, some of which are fully owned and led by USDA.
“There’s been a lot of focus on the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in suburban Maryland, when that facility was opened, it wasn’t suburban Maryland, that was rural countryside. Now it’s within the Washington, DC metroplex. That wouldn’t necessarily be horrible, except for the fact that the building is falling apart, and we have an Office of Special Counsel report that’s an independent government investigator telling us that that facility is a hazard to the employees who work there.”
Vaden says the goal of the effort is to invest in research, but in strategic locations with the best facilities.
“You can’t do world-class science in a facility where, when you go into labs, things are held together with duct tape, and garbage bags are taped on the ceiling to keep leaks from falling down on the scientists’ experiment tables. That is literally what is happening in Beltsville. I have seen it with my own eyes. We’ve got 94 other Agricultural Research Service labs located across the country, many of them at our premier land grant universities. Why in the world wouldn’t we be doing that research there instead of some broken down place in Maryland? It should have been done years ago.”
Earlier this week, USDA announced a $125 million annual program, the Research Facilities Act, to address deferred maintenance and modernize ag research facilities at Land Grant Universities.
USDA is relocating more than half of its positions from the Washington DC area to five hub locations it’s announced: Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah.
The goal is to have no more than 2,000 employees in the DC metro.
“It’s quite arrogant to think that the only people who are capable of doing this work, agricultural work, are in the Washington, DC metropolitan area,” Vaden said.
He says he’s not concerned about ‘brain drain’ for two reasons:
- There are people across the country who want to work for USDA
- The agency’s succession plan
As he explains, that succession plan is “We have a number of employees who’ve already indicated to us they’re excited about moving, and for those who aren’t, we’re taking common sense steps that corporations do every day. Where there are employees who have been with us for 30 years and are near retirement, we don’t expect those people to move. It doesn’t make logical sense. So, what we’re doing is we’re allowing those key critical people who have all that knowledge to stay here in Washington, DC.”
He continues, “We’re hiring their successor out in the field in one of our hub locations. Their successor will get to learn under the 30 year incumbent, and then when that incumbent takes their well-deserved retirement, their successor is already on the payroll, has been able to learn underneath them, and is in the field where we want them. This is what corporations do every day. We’re just applying it to the federal government right now.”
For more from Vaden on the agency’s priorities, here’s what he’s previously said.
