Senators pick at USDA reorganization proposal

Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden took questions from the Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday after the agency’s plan to slash its Washington offices and move staff to satellite locations across the country raised bipartisan eyebrows.

Much of the panel's criticism focused on whether the administration had sufficiently notified Congress — friction that led to Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), the committee’s chair, to call the hearing on relatively short notice.

In a testy exchange with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Vaden said that the department was opening up a period to consult with agency employees and other stakeholders. Several Republicans also took issue with the way the plan had been announced without their consultation.

“It is something that ultimately this Congress has something to say about, both from an authorization standpoint, and certainly from an appropriation standpoint,” said Sen. John Hoevan (R-N.D.). “Is this a process where we’re going to work together on an outcome, or is this an outcome that we’re not just going to talk about, but as a fait accompli?”

Hoeven and Vaden will meet later Wednesday, the senator said.

At the hearing, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) also expressed disappointment with the agency’s rollout of its plan, although she said she agreed with USDA’s overall goal.

The agency’s plan, announced last week, would move most staff to five hubs — in North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Utah — and wind down most of its federal buildings in Washington, D.C. 

Vaden defended the changes as an effort to bring the agency’s employees — many of whom he claimed were working remotely anyway — closer to farmers and other constituencies of the agency. He claimed that the consolidations, in conjunction with voluntary buyouts given to thousands of agency employees, could save the federal government as much as $4 billion.

At least 15,000 Agriculture Department employees accepted a deferred resignation in May as part of the Trump administration’s push to aggressively reduce staff.

“We need more agencies to follow Secretary Rollins’ and USDA’s lead,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said later in the panel.

The plan would also consolidate various regional offices that Vaden referred to as “middle managers,” a move that several senators worried could lead to services being lost. The reductions include the regional offices of the National Forest Service, which manages wildfires and other elements of America’s woodlands.

Several senators, including Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), said they were worried about the proposal’s move to eliminate regional offices of the agency’s research arm, including the branch of the Agriculture Research Service in Stoneville, Miss.

Vaden claimed that the location’s staff would remain, an answer that seemed to satisfy the Mississippi senator.