Like many government agencies, the Department of Agriculture has a fraught history with discrimination and disenfranchisement. Farmers of color and young and beginning producers have long struggled to access capital, in the form of loans and grants, from the agency.
So in 2022, former President Joe Biden’s USDA created the Regional Food Business Centers program using funding from the American Rescue Plan. The program established 12 virtual centers to function as business development resource hubs within rural communities nationwide. The centers were intended as a way to provide technical assistance, navigate federal and state resources, and administer grants to small- and mid-sized farmers and ranchers who wanted to develop food businesses or access new markets. The overall goal was to build a more resilient food system.
A total of roughly $400 million was earmarked to support the 12 centers, each run by a coalition of organizations and partners based in each region, which the USDA agreed to fund for five years. In 2024, many began distributing sub-awards from that pool of funds in the form of “business builder” grants.
In early January, Ed Harvey, a Navajo farmer in rural northern Arizona, was awarded a technical assistance contract dedicated to assisting Indigenous producers from the Southwest Regional Food Business Center, which was created to strengthen local supply chains throughout Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. Not only does he grow apples, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, cherries, and sumac berries, but Harvey runs a consulting business geared toward helping other Navajo tribal members through all of the paperwork needed in order to begin or continue farming on their land.
Much of the farmland throughout Navajo Nation is left idle, buried in layers of dirt, wind deposits, and towering weeds, with slivers of corn, squash, and melons here and there. Harvey attributes the situation to the federal mandate that tribal members need a permit with a conservation plan in order to use their land for agricultural production. It’s an exceedingly onerous application process, and the reimbursable RFBC funding was intended to cover the costs associated with the development of conservation plans for other tribal members. When he heard he was selected for the program, Harvey was elated, and immediately began advertising the opportunity to work with him free of charge: He reached out to community farm boards, promoted it across all of the reservation’s chapter houses, and even posted flyers in local businesses.
That sense of joy morphed into one of sinking despair when, the following month, President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly froze the program’s funding, and a tsunami of layoffs at USDA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs saw thousands of federal workers leave their positions. The month of February, Harvey said, was the “worst of my life.”
“It hurt me. It hurt the business,” he said. “I did a lot of conservation plans for free, not getting paid for it, because I expressed to people that it’s paid for, so I didn’t want to let it ruin my reputation.” While the fate of the centers remained in purgatory, Harvey scrambled to remedy the damage done, completing 36 conservation projects at no charge, the equivalent of hundreds of unpaid hours and thousands of dollars worth of labor — a huge net loss.
Finally, on July 15, the USDA announced it was shuttering the program, a decision that was met with considerable opposition across food and farming sectors. And just like that, Harvey’s big plans for his community went up in smoke.
“This was a program fully dedicated to support rural people. So I was thinking, ‘Heck, yeah, I can support my relatives who live in the middle of nowhere. I can find a way to help my uncle, to help with what he needs by planting corn,’” said Harvey. “Out here in Navajo Nation, you have to take in the fact that there’s very limited opportunities for people to make money. The tribe here, we live on government assistance…people don’t have that dedicated time to give back to the land, to give back to who they are. It takes funding mechanisms or opportunities to find [it].”
Ed Harvey
In the press release announcing the end of the RFBCs, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins criticized the Biden administration for creating the RFBCs “without any long-term way to finance them,” which the release described as a “COVID-era program.” The release also specified that “over 450” grants so far awarded would be honored — which meant that roughly four of the centers that hadn’t yet officially awarded their grant selections had 60 days to cease operations, and the other eight overseeing those awards would end next May. But even those centers still operating through next spring won’t be running at full capacity, as the cancellation limits the scope of what each center can do to no more than merely monitoring awards and technical assistance for existing grants. Rollins also stated that “any remaining funds will be repurposed to better support American agriculture.” As of this story’s publication, the details of that repurposing are not yet known.
Roughly a week after the USDA announced the end of the RFBCs, Rollins released a memo that again took the agricultural world by storm. The five-page document revealing Rollins’ plan to significantly reorganize the agency was accompanied by an unlisted YouTube video intended for employees, which also broadly detailed the four pillars powering the decision: ensuring the size of the agency’s workforce aligns with available resources and priorities, bringing USDA closer to those it serves by relocating resources, getting rid of bureaucracy, and paring down redundant support functions.
According to current and former USDA staffers, the closure of the country’s regional food business centers and the agency’s reorganization rollout should not be considered as separate developments, but rather as successive decisions with intertwining impacts. Both moves are expected to have lasting effects on historically underserved rural communities in particular, where farmers and families are already facing the day-to-day impacts of a shrinking federal workforce in local offices. That’s to say nothing of the growing role of climate change in throttling agricultural production and amplifying economic stressors such as increased price volatility, trade war disruptions, and surging labor and production costs.
“To me, there is a real friction here between those in the administration that simply want to diminish, destroy, and decimate the federal workforce and any sort of policy goal that is aimed at improving the lives of Americans and reducing costs for those who live in rural communities,” said Michael Amato, former USDA communications director. So far in his second term, Trump’s USDA has gotten rid of more than 15,000 federal employees, nearly a fifth of its workforce, straining bureau capacity, even as the agency has culled billions of dollars in funding streams that, in the process, has buckled local and regional food systems. At least ten percent of the federal employees who have left the USDA this year worked for Rural Development, the nation’s lead agency that fights rural poverty.
“If there was some policy objective, then it’s lost on me, because I don’t see how simply just cutting funds to try to run up your DOGE score as high as possible, and calling for deferred resignations across the entire department with no strategic plan about where you see waste or where you see bureaucratic bloat,” Amato continued. “It just seems like a meat axe approach with the goal of shrinking the department.”
Rollins did not specify a timeline for the plan, nor did she share many details of how it will be carried out, but noted that the agency will move more than half of the roughly 4,600 D.C. area employees out of the capital area. According to Rollins, the five hubs, located in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kansas City, Missouri, Indianapolis, Indiana, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, would bring the USDA closer to its “core constituents.” The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Multiple current USDA employees told Grist that not even they have been briefed on the details of the reorganization. “We haven’t been given any more information than is publicly available,” said one USDA employee who is based in D.C. and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. “It’s been unsettling. Morale is low. It has not been a great work environment, just because everyone feels insecure right now.”
“The relocation is actually going to be moving many of our regional office partners farther from the states that they cover,” the staffer continued. “The logic is just not there. It doesn’t make sense. And the claim that they’re moving up closer to the people we serve, is just patently false.” The USDA staffer added that the mass layoffs experienced have already resulted in overworked employees and significant delays in processing financial assistance applications. “There are things falling through the cracks,” they said.
On Thursday, August 21, a letter addressed to Rollins and signed by 32 USDA unions, and shared with Grist, also expressed widespread concerns about the reorganization. It noted that over 90 percent of USDA employees already live and work outside of the D.C. area and urged the department to “slow down, engage with Congress and the labor unions in good faith, and fully assess the true impacts of this reorganization before proceeding further.”
“We are just trying to call attention to how poorly planned the USDA reorganization is, that they seem to be hiding whatever details that they have,” said Ethan Roberts, a physical science technician at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service based in Peoria, Illinois, who represents the bargaining unit employees at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president. “There’s something going on. When I talk to the management in this building, they don’t know anything. They’ve not been told anything.
“Why this is incredibly harmful is because the USDA is already struggling administratively,” Roberts continued. “Here in my laboratory, the management and the admin are taking on two to three jobs just to keep up to try and make everything continue to function. If we lose even more people in D.C., at the highest levels of the human resources department, and our budgeting and our billing, it’s going to be catastrophic. There’s going to be a critical administrative failure.”
The lack of clarity has prompted plenty of congressional backlash, too. When news of the reorganization broke, a Senate hearing was swiftly assembled where a bipartisan contingency of Democrats and Republicans grilled Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Stephen Vaden about the unusually secretive nature of the rollout of the reorganization. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry ranking member Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, said at the hearing that the committee first heard of the plan just minutes before it was announced.
“It is clear from the hearing that this is a half-baked reorganization plan developed without input from Congress or stakeholders that will almost certainly result in worse services for farmers, families, and rural communities,” Senator Klobuchar later told Grist. She noted that the reorganization “follows the cancellations or delays of funds for voluntary conservation programs that protect our environment and improve farmers’ bottom lines.”
Klobuchar and some of her colleagues on the Senate Agriculture Committee sent a letter to Vaden on Monday requesting more time to comment on the plan and increased transparency with the results of the agency’s ongoing public comment period. The letter followed at least two others that have been issued in the last month by groups of lawmakers demanding more information. Nearly all have referred to the first Trump administration’s relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which resulted in the resignation of three quarters of employees, and declining workforce productivity.
Kevin Shea, a 45-year veteran of USDA who led the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for 11 of those years, and briefly served as Secretary of Agriculture during the Biden administration, points to the USDA’s claim that the reorganization plan will bring staffers closer to constituents as one example of the contradictions at play. “This whole ruse about being closer to farmers — what nonsense. They’re still going to be in cities hundreds of miles from farmers,” said Shea.
What’s more, the RFBC program wasn’t solely addressing an immediate food system crisis that became clear because of the pandemic, he said, but “it was addressing a problem that had been revealed. The problem was always there.” A USDA report released last October found that the RFBCs led to more than 2,800 individuals receiving technical assistance, 1,500 new partnerships formed by recipients, and 287 businesses reporting increased revenue as a result of the program. Other critics of the Trump administration’s decision to cancel it have argued the program was established to meet a $4 billion congressional mandate in the American Rescue Plan to build more resilient food systems.
Another current USDA employee based in D.C., who also asked to remain anonymous, told Grist that the double blow of the closure of the regional food business centers and the proposed relocations “is going to result in massive harm to rural America which, again, is a population that they purport to care about.” “There’s no particular rhyme or reason that we can tell,” the staffer said, while pointing out where the new hubs aren’t. “California is the biggest agriculture state in the country, and there’s not a hub there. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“For farmers and people that rely on the USDA for information, for money, it’s going to be poorer quality service and less of it because there’s just going to be less people working,” said Roberts, the USDA union president. “If we experience an even greater loss of the administrative staff that keeps the USDA running, by telling them that they need to pick up their entire lives and move to somewhere across the country, the USDA is going to grind to a halt.”
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Ayurella Horn-Muller grist.org
