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Vaden: USDA reorganization on track
The Deputy Secretary at the USDA says most elements of the agency’s reorganization are expected to be completed by the end of the year.
“We’re moving full speed ahead,” Stephen Vaden tells Brownfield.
He says thousands of USDA employees are expected to relocate out of Washington, D.C., as the agency moves mission areas to regional hubs across the country, and discussions are happening with labor unions.
“Every employee currently at USDA, his or her job is secure if they stay with the agency. No one will be asked to leave. There are no reductions in force planned.”
Vaden says farmers shouldn’t notice many changes in the day-to-day.
“They won’t notice changes at their Farm Service Agency county office. They won’t notice changes at their Natural Resources Conservation Service county office,” he says. “They won’t notice changes at their Rural Development county office. None of those employees are moving or even being bothered as a part of this reorganization.”
Considered one of the largest reorganizations of the USDA, the agency is assigning mission areas to five regional hubs, including Kansas City, Missouri; Raleigh, North Carolina; Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Salt Lake City, Utah.
At least five mission areas have already been assigned, including the Forest Service; Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services; Food Safety, Research, Education and Economics; and Research and Statistics agencies.
The relocation of one of the largest USDA mission areas, Farm Production and Conservation, hasn’t been announced yet.
“We do have a lot of FSA, and Farm Production and Conservation employees in Kansas City. I suspect we’ll be adding to that number.”
Vaden tells Brownfield the agency intends to have reorganization plans for the remaining mission areas soon.
“By the end of the month, every mission area will have had its reorganization announcement and will be fully into the implementation phase.”
There have been concerns that institutional knowledge would be lost if USDA employees were required to relocate, and Vaden responds.
“We’re going to keep the talent we currently have by ensuring those who are near retirement, those who have been with us for 20, 30 years may only have a couple more years to go, we don’t want to lose those people,” he says. “They’re going to stay with us. Their successors will be hired out in the field in our new hub locations. Those successors will be able to be trained up under these multi-decade experts who we’ll keep here. And then when they retire, as expected, the new position is permanently in the field, they’ve had the ability to be trained up, by the experts who are already here. And not only have we not lost institutional knowledge, we’ve ensured its continuity.”
He says the relocation is all about securing the future of the USDA.
“This is something that we have spent more than a year planning,” says Vaden. “We’re not going to screw this up.”
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I have almost 20 years in at USDA as do many of my coworkers. I can assure people reading this that what Baden says is not true. We are being required to relocate or give up our jobs. Most of us will not be relocating. So institutional knowledge will be lost.
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What. The. Actual. Heck? You drove employees with 35 plus years of taxer trained employees to retirement! You forced some of the brightest young talent who loved the mission out! You are not training the people left behind because you can’t! Then agreements…. You pulled out a mossberg 12 ga. – execution style kill shots- agreements with Ag Research Service leading Ag Universities. Those agreements were funding niche level expert work for agencies…. That decision ended many projects and careers. You didn’t screw it up. Sir you used that mossberg 12 ga in like fashion did the same again to the agencies.
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This has to be one of the worst thought out and planned reorganizations I have ever seen. As a management consultant working for a blue chip firm, these types of enormous reorgs, that encompass so many areas of expertise, affect so many important constituents and provide so many extremely important products and services to the American consumer is shameful. Any other management consultancy would have taken one to two years to do due diligence, understand any and all impacts to the many constituencies and employees and then put out a detailed analysis of the effects. This agency management does not appear to have done anything, they appear to be building the airplane while its flying. What expertise does an attorney like the undersecretary of the secretary have in these massive undertakings. It was tried in the first Administration and no one moved to the outlying regions and President Biden reversed it. Too late for many who lost jobs and joined the unemployment roles but then politics is politics I suppose.
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28 years of service and my position with REE is moving to Kansas city Vaden is lying !
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Bert captures a lot of how I feel, and I will add some more: If the agency expects long-tenured employees to stay and train successors, but those employees are the most likely to retire early in response to relocation pressure, the entire premise collapses. If he thinks you can transfer 20-30 years of institutional knowledge in a 1-2 year overlap, I’d like whatever he’s taking–that’s a pipedream. Furthermore, Vaden’s statement treats institutional knowledge as a pipeline, not a network. He also assumes retention without addressing morale or trust, and frames the reorg as a generational handoff rather than a structural upheaval. His whole messaging lacks genuine authenticity and an acknowledgement to ALL the elephant’s in that room.
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Vaden is lying here. He says, “Every employee currently at USDA, his or her job is secure if they stay with the agency. No one will be asked to leave. There are no reductions in force planned.” But that only sounds true if you ignore the actual choice we’re being given and that is move across the country or lose your job.
For ARS this probably means losing around 75% of our scientists. We have two months to decide, we still don’t know where some of us are even being sent, and to say yes we’d have to sell our homes, buy or rent somewhere new, uproot partners who have careers and family here, pull our kids out of their schools and away from friends, and spend tens of thousands of dollars with no guarantee any of it gets reimbursed. Most people aren’t going to do that, and he knows it.
He also says institutional knowledge will be preserved. It won’t. You can’t keep the expertise when you’re forcing out the people who have it. We are spending money to gut our own research agencies.
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So much tax payer dollars, loss of institutional knowledge, complete disregard for employees and their families, and disrespect to the farmers and ranchers as they are being lied to (again). It all could be avoided by embracing work from home. The foolishness is abhorrent. The savings from work from home is significant. But let’s be honest. Their real reason is to rid the government of African Americans, liberals, and anyone else that is not Trump loyalist. Move the employees closer to the farmers.. translates to give the jobs to white america.
As a former 41-year service employee of USDA, farmers are going to suffer significant reductions of services from the department.
The loss of experience and institutional knowledge has already been significant in many USDA agencies and when the reorganization is complete, the great agricultural community will see they’ve been fed a bag of propaganda untruths.
I wonder who will end up owning the washing D.C. USDA South building when it is sold? LOL 😂 it has been USDA headquarters since 1930! Let’s make the U.S.A. GREAT again! 😂