USDA relocation of food assistance employees will lead to major staffing losses, union warns

Many employees working in the Agriculture Department’s food assistance programs would rather quit their jobs than relocate across the country, according to an internal poll conducted by their union.

USDA announced last month that most Food and Nutrition Service employees will relocate to other parts of the country, after shuttering its Washington, D.C. headquarters and several of its regional offices.

But the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 226, which represents FNS employees, says more than 80% of staff who took an internal survey claim they will not relocate to keep their jobs. Another union survey of other USDA employees tapped to relocate found similar results.

About a third of all current FNS employees took the survey. The Food and Nutrition Service has a workforce of about 1,200 employees.

Union officials told Federal News Network that both bargaining-unit and non-bargaining-unit employees were invited to respond to the survey. They said the results align with what they’re hearing from the FNS workforce more broadly.

“The vast majority just cannot move for various reasons — family commitments, spouses that have careers,” one union official said. “Even those who would move, there’s some caveats. People said, ‘I might move short-term, but then I’m actively looking for another job.'”

Federal News Network has reached out to USDA for comment. A department spokesperson previously said in a statement that all 16 of its federal nutrition programs “will continue without disruption.”

NTEU Local 226 said that 81% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) employees, 78% of child nutrition employees and 90% of Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) employees who took the survey said they would not relocate.

FNS has already lost more than a third of its workforce since the beginning of the Trump administration. More than 15,000 USDA employees left last year after accepting deferred resignation and early retirement offers.

“These results confirm what we already know: mandatory relocations will force hardworking FNS employees to quit en masse,” NTEU Chapter 226 President Amy Rosenthal said in a statement. “It’s hard to imagine how FNS could possibly administer the crucial programs one in four Americans depend on after suffering a loss of this scale.”

The union warned that without full staffing, FNS employees will not be able to produce reliable data on SNAP overpayments and underpayments. The agency, it added, would also face challenges issuing grants and funding for disaster assistance. About 82 million Americans rely on FNS food assistance programs.

USDA is moving many more jobs across the country than it did under the first Trump administration — thousands, rather than hundreds — but expects fewer employees to turn down relocation offers this time around.

USDA moved hundreds of positions at the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City in 2019. But about 85% of impacted staff quit their jobs or retired, rather than relocate. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, which represents USDA researchers, said it expects to see similar results this year.

An internal survey conducted by the union earlier this month found that 76% of its members working at ERS and NIFA are not planning to relocate. AFGE Local 3403 said these relocations, which are expected to go into effect by the end of the summer, will trigger a “brain drain” within the department.

FNS is currently headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, and has seven regional offices across the United States. According to NTEU, the agency would shutter its headquarters and regional offices in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco under this reorganization plan.

Most impacted FNS employees will move to regional hubs that USDA designated last year, when it announced plans to relocate more than half of its D.C.-based headquarters workforce.

“We have employees in all the major time zones for the continental U.S., and that was intentional,” the NTEU Local 226 official said. “This would bring those ‘hubs’ that they’re calling them actually further away from a lot of those states. So it might make travel to those states more difficult.”

USDA, amid all these changes, is also rebranding the Food and Nutrition Service as the Food and Nutrition Administration.

While the USDA saw a high rate of attrition amid the first Trump administration’s relocation plans, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden told lawmakers last summer that department leaders expect fewer employees to refuse to move this time around, because mass layoffs across the federal workforce have made the job search more challenging in the D.C. area.

“I think many of them will choose to come, because given cuts made by other federal agencies here in Washington, D.C., the job market isn’t what it once was here,” Vaden told the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee last June.

Union officials said FNS employees have not yet received relocation notices or a timeline of when these relocations would occur.

USDA leaders say the reorganization plan is meant to bring employees closer to the farmers, ranchers and communities they serve, and will save money by moving employees to places with a lower cost of living.

But a union official said most FNS employees are not in public-facing roles. In limited circumstances, employees may deal with complaints from the public, or investigate cases of alleged discrimination or fraud.

“We might send out a team to investigate, but there’s no customer-facing office for FNS. We do all of our work pretty much on the computer,” the official said.

Joel Berg, chief executive officer of Hunger Free America, said in a statement that the potential disruption from employee relocations would occur as FNS is carrying out “a great deal more work” to implement major SNAP eligibility changes under the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act that Congress passed last summer.

“The so-called USDA Food and Nutrition Service reorganization is clearly meant to destroy the agency’s independent civil service workforce and crush a public employees union, rather than improve customer service to Americans,” Berg said. “If Congress allows these changes to be implemented, it could harm the agency’s vital work for a generation.”

USDA is embarking on a multi-part plan to relocate employees across its component agencies outside of the national capital region. About 90% of USDA employees already work outside of the D.C. area.

SNAP employees will be relocated to Indianapolis, Indiana. Employees who work in child nutrition programs will be relocated to Dallas, Texas.

Supplemental Nutrition and Safety Programs staff will be relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, and research programs employees will move to Raleigh, North Carolina. FNS employees who work in retailer operations and compliance will be moved to offices in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas and New York City.

In February, the USDA announced plans to sell one of its D.C. headquarters buildings, as part of its plan to move about 2,000 employees to five hubs across the country.

The department hasn’t provided many details on the total cost of this reorganization. But its budget request for fiscal 2027 states that it will cost more than $25 million to dispose of the USDA South Building and consolidate employees staying in the D.C. area to the nearby Jamie L. Whitten and Sidney R. Yates Federal Buildings.

The department is also embarking on a multi-part reorganization of the Forest Service that would move its headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, shutter its regional offices, and close up to three-quarters of its research facilities.

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email jheckman@federalnewsnetwork.com, or reach out on Signal at jheckman.29

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