Federal employees who administer food stamps, school lunches and nutrition programs for pregnant women packed into a conference room in Northern Virginia this month to confront their bosses about a relocation they hoped would never come.
The Trump administration, they had learned a day earlier, intends to move forward with a plan to scatter them across the country, upending their lives in a move that opponents say could also disrupt benefits for millions of low-income families.
“Everybody in this room knows that most staff will leave because of this announcement,” one employee told Patrick Penn, deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services at the Agriculture Department, according to a transcript of the meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, reviewed by The Washington Post. “So I’m curious, how does the departure of most staff equal better customer service and continued good work?”
The reorganization plan, which includes renaming the department’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) the Food and Nutrition Administration, is part of a broader reordering first announced in July to move a majority of the Agricultural Department’s Washington-area staff to other places.
Employees at FNS oversee 16 programs with an annual budget that last year exceeded $140 billion. They include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps. The workers spent months hoping the plan would be scaled back or abandoned.
Instead, the employees got a warning April 30 that most of their jobs would soon be moved elsewhere, though the plan still faces union negotiations, possible legal challenges and questions about whether critics of the effort in Congress will stand in the way.
Under the reorganization, FNS staff will move from its Alexandria headquarters and seven regional offices primarily to five hubs in Indianapolis, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Missouri, and Raleigh, North Carolina. The relocations will force employees across the agency to move if they want to keep their jobs.
The FNS employs just under 1,200 people, nearly a third of whom work in the Alexandria headquarters, according to a Post analysis of federal worker data.
A footprint of about 100 people will remain in the Washington area to handle congressional relations, interagency coordination, regulatory work and policy matters, officials said. But the bulk of program leadership and staff will be dispersed.
Trump administration officials say the reorganization will help fight fraud, waste and abuse, while bringing services closer to the people they serve. At the meeting May 1, Penn told employees the move is not a reduction in force. “This is not a firing of anyone,” he said.
In 2019, when the first Trump administration relocated two smaller USDA research agencies from Washington to Kansas City, Mick Mulvaney — then President Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director — seemed to celebrate the resulting departures at a Republican gathering in South Carolina.
“You’ve heard about ‘drain the swamp.’ What you probably haven’t heard is what we are actually doing,” Mulvaney said. “ … By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out in the real part of the country,’ and they quit — what a wonderful way to sort of streamline government.”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins echoed the sentiment to Fox News after she announced the USDA-wide reorganization in July, recalling Trump “going down that escalator” and changing “politics in America forever.”
“From the beginning he talked about draining the swamp,” Rollins said. “… Fast-forward 10 years later, and this is literally what he has tasked his Cabinet to do, to deconstruct the administrative state in Washington, D.C.”
Rollins told Fox News she expected 50 to 70 percent of the department’s staff would be willing to move. Those who weren’t would be replaced. Moving government “out closer to the people in America,” she said, “is what the Founding Fathers envisioned. It’ll be cheaper, it’ll be more efficient, and we’ll be able to do better.”
After the announcement, a USDA analysis of public comments found overwhelming opposition. Of more than 14,000 unique comments submitted during a review period last year, 82 percent expressed negative sentiment toward the reorganization.
Democrats have decried the move.
“This is yet another escalation in the Trump administration and Republican’s war on food assistance programs and against hungry Americans,” Rep. Angie Craig (Minnesota), the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement to The Post.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said the plan “raises serious questions.”
“With families facing rising costs, the Department should be strengthening these programs — not taking actions that will result in loss of expertise and capacity or that make it harder for American families to put nutritious meals on the table,” Klobuchar said in a statement.
The 2019 relocations of the smaller USDA agencies, the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, resulted in about two-thirds of employees declining to move and losing their jobs, according to a tally by the department.
Organizations whose members work closely with FNS are expressing alarm over the latest announcement. The National WIC Association’s members include directors of state and local agencies tasked with administering the program. “There is deep concern from within our membership that this will be very, very disruptive,” Georgia Machell, the association’s president and CEO, said in an interview.
A group of House Democrats who represent jurisdictions in the Washington region called the plans for FNS “a mass layoff and illegal reorganization under the guise of a relocation.”
“In short, this move will be a disaster,” the lawmakers said in a statement. “We will do everything we can to fight it and eventually reverse it.”
The FNS workforce fell from about 1,600 employees to about 1,400 during Trump’s first term, federal worker data shows. It rose to nearly 1,800 under President Joe Biden. Then it shrank by about 500 employees under the U.S. DOGE Service initiative.
Remaining employees who now face the prospect of relocation expressed bitterness during their meeting with Penn, raising concerns about those with children already enrolled in summer camps and families with loved ones in local elder care.
“Don’t say our voices matter but you’ve decided against our clear preferences,” one employee told Penn. “You wouldn’t call a last-minute session with a real plan that affects real people if you actually respected us, our service, our programs and the people we serve.”
When one employee asked who designed the new organizational structure, FNS Chief of Staff Shiela Corley replied: “It was not a consultant or a group, it was some leadership team members thinking through how to best deliver our programs.”
That response drew sharp criticism. “It clearly did not reflect an understanding of how we do business,” one employee said. “It did not include any input from us as leaders within our own line of work. … You took an integrated organization, a finely tuned organization, and made it into a siloed organization. This will be an embarrassment.”
Employees also challenged the administration’s assertion that the move would bring staff closer to the people they serve, considering most employees are already based in regional offices. Moving child nutrition program leaders from Alexandria to Dallas, one employee said, does not bring them closer to the rest of the country. “This is a narrative that’s been sold to push this move, and it’s not true,” the employee said.
Penn, who was a state representative in Kansas before Trump tapped him to be undersecretary, pushed back. “It’s not a narrative,” he said, according to the transcript. But he urged employees to avoid “rash decisions” while union negotiations and talks in Congress remain underway. “Nothing will move until the negotiations are completed,” he said.
For employees, the announcement brought no resolution — only more uncertainty. “As others have already said, there’s plenty of people that either can’t or won’t move when the time comes unless it remains local,” one worker told Penn.
“It’s been an exhausting year of not knowing how things are going to play out for us,” the worker said.
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