The Department of Agriculture will relocate a majority of its Washington-based workforce to five other locations and shutter several key facilities in the capital region, including its main research center, the agency announced Thursday.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told employees in a video message that the move is aimed at reducing costs and moving the agency’s workforce, which is already primarily scattered across the country, “closer to the people we serve.” About 2,600 out of 4,600 employees will be relocated to Salt Lake City; Fort Collins, Colorado; Indianapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

The agency will also vacate the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, as well as an office building in Washington, D.C., and the Alexandria, Virginia, office for the Food and Nutrition Services. The agency is not leaving its main headquarters, which is called the Whitten Building; the Yates Building, where the Forest Service has offices; or the National Agricultural Library.

“In the coming months and where applicable, my team will be notifying your offices with more information on relocation to one of those five regional hubs,” Rollins told the staff.

The move comes as the Trump administration has sought to reduce its footprint in Washington. In February, federal agencies were instructed to submit “any proposed relocations of agency bureaus and offices from Washington, D.C., and the National Capital Region to less-costly parts of the country” by mid-April.

The General Services Administration - the government’s real estate arm - had previously posted a list of 443 federal properties it deemed “noncore,” making them potentially eligible for sale, in March. The list included the Agriculture Department’s South Building just off the National Mall. GSA took the list down hours later.

In addition to moving the staff from Washington, the department is also downsizing staffing in other parts of the country. An agency memo said the Agriculture Research Service will close area offices, the Forest Service will phase out nine regional offices over the next year and reduce research stations to one in Colorado and other subagencies will reduce their spread to five hubs.

Among the reasons that the agency cited for the moves was the costs of maintenance for the office buildings for the closures. An Office of special counsel report released last month substantiated whistleblowers’ reports of unsafe and deteriorating conditions at the agency’s flagship research facility in Maryland.

Rollins also attributed the move to the higher cost of living in the Washington region while acknowledging that the change could upend the lives of employees and their families in the area.

“While this is a strategic and long-term decision for USDA, I know that for you, this is an immediate and potentially major change,” Rollins said. “I know that your primary concern at this moment is for you, your families and your colleagues. I want you all to know that this decision was not entered into lightly.”

Several Agriculture employees told The Washington Post that they fear the reorganization will imperil their agency’s ability to keep providing several services to the public, from soil research to fire prevention to two-sided negotiations with Native American tribes over land management, partly because the reshuffling of research stations spread across the United States. The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Shutting down those laboratories will stymie innovation and increase the risk of severely harmful weather events, one employee said.

The employee pointed out that U.S. Forest Service researchers played a key role in developing methods to convert logging leftovers - like stumps or treetops - into usable wood products. Other Agriculture research stations, the employee added, study soil conditions to prevent another event like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when severe dust storms ripped across America and Canada, inflicting massive damage on ecosystems and crops.

“These were the offices created to prevent that from ever happening again, and now we’re closing them down,” the employee said.

“There are already big dust storms that blanket everything out, they already cross Arizona and New Mexico. What’s going to happen when they start crossing Nebraska and other Midwestern states?”

The shuttering of regional offices, the employee continued, will deprive the agency of staff who monitored the safety of wildfire responses, from checking that helicopters flew in safe paths to overseeing inexperienced firefighter teams. Those closures likewise nix the agency’s ability to involve Native American tribes in determining how Forest Service land is managed, the employee said.

Another employee predicted the relocations will spur a wave of retirements and resignations across the Agriculture Department, all while officials are forced to spend a large amount of money to facilitate the various moves required for staff who stay.

“The department will likely lose hundreds of more years of work experience,” the second employee said. “And while some costs may be saved in salaries, relocating large numbers of employees and equipping these hubs to serve as their offices will be an incredibly expensive endeavor for the taxpayer.”

During the first Trump administration, the department relocated two research agencies to Kansas City, Missouri, a move that shocked the federal workforce and stirred outrage among some lawmakers.

In the months following the 2019 relocation announcement, department data showed that two-thirds of USDA employees decided to leave their jobs rather than move, The Post reported at the time. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that USDA’s decision at the time “omitted critical costs and economic effects from its analysis of taxpayer savings, such as costs related to potential attrition or disruption of activities for a period of time, which may have contributed to an unreliable estimate of savings from relocation.”

Two of the impacted facilities this time are in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which has faced one economic hit after another in recent months. The federal workforce that helped build Prince George’s into one of the nation’s wealthiest majority-Black counties continues to be hollowed out amid the administration’s reshaping of the federal government. And, after a 15-year effort to entice the FBI to move to the Maryland suburbs, the state’s leaders are preparing to fight the Trump administration’s decision to keep the agency’s headquarters in D.C.

The Beltsville Agriculture Research Center will be “vacated over multiple years to avoid disruption of critical USDA research activities,” according to Thursday’s department announcement. The nearby George Washington Carver Center will be “sold or transferred upon conclusion of its use as a temporary location for USDA personnel.”