By Trevor Bach, The Dallas Morning News
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is moving some roles from the Washington, D.C.-area to Dallas-Fort Worth, the federal agency announced Wednesday.
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The roles fall under the umbrella of the USDA’s Rural Development arm, which offers various loan and grant programs designed to help rural Americans with housing, infrastructure, healthcare and other needs.
The bureaucratic operation oversees a loan portfolio of more than $200 billion and counts several thousand employees in Washington, D.C. and hundreds of offices around the country, including one in McKinney that’s responsible for programs in Collin, Cooke, Dallas, Denton, Fannin, Grayson, Hunt, Kaufman, Palo Pinto, Parker, Rockwall and Tarrant counties.
The USDA is relocating some positions from the D.C. area to D-FW to create a new “operational hub” that will support loan and grant processing and program management, according to a news release. The agency is also creating a new hub in St. Louis as part of the same initiative.
Further details about the relocation, including how many roles are being moved and whether the operation will be based at the existing McKinney office, were not immediately clear. A representative for the USDA did not immediately respond to questions from The Dallas Morning News about the move on Wednesday.
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While the relocation comes as part of a broad effort by the Trump Administration to reduce the federal government’s footprint in Washington — as a candidate in 2024 Trump said he wanted to move 100,000, or roughly one in three, federal jobs out of the capital, expanding on a similar initiative from his first term — USDA executives this week framed the moves to D-FW and St. Louis as an effort to more efficiently serve rural communities.
“When rural communities collaborate with USDA they deserve a streamlined experience,” Stephen Vaden, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, said in a statement. “This reorganization injects new attention to our systems and processes that will eliminate unnecessary layers of bureaucracy, improve our ability to engage with our customers and conduct responsible oversight of federal investments.”
The USDA, an agency now led by the Glen Rose-native Brooke Rollins, announced last year that it would undergo a broad restructuring that included vacating a Maryland research center and moving more than half of its nearly 5,000 Washington-based employees to five hubs around the country, prompting criticism from a major federal employee union.
The agency’s Rural Development division has around 3,000 total employees nationwide, less than half of its total staff in 2005, according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, an advocacy group. Last year, the division lost around 1,500 employees — including over 30% of its staff in Texas — from DOGE-related reductions, according to the group.
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