By Leah Douglas
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that the agency is not planning to close any of the country’s 4,500 Farm Service Agency offices that serve farmers.
The USDA has lost more than 15,000 staff who took a financial incentive program to quit, according to an agency briefing with Congressional staff last week.
The administration of President Donald Trump has used such incentives, known as deferred resignation programs, as part of its effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce.
About 1,100 of those leaving the agency worked at the FSA, which administers farm loans and provides technical support to farmers at its locations around the country. Two-thirds of those were county staff.
Rollins said while testifying before the agriculture subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee that “it is not in our plan” to close any FSA offices, but that the USDA is working to develop online technical assistance that may mean less reliance on in-person services in the future.
Rollins said that the agency is recruiting to rehire staff to critical roles that were vacated, including those in FSA county offices, wildland firefighters in the U.S. Forest Service, and staff at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which handles animal disease outbreaks like bird flu.
She said several hundred requests to enroll in the financial incentive program were declined because the staff roles were too important.
“Have we done it perfectly? No,” she said of the staff moves.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas in Washington, Editing by Franklin Paul and Marguerita Choy)
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