In the past year, the Trump administration has worked to dramatically reduce the federal workforce and—with the support of the Republican-led Congress—slash spending on the social safety net. A move by the Agriculture Department to reorganize the agency that oversees federal nutrition programs could further complicate low-income Americans’ ability to access the assistance they depend upon to stay healthy and avoid food insecurity.
As part of the larger reorganization of the Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees the nation’s 16 federal food and nutrition programs, most agency employees will be required to move to five new “hubs” across the country. The USDA is also expected to shutter most of the seven current regional offices across the country, as well as the current agency headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. The agency—which is also being rebranded as the Food and Nutrition Administration—will maintain a small footprint in Washington, D.C., according to the USDA.
Rather than overseeing nutrition programs based on regions, the new hubs will be divided by program area, with the intention of providing support from a centralized location. The Trump administration argues that moving oversight of these programs to new hubs will make it easier for officials to connect participants across the country. USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden told congressional Democrats that “each hub will have programmatic experts able to assist all states in their execution of USDA’s nutrition programs.” Vaden has also said that the move “reduces duplicative management and complexity within the agency.”
Perhaps the most major relocation will be that of the headquarters for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which serves around 40 million people, to Indianapolis. But Kate Howe, executive director of the Indy Hunger Network in Indianapolis, expressed skepticism that the relocations would actually do much to help SNAP participants in her city.
“We’re creating these silos of programs that will operate in a much more isolated fashion, and then the efficiencies of being in one place together will be lost,” said Howe. “I can’t imagine that having the SNAP office here will make a difference in terms of customer service. It simply seems like moving an administrative office from one place to another.”
Last year, Vaden told a House committee that he believed employees based in and around D.C. would be willing to move due to that region’s flagging job market. But given that many current FNS employees are located in cities with regional hubs that will be closing, this reorganization won’t just apply to workers in the national capital area. A recent internal survey by the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 226, which represents FNS workers, found that around 80 percent of respondents—comprising around a third of the agency’s 1,200 employees—were unwilling to relocate to keep their jobs.
“They already have a regional structure in place that’s been working. There’s nothing that indicates why that’s not working,” said Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union. “This has just not been well thought through, and is ill-conceived.”
Greenwald added that it would be far more difficult for FNS employees to “uproot” themselves and their families than the USDA suggests, and warned that the reorganization could cause a “brain drain” wherein the agency could lose staff with extensive institutional knowledge. There’s precedent for this possibility: When the USDA moved the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City in 2019, both agencies lost more than half of their staff. Although that number rebounded, the moves resulted in a loss in both employee diversity and productivity.
FNS employees often have a deep understanding of how nutrition programs are managed in their specific regions. For example, SNAP administration and access varies across states, with differences such as income requirements, benefit amounts, and even what food items can and cannot be purchased. It may be difficult to replace these employees, not only because it will take time to train up new workers but because working for the federal government is currently not a stable prospect—from repeated shutdowns to mass layoffs, to insecurity about whether a job can be relocated at any moment. The potential loss in staffing also comes amid a dramatic shrinkage in the federal workforce. More than 15,000 employees left USDA last year, accepting early retirement and deferred resignation offers.
Another key program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC—which assists around 6.7 million people, including around 40 percent of all infants born in the U.S.—will be moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Nell Menefee-Libey, senior public policy manager at the National WIC Association, said that administration of WIC was deeply reliant on the “close working relationships” between state agencies that administer the program and FNS staff on a regional and national level. The potential loss of those federal employees could make it more difficult for state officials to provide WIC benefits, or adjust to any changes.
“State WIC agencies rely on FNS staff for technical guidance to answer questions or troubleshoot issues as they arrive, for implementation of new policy initiatives, and to get federal resources out to the state level in a timely and appropriate manner,” said Menefee-Libey. Even if WIC recipients aren’t aware of the changes that are being made, she continued, they could soon feel their effects.
“I can absolutely understand how it feels sort of nebulous and removed from the day-to-day lives of new parents who rely on WIC to help them raise their kids, but it really is as simple as not having the guarantee that their benefits will get loaded onto their card on time,” said Menefee-Libey. “The state agency might not have the resources that they need to pay for those benefits, because the funds aren’t being dispersed from the regional office, because they don’t have the support that they need from the national office to get those dollars out the door.”
The timing of the relocations is still nebulous as the USDA continues negotiations with employee unions, but many of the regional offices are expected to close on a rolling basis as leases expire. Oversight of child nutrition programs will be moving to Dallas; emergency management to Denver; and research organizations to Raleigh, North Carolina. Retailer operations and compliance employees will move to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York City. Diane Pratt-Heavner, the spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, or SNA, raised concerns about the timing, given the “forthcoming introduction of new school nutrition standards.”
“SNA is concerned that so many staff have reported that they will not be relocating,” she said in a statement. “We worry about the loss of institutional knowledge.”
The reorganization also comes after Congress dramatically slashed SNAP last year, pushing more of the cost of administration and benefits onto states over the next several years. The percentage of benefit costs that a state pays will depend on its rate of overpayments or underpayments. As the Food and Nutrition Administration determines SNAP error rates on a national and state level, a dip in staffing could make calculating those rates ever more difficult.
“We’re just worried about the impact on the state agency trying to rapidly scale up to meet the new federal requirements,” said Howe. “The loss of institutional knowledge at a time when everything is changing is only going to have negative impacts on people trying to access benefits, because there will be fewer trained and knowledgeable people to help them.”
Ultimately, Howe sees this change as a move to make nutrition programs more difficult to obtain, particularly since the law added new work requirements to SNAP last year. She has heard from a local food pantry in Bloomington that they’ve seen a 15 percent increase in visits in the past year, which they believe is “directly correlated to the decline in people accessing SNAP benefits.”
“It feels like this is part of a larger plan to reduce the effectiveness of the SNAP program, and we can’t afford that. We can’t afford to have the federal government step back from the obligation to make sure that people are fed,” Howe said.
