The Trump administration has cut 21% of USDA's workforce, killed a $300 million program for new farmers, and redirected $14 billion in climate-specific funding — changes that disproportionately hurt small-scale agriculture while benefiting large industrial operations.
When Tom Brennan walked into his local NRCS office in eastern Iowa last March, two of the three desks were empty. The woman who remained told him she was covering three counties by herself. Brennan, who farms 200 acres of corn and soybeans, needed a routine field assessment. The kind of thing that used to take two weeks. He waited eleven. By the time someone came out, he'd already made his planting decisions without the soil data.
Brennan's experience is not an anomaly. In the first year of Trump's second term, the Natural Resources Conservation Service lost roughly 950 employees — about one in eight of its entire workforce. Those cuts are part of a broader USDA workforce reduction of approximately 26,000 positions, a rate nearly double the average across all federal agencies. The programs eliminated were oversubscribed, not underperforming. And the staff who left were soil scientists and conservation engineers working side by side with farmers, not paper-pushers in cubicles.
The conventional read on these changes is that they're just another round of government belt-tightening, a trimming of bureaucratic fat that won't affect the people who actually grow food. But the deepest cuts landed in rural field offices, not in Washington. And the funding that remains has been restructured in ways that channel it toward the largest operations and away from the small and mid-size farms most likely to adopt climate-smart practices.
The strongest counterargument from the administration is fiscal responsibility. A USDA spokesperson characterized the terminated Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access program as wasteful spending. But the program's advocates say USDA itself froze funding for months, then blamed grantees for failing to make progress on work they'd been blocked from completing.
A 12% Workforce Reduction That Hit Rural America Hardest
According to Inside Climate News, which analyzed Office of Personnel Management data, USDA lost approximately 26,000 employees — around 22% of its workforce — during the first year of Trump's second term, with cuts running roughly 1.8 times the average rate across all federal agencies.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service took the worst hit, losing an estimated 950 staffers. About 12% of its workforce. These are the people who help farmers implement cover cropping, manage grazing to prevent erosion, and assess soil health. They don't set policy from behind desks. They stand in fields. They walk property lines with producers, interpret drainage patterns, recommend grass waterways to slow runoff, and design nutrient management plans tailored to specific soil types and slopes. They help beginning farmers navigate the paperwork for programs like EQIP and the Conservation Stewardship Program. They return season after season to check on progress, adjust recommendations, and build the kind of trust that turns a skeptical landowner into someone willing to try cover cropping for the first time. That work doesn't happen over email. It happens in person, in the dirt, and it requires institutional knowledge that takes years to develop.
The geography of the cuts matters. Kansas lost an estimated 28% of its USDA field staff. Illinois lost roughly 24%. Suburban Maryland offices, which house research and inspection functions, saw reductions closer to 15%. Washington headquarters saw single-digit proportional cuts. The pattern is clear: the farther from D.C., the deeper the wound.
Becky Schewe, a policy analyst with expertise in agricultural issues, noted an apparent contradiction between the administration's stated goals of bringing services closer to farmers and the reduction of field staff.
Most departures were technically voluntary, through the Department of Government Efficiency's deferred resignation program. Employees agreed to leave in spring 2025 and received pay through later in the year. But experts noted that morale drove many of those decisions. Schewe suggested that concerns about job security influenced many employees' decisions to accept the departure program.
$8.5 Billion in Climate Funding Stripped of Its Purpose
President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act directed $19.5 billion to farmers for practices with measurable climate benefits. Approximately $8.5 billion of that total hadn't yet been spent when Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed. The legislation rolled those funds into USDA's general baseline spending for conservation programs.
On paper, that actually provided more permanent funding over time. But the reallocation stripped the climate-specific requirements attached to the money. Farmers no longer need to demonstrate environmental outcomes to qualify.
The legislation also raised income limits on conservation funding from $900,000 to $1.5 million in adjusted gross income, opening the door for larger, wealthier farms to capture dollars originally intended for smaller operations pursuing climate goals. As VegOut has previously covered, this pattern of quietly defunding climate infrastructure while technically preserving budget lines has become a recurring feature of the current administration.
The irony runs deep. Even among politically conservative farmers who have questioned climate science, conservation programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program have been wildly popular. EQIP is oversubscribed. In 2024, the program received roughly three applications for every one it could fund. Farmers want this money and this guidance. The bottleneck is now the agency itself.
The Quiet Death of a $300 Million Program for New Farmers
In late March, the administration terminated 81 of 85 projects under the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access program, effectively killing it. The program offered grants and low-interest loans for farmland, infrastructure, and equipment to underrepresented and first-time farmers.
Land access is the single biggest barrier for aspiring farmers. Average farmland values have risen 30% since 2020, now exceeding $4,170 per acre nationally. Industry consolidation has concentrated farmland ownership. The largest 8% of farms now control more than 70% of cropland. The program was designed to counter those forces, even if its stated goal was broader access rather than explicit climate action. The indirect climate benefit was real: USDA's own survey data shows that young and beginning producers are roughly twice as likely to adopt regenerative and climate-smart practices as established operations.
USDA characterized the terminations as a response to fraud, abuse, and waste. But the termination letters didn't cite specific allegations. A manager of the Land, Capital, and Market Access Network told Inside Climate News that USDA delayed necessary approvals for months before canceling the program and citing lack of progress.
FarmStand, a legal advocacy group, has sued the administration to obtain the full record of how terminated grants were selected. What has emerged so far suggests the agency searched its database for terms related to equity, environmental justice, climate, and biodiversity.
David Muraskin, an attorney with FarmStand, characterized the process as a simple keyword search that identified grants for termination.
Who Benefits When Field Staff Disappear
Every cut described above follows the same structural logic: it rewards scale. Large agricultural operations have in-house agronomists, legal teams, and grant writers. They don't need an NRCS soil scientist to walk their fields. They don't need a local office to help them file paperwork for a Conservation Stewardship Program contract. They can absorb the raised income limits, navigate stripped-down programs without guidance, and hire private consultants when federal staff disappear.
Small farmers can't.
Linda Guzmán, who runs a 75-acre diversified vegetable operation in southern Colorado, described what the cuts mean in practice. "I spent four years building a relationship with my local NRCS office. They helped me design a rotational grazing plan, apply for EQIP funding, test my soil. That office closed in April. The nearest one is ninety minutes away, and they told me they're not taking new consultations until fall." Guzmán said she's considering dropping her conservation plan entirely because she can't manage the paperwork alone. "I don't have a grant writer. I have a pickup truck and a notebook."
Richa Patel, a policy expert focusing on sustainable agriculture, put it bluntly: requiring farmers to hire professional grant writers to access programs designed to help them defeats the entire purpose of those programs. When you remove the technical assistance layer, conservation programs don't disappear. They become inaccessible to everyone except those who already have resources. The money flows to operations that can self-serve. Those operations tend to be larger, more industrialized, and less likely to pursue practices with meaningful environmental outcomes.
Rebecca Bartels, executive director of Invest in Our Land, noted that EQIP has far more applicants than available contracts. Bartels questioned whether farmers would maintain confidence in enrollment programs given concerns about staffing and contract reliability. "We're hearing from producers who completed multi-year conservation contracts and are now afraid to re-enroll because they don't trust the agency will hold up its end," Bartels said.
This connects to something we've been investigating. While the USDA slashes conservation support for small farms, we documented how the agency's organic program has been systematically captured by the same corporate interests that benefit from weakening these protections. The pattern is unmistakable: whether it's gutting technical assistance or watering down organic standards, USDA policy increasingly serves industrial agriculture at the expense of the farmers who need support most.
Agriculture is already one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. As we've reported on shifting growing zones, climate change is actively redrawing the map for American farmers. The people who need the most help adapting are the ones losing it fastest.
What Comes Next
USDA has announced major reorganizations but provided few details. At the end of March, the agency said it would relocate the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Utah, framing the move as bringing leadership closer to the communities it serves. The fate of other departments remains unknown.
Schewe said the department has provided little formal information about its plans. Schewe described the department as withholding information from both staff and external stakeholders.
A USDA spokesperson said Secretary Brooke Rollins is aware of critical positions and programs at the Department. The spokesperson said areas including NRCS would maintain adequate resources and staffing. Some aspects of the reorganization would be implemented in coming months, the spokesperson added, while others would take longer.
USDA announced a regenerative agriculture pilot program in December to help farmers deploy conservation practices like cover cropping and erosion management. Farmers have since reported that their local NRCS offices don't know the program exists or how to help them enroll.
That gap between announcement and implementation is telling. You can launch a program with a press release. You can't deliver it without people.
So here's the question no one in this administration seems willing to answer. The United States loses roughly 1.7 billion tons of topsoil to erosion every year. That's not a policy abstraction. That's the physical foundation of the food supply. What happens when the last soil scientist in a three-county region retires and no one replaces her? What happens when the farmer who wanted to try cover cropping gives up because there's no one to help him design the plan? Every acre that doesn't get a conservation assessment is an acre where topsoil loss accelerates, water quality degrades, and the long-term productivity of American farmland declines. We are treating soil conservation as optional. It is not. And the 330 million people who eat what these farms produce deserve to know: if this isn't a priority, what exactly is?
