Agriculture Secretary Rollins: President Trump is putting US farmers first | Opinion

Thirteen months ago, President Donald Trump returned to office backed by a powerful mandate from the American people. A mandate to enact real change, transform government and shift programs and power out of Washington, D.C. and back where they belong: in our cities, towns, and communities throughout the heartland.

Central to this mandate is reimagining the way the federal government does business. Empowered by President Trump’s bold vision, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking long overdue action to provide the very best services to our patriotic farmers and ranchers and ensure that taxpayer dollars are wisely spent.

In July, we announced the reorganization of the USDA to refocus our core operations on better serving the men and women who grow our crops, manage our lands and feed our nation and the rest of the world. Our reorganization plan rests on four key pillars. First, ensure the size of the USDA’s workforce aligns with available financial resources and agricultural priorities. Second, bring the USDA closer to its customers. Third, eliminate management layers and bureaucracy. And fourth, consolidate redundant support functions.

To bring our operations closer to the people we serve while also providing a more affordable cost of living for USDA employees, by year’s end we will relocate just over half of staff currently in and around the Washington, D.C., area to hub locations spread throughout the heartland.

Over the past century, the USDA’s footprint in the National Capital Region has only grown larger. In the past four years alone, the USDA’s workforce grew by 8%, and employees’ salaries grew by 14.5%. In sum, this department hired thousands of employees with no sustainable way of paying them. This all occurred without any tangible increase in service to the USDA’s core constituencies across the agricultural sector.

But bigger hasn’t always meant better. In fact, underutilized buildings, redundancies, rampant overspending, chronic underinvestment and decades of mismanagement and deferred maintenance costs are all hallmarks of what happens when the priority is growing government instead of serving the men and women who grow our food.

Nowhere is this distortion of priorities clearer than in the USDA’s South Building in Washington, D.C., which was once the beating heart of the USDA. It was even the largest office building in the world for a few years. Today, however, the South Building is mostly empty and in disrepair — a massive annual drain on taxpayer dollars.

The South Building spans more than 432,000 square feet and contains 6,000 offices, but️ more than 70% of the building sits vacant on any given day. The building is also saddled with more than $1.6 billion in delinquent maintenance.

Since taxpayers should not be paying for empty offices, recently we officially began the process of returning the South Building to the General Services Administration, which exists to manage and support federal agencies with the highest possible degree of efficiency. This is a major step towards right-sizing government, cutting waste, and refocusing the USDA on farmers and all the men and women we serve.

This transformation can’t happen overnight, but we are determined to use every tool at our disposal to make it a reality — without disrupting any of the critical functions of the department. We can both responsibly steward taxpayer dollars and ensure top-notch customer service that fulfills our promises to American farmers.

By restoring dismantling bureaucratic bloat, enhancing services and restoring accountability and common sense to U.S. government, President Trump is once again putting farmers first — right where they belong.

Brooke L. Rollins is U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.