Punk’s ‘Demolition’ of USDA Exposed as Playbook for Mass Resignations, Privatization

In what critics are calling a deliberate demolition of a vital federal agency, the Felonious Punk administration is proceeding with a plan to forcibly relocate the majority of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Washington, D.C., workforce. This move is not an isolated event but the culmination of a sustained assault on the agency, its scientific mission, and the people it serves. As Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) warned, it comes at a time when “farmers have been hit with obscenely high tariffs, families have been walloped by SNAP cuts, and research grants have been frozen and reduced.”

The administration, through Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, has cynically declared the USDA a “bloated, expensive, and unsustainable organization” to justify the upheaval. This contemptuous language is a thin veil for the administration’s true intent: to gut the federal workforce through attrition. In a stunning admission, the department stated there would be “no large-scale reductions in force,” precisely because they have already driven an “exodus of 15,364 employees” through an earlier buyout plan. It is a classic union-busting tactic: make conditions so untenable that employees are forced to quit.

This is a proven playbook. When the administration relocated two research agencies in 2019, a staggering two-thirds of the affected employees quit their jobs rather than uproot their families. A subsequent 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that the USDA’s financial justification for that move was built on an “unreliable estimate of savings” because it “omitted critical costs and economic effects,” such as the cost of attrition and disruption. The administration is knowingly repeating a destructive and fiscally dubious strategy, armed with the knowledge that a forced relocation is functionally a mass termination.

The institutional knowledge being jettisoned is not just contained in people, but in the historic infrastructure now slated for closure. The plan involves shuttering the Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a sprawling 6,500-acre facility that grew into one of the world’s premier agricultural research centers over more than a century. Also on the chopping block is the George Washington Carver Center, named for the pathbreaking Black scientist and inventor. The closure of these centers represents not just a loss of buildings, but the erasure of scientific legacy and the abandonment of irreplaceable, long-term research projects that have protected the American heartland for generations.

The real-world consequences of this purge are catastrophic. Employees warn that this war on science imperils everything from soil research designed to prevent another Dust Bowl to the development of wildfire safety protocols that protect communities in the West. “These were the offices created to prevent that from ever happening again, and now we’re closing them down,” one terrified employee told The Washington Post. This purge of expertise was further escalated last week when the department summarily fired 70 foreign contract researchers, gutting international collaboration under the pretext of “national security.”

This sustained campaign of disruption and disrespect has inflicted a deep psychological toll on the agency’s dedicated staff. The prevailing attitude is one of numb exhaustion, a symptom of the moral injury that occurs when public servants are forced to witness the demolition of a mission they believe in. One employee, part of a dual-USDA household facing the prospect of being relocated to separate cities, described the feeling to The Washington Post not as anger or sadness, but as resignation: “It’s just like, ‘Oh. Well. Another thing.’” It is the quiet sound of a professional workforce being systematically broken, their dedication treated with contempt by the very administration they serve.

This executive overreach has been met with outrage on Capitol Hill, though the administration appears intent on ignoring any attempts at oversight. Senator Klobuchar decried the “half-baked proposal” submitted with “no consultation with leading Agricultural Senators” and demanded an immediate hearing to assess the damage. Her call underscores a key element of the administration’s strategy: to act unilaterally and bypass the legislative branch, making massive structural changes to the government before Congress has a chance to intervene or scrutinize the decision’s true costs and consequences.

This engineered chaos serves a more insidious long-term goal. As environmental groups have argued, by crippling the agency’s ability to function, the administration creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once sufficiently weakened, they can declare the USDA broken and argue for privatizing its functions—most notably, selling off the U.S. Forest Service and the public lands it manages. With a recent Supreme Court decision clearing the way for federal agencies to conduct layoffs more easily, the administration now has the legal cover it needs to finish the demolition. This is not a reorganization; it is a clear and present threat to America’s food supply, its public lands, and the public servants who protect them.