FILE - The U.S. Department of Agriculture building is seen in Washington, Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024. Many recently terminated USDA employees in Oregon worked in collaboration with Oregon State University, according to the university's agricultural sciences dean.
Jose Luis Magana / AP
Over the last week, thousands of mostly early-career federal workers across several agencies were fired as part of the Trump administration’s broad effort to reduce the federal government’s workforce. That includes at least 19 U.S. Department of Agriculture research and administrative employees.
Staci Simonich, the dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University, told OPB that many of the USDA Agricultural Research Service employees in Oregon who were recently terminated worked in collaboration with OSU at the university’s agricultural research stations in Corvallis, Newport, Hood River, Pendleton and Burns. The Capital Press first reported this story.
Simonich said those researchers were working on projects such as a blueberry genetic breeding program, improving oyster production on the coast, weed control on grass seed farms, and projects focusing on rangeland ecology and wildlands restoration in Eastern Oregon. Some of them also served as mentors to OSU graduate students.
“We’ve lost half of our teams, and all of these up-and-coming young scientists,” Simonich said, referring to the scientists who were working at the university’s research units. “And so it’s like we’ve lost the next generation of scientists in agriculture and natural resources.”
Related: Trump’s firing of Forest Service workers raises concerns about wildfires in Oregon, the West
Most of the federal workers who were recently terminated were probationary employees – recent hires who’d only been with their agency for one or two years or were recently promoted to a new position.
“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar is being spent as effectively as possible to serve the people, not the bureaucracy,” a spokesperson for the USDA wrote in an email. “As part of this effort, USDA has released individuals in their probationary period of employment.”
There are other local USDA offices in Oregon that provide farmers with loans and other assistance for practices that can help improve a farm’s environmental and financial resilience. A spokesperson for the agency did not respond to a question about whether staff at those locations were also terminated.
The Trump administration’s cuts to agricultural programs may have gone beyond the federal workforce. Farmers and nonprofit groups across the country, and in Oregon, are awaiting millions of dollars of funding they were expecting from the USDA that is now stalled.
That included reimbursement payments through popular conservation programs such the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. Usually, farmers enroll in that program to create a conservation plan for working farms, such as improving wildlife habitat, water quality or reducing soil erosion.
On Thursday, the USDA announced it will honor contracts that were already made directly to farmers, and that it will release about $20 million in contracted payments for the Environmental Quality Incentive Program and other conservation programs.
The agency is still reviewing Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funded agricultural programs, to ensure they’re focused on supporting farmers and not “DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] or far-left climate programs,” according to a statement from the agency.
