Earlier this summer, Manan Sharma received an email with some unwelcome news: to keep his job, he'd have to move across the country in a matter of months.
Sharma worked as a food microbiologist for more than two decades at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland, a federal facility just outside Washington, D.C.
“You can't easily replace what BARC is or represents,” Sharma said.
His research unit studied how pathogens that cause foodborne illness enter produce through soil and water, then helped farmers implement practical food safety solutions.
“A lot of people aren't aware of the effort that goes into doing agricultural research, but this was a very unique facility,” Sharma said. “It has a historic place in American agriculture.”
Since 1910, agricultural and food scientists at BARC have created culinary innovations such as shelf-stable butter, seedless grape varieties and the Roma tomato. They continue to develop solutions to fight costly threats to the food industry — such as crop disease and livestock pests — and human health risks like cyclosporiasis.
Yet this flagship U.S. Department of Agriculture facility is slated to close in a few weeks.
Last July, the USDA announced a massive reorganization across the agency, which involves moving about 2,000 Washington D.C.-area researchers to labs across the country, including Raleigh, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; and Salt Lake City, Utah.
In an initial announcement, USDA officials called the agency a “bloated, expensive, and unsustainable organization” and said relocating staff would save taxpayer dollars, reduce the cost of living for researchers and bring scientists closer to America’s food producers.
“We are aligning our workforce and infrastructure with the Department’s core mission, reducing unnecessary complexity, and ensuring every function is positioned to deliver results,” USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden later said in an April 2026 statement.
Shuttering the Beltsville facility is part of that plan. Workers in its 20 specialized research departments were expected to accept their relocations, retire or step down.
The agency initially planned to vacate the Beltsville campus over a period of several years to “avoid disruption of critical USDA research activities,” according to a USDA memo. But this spring, federal officials decided to expedite that timeline.
Employees received relocation letters in June and July, requiring them to move to agency-assigned locations in order to keep their jobs and continue their projects. Those who accepted must report to their new labs by Sept. 21 or Oct. 5, depending on their projects’ status.
Pending lawsuits may push those deadlines, but so far the USDA has not shifted the facility's October closure date.
Sharma ultimately chose to leave the federal service and take another job in the private sector. He said it wasn’t an easy choice to leave behind his research.
“It feels incomplete,” he said. “It just felt like we got a stop-work order. As a scientist — as somebody who continually wants to do applied research and investigate things that you feel like could make a contribution — I think it's highly disappointing and highly wasteful not to continue that work.”
Research at risk
In interviews, Beltsville employees expressed deep concerns about how the facility's closure will affect ongoing research.
Teddi Mitchell is the vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3147, the union that covers federal employees at BARC. She has also worked at the facility for nearly 40 years studying biocontrol methods against insects.
When the closure was announced, Mitchell said researchers’ first concerns were about their projects, not their personal lives.
“It was, ‘Where are my samples going? How do I get the incubators out?’ I mean, everything was about the research,” she said.
Sharma said the facility is uniquely equipped for specialized research. Scientists could work together across disciplines on site, and federal funding allowed for long-term, in-depth projects.
He worries that work may not be able to continue at smaller labs.
“I think it'll definitely set back aspects of agricultural research in the United States,” Sharma said. “Those research projects are going to be halted and have to be reestablished and restaffed at facilities that may not have the resources that BARC currently has to support that specific, high-level, complicated research.”
Closing the country’s flagship USDA lab, Mitchell said, also puts vital agriculture research at risk.
“For everything you hear — cyclospora, screwworm, recalls — there's 15 more sitting in a container at the port, waiting to make the news,” she said. “There's hundreds of things weekly, monthly, but you don't hear about them because we catch them. [Federal employees] are the first responders. You're hearing them in the news because the people who were responding are gone.”
The plan to close the Beltsville facility has also received intense public pushback. The USDA received more than 2,000 comments over a two-month period last year, with 92% of respondents expressing “strong opposition” to the planned closure, citing risks to ongoing research.
Publicly-funded scientific research can be a valuable investment, said Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment Program with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit scientific advocacy group.
“Spending on public agricultural research and development in the last century generated about $20 in benefits to the U.S. economy for every dollar of spending,” said Stillerman, who has written about the potential negative impacts of BARC’s closure. This research, she added, offers “independent answers about the challenges that farmers and rural communities and other communities face, and what we can do about them.”
The Trump administration, Stillerman said, is recycling a past playbook as it moves to close BARC. In 2019, two USDA agencies moved their headquarters to Kansas City, Missouri. About half of the staff from each agency left during the relocation process.
“They spent millions of dollars on the relocation, and as far as I can tell, didn't save any money. There was little or no benefit to that whole mess, and so now we're seeing that repeated, but on steroids,” she said.
Stillerman said when federal employees leave, America’s food system loses valuable expertise and knowledge.
“It's deeply demoralizing and quite troubling to see all of that experience and expertise and passion for public service just disregarded and tossed aside,” she said.
Uncertainty affects decisions
Many BARC employees who have decided to relocate are confused about the process of moving themselves and their research.
The USDA has held weekly all-staff meetings and webinars to inform employees, but workers say specifics on the closure often changed.
Researchers say emails and messages to administrators have often been answered slowly. Policies and guidance from staff meetings were rarely provided in writing to all staff members at once. Employees have compiled their own documents and notes to keep track of information, in lieu of direct communication from the USDA.
One BARC employee, who asked to remain anonymous due to uncertainty about their employment situation, said USDA administrators had not been updating informational documents for staff on an internal website.
“There are so many questions that are not answered or are conflicting with the answers that we do hear verbally,” the employee said. “A lot of those [documents] link to past information on relocation or reassignments that there are standards or statutes for. But what's happening now is unprecedented. This is a new territory, and those are where all our new questions are coming in. There are no answers.”
Mitchell, the union representative and BARC researcher, said inconsistent communication has made it hard for employees to make choices about their relocations and jobs.
“How do you comply in an environment where we have no leadership, and no clear protocols on how to do it?” she said.
Some researchers couldn’t report to their new locations right away or move due to personal circumstances. The USDA provided a hardship exemption process where employees could request a delayed report date or to stay near Washington, D.C.
One employee at BARC, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation, requested a hardship exemption due to medical conditions. The request was denied, and the employee ultimately decided to accept the relocation.
“It's not my first choice, but I feel like I don't really have another choice,” the employee said.
Though federal officials have said closing BARC will eliminate unnecessary spending and save taxpayer dollars, workers warn the closure process itself has been wasteful.
According to employees, USDA administrators told staff to leave behind equipment worth less than $500,000. The USDA said it would handle transfers of more expensive equipment, but provided little to no other details when employees asked.
For example, Mitchell said the facility has several High-Performance Liquid Chromatography systems, used to separate and measure chemical components of a sample. These machines cost about $150,000 per unit. If the USDA chooses not to move the units, it would cost as much to repurchase. Moving them would require recalibration, which would cost a few thousand dollars.
Expensive renovations and updates to many BARC buildings are also ongoing or were recently completed.
Millions of dollars have been spent renovating buildings at BARC over the past five years, Mitchell said.
“I mean, the list goes on and on and on,” Mitchell said. “[The USDA] poured money into here, and now it's gone.”
The USDA has said further renovations to fully update BARC would be costly for the department and American taxpayers. Some renovations have been paused.
The department is also paying to relocate employees. According to documents obtained by Harvest Public Media, the USDA will pay relocation stipends to cover moving costs.
The USDA typically completes about 1,700 relocations per year with an average cost of $50,600 per move, according to a document issued in May by USDA Chief Financial Officer Candice Kim. However, Kim expects employees who opt for a lump-sum payment rather than traditional reimbursement will cost less to move.
In addition to the stipends, documents indicate workers who sign a two-year service commitment at their new location will also receive an additional bonus between $15,000 and $20,000.
Legal challenges may come too late
The American Federation of Government Employees — along with other federal employee labor unions, nonprofits and local governments — is challenging the USDA reorganization and the closure of BARC in court.
The coalition sued the federal government in April and later asked for an injunction to stop the closure process. A judge denied the injunction on Sept. 2, citing concerns that complaints about USDA reorganization efforts were not relevant to the original lawsuit.
A week later, a new lawsuit was filed specifically opposing the USDA’s reorganization efforts. A judge has ordered a pause on BARC’s closure until Oct. 2. A hearing on Sept. 29 will determine if any further delays are ordered.
On Sept. 15, the USDA sent a memo to employees providing directions on who should continue their relocations and keep working on-site at BARC.
For BARC staff, a final decision could come too late. With operations winding down, most employees have already decided whether to stay or leave.
There is no clear estimate of how many of the facility’s researchers will continue working with the USDA following the closure. In an August court filing, a USDA administrator said 725 department staff members had received relocation offers, and 64% accepted.
Mitchell said this likely isn’t an accurate picture of who will actually move; employees can rescind their relocation agreements the Friday before their new report date.
She said the union has asked labs for their own estimates.
“In one lab, there's 25 people left, and only nine have even considered moving. Another lab currently has around 15 left, and only four of them have expressed any interest in relocating,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell estimates about 400 employees worked at BARC before the department announced the reorganization plan.
Stillerman with the Union of Concerned Scientists said the loss of public research can erode democracy.
“These kinds of moves — whether it's the closure of Beltsville or the larger reorganization of the USDA or all of the other things that this administration is doing — I think chip away at the underpinnings of democracy in independent analysis and science,” Stillerman said. “I think that's something really important for us to pay attention to and work to prevent.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
