Cursing Trump official launches 'unprecedented' USDA purge: insiders

After a spat between the political leadership and top career officials, the Trump administration has carried out a massive shakeup of the federal government’s agriculture officials at the state level.

The Agriculture Department has reassigned or detailed out six of the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s state conservationists in the past few weeks, according to seven people familiar with the moves and internal communications seen by The Washington Sun.

The majority of the shakeup was precipitated by an unusually testy meeting, in which Trump administration political appointees castigated USDA’s state leaders for failing to serve the nation’s farmers, an issue heightened by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the war with Iran.

In the meeting, NRCS Chief Colton Buckley told the agency’s top career officials that they needed to get funding out the door more quickly, according to two people familiar with the exchange. He then yelled and cursed at the staff.

Buckley even brought forms to the meeting to initiate the reassignment or firing of the executives and said he was prepared to sign them if they didn’t begin moving the funding with more haste.

One employee said Buckley was “verbally abusive” during the meeting.

The state conservationists pleaded with Buckley to recognize that the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to slash the federal workforce had left them without enough personnel to go any faster, the people said.

NRCS has shed nearly 3,000 employees under Trump, or around 24 percent of its workforce.

But the argument was lost on Buckley. As of early November, the chief has started the process of reassigning state leaders in Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming and Illinois. He previously forced out the head of the NRCS office in Texas and detailed out the leader of the office in Florida.

“This is unprecedented in NRCS history,” one employee said of the shakeup. “Trump’s tariffs hurt the farmers. [His workforce-reduction efforts] hurt the farmers, and career employees are being punished after being placed in a compromised position.”

The Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment.

The message from agency leadership has been “spending more money faster,” one employee said. “We have little to no staff, and are being forced to take more money with no one to obligate contracts.”

Employees have been threatened and disciplined for missing deadlines, one field employee said, but that hasn’t stopped backlogs from piling up.

NRCS staff said state conservationists are just scapegoats. One partner to the agency said the official in their state was “just the most obvious person to throw under the bus.”

“Unless the next guy is going to pull about 20 foresters and engineers out of thin air, he’ll do about as well as she ever did,” they said.