Department of Agriculture

Representing DOGE and OPM, Noah Peters finalizes mass layoffs at the USDA just before Secretary Rollins is to be sworn in that evening. When asked later by Congress about the layoffs, she deflects and says it happened before she started.

In a speech, the Secretary of Agriculture says DOGE has been at the agency for “a few weeks” already.

In emails with USDA staff to identify climate-related terms to look for and cancel in grants, Gavin Kliger also alludes to DOGE developing LLM models that would analyze grant descriptions for specific language.

USDA Secretary Rollins posts a photo of a grant-cancellation session on the @DOGE_USDA account. None of the participants are identified, but it looks like Gavin Kliger is in the picture.

The Chief Human Capital Office of the Department of Agriculture testifies to Congress that OPM ordered the firing of all probationary federal employees at the agency.

Federal staff at the USDA are sent an email offering them another chance to do a deferred resignation if they enroll within the next week or so from this date.

Jordan Wick is granted high-level access to the National Payment Service (NPS) system, which would allow him to see and alter payments or even cancel loans to farmers and other agricultural producers. Concerningly, his activities are not logged or recorded.

In a response to a FOIA request from American Oversight, the USDA returns a list of known DOGE members at the agency at the time.

Luke Farritor uses his admin access to lock out all government officials at multiple agencies from using grants.gov to issue new grants. Instead, all grants must now be sent to a new email address which will be reviewed by DOGE staffers before grants can be posted.

A letter is sent to all USDA staff informing them that DOGE staffers would be reviewing all farm loans above $500,000 as well as loans of any size to “formal entities,” which could mean everything from small farms to large corporations. Loans are already reviewed by highly qualified and experienced loan officers at the USDA.

USDA reports to Congress that 15,000 of its employees (15% of its workforce) have taken one of the two deferred resignation programs

The Department of Agriculture sends a letter to the state directors of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program citing EO 14243 which grants DOGE unfettered access to federal and state data and demanding they turn over data on recipients dating back to 2020-01-01 or face consequences.

Jeremy Lichtman emails USDA officials to inform them that GSA (likely Josh Gruenbaum) had directed them to review several agency grants for termination. These terminations were reportedly “awaiting final greenlight from the White House.”

Over 200 loan recipients have their birth date voided and their accounts closed in the National Payment Service (NPS) system. This action was likely taken by Jordan Wick in response to discovering that some number of loan recipients had “1900” as their birth years (DOGE presumed similar circumstances at SSA indicated fraud when it was really issues with data entry). It is possible that this action was a pretext for closing other accounts. (fuzz: date just reported as late May)

In an email to agency partners, the operators of grants.gov declare that the revised mechanism added in April that routed all Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) through a DOGE email address has been reversed. Instead, agencies are to return to using the tool like that did previously. This doesn’t necessarily mean that DOGE or political appointees will not be reviewing grants, but they have no longer locked other users out of the system.

A USDA employee tells Wired that they have been told to refer to the DOGE team at the agency as the USDA Digital Service instead.

A USDA staffer (and USDA spokesperson later confirms) that the DOGE team in the agency is now referred to as the USDA Efficiency Team or “E Team.”

Despite claims by USDA leadership that they had met 99% of their hiring goals, more than 4500 (approximately 27%) firefighting jobs in the US Forest Service are unfulled, according to an internal staffing tool at the agency. This rough assessment is supported by anecdotal accounts of firefighting offices in states facing a challenging year for forest fires.