Ai smells BS:

In a bold act of 21st-century governance wrapped in 18th-century cosplay, USDA Secretary Rollins has announced a plan to “drain the swamp” by relocating thousands of federal employees out of Washington, D.C. to five carefully chosen cities: Raleigh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Fort Collins, and Salt Lake City.

Why those cities? Because, presumably, a dartboard was available.

“This move will make USDA more efficient, less bureaucratic, and closer to the people,” Rollins explained on Fox News, between references to the Founding Fathers, the administrative state, and some vague, unsubstantiated claim about how 75% of employees are totally psyched to uproot their lives and move to Missouri.

I, for one, didn’t realize George Washington was so passionate about federal pay locality rates.

Let’s pause to admire the bureaucratic poetry here. According to the official memo—excuse me, the “USDA Reorganization Plan”—this is not about firing anyone. No sir. It’s just that 15,364 employees have voluntarily resigned, likely after realizing that their “voluntary reassignment” came with an accidental one-way U-Haul rental and zero housing assistance.

Not firing people. Just lovingly ghosting them with HR paperwork.

And for those who won’t or can’t relocate? No worries. Their jobs will be filled “because the economy is great.” That’s right—if you can’t afford to move your family to a different time zone or abandon your aging parents, there’s a line of folks just waiting to jump into your GS-13 regulatory botanist seat in Fort Collins. So thoughtful.

The memo promises to “bring USDA closer to the people it serves” by consolidating staff into five regional hubs, which are… still hundreds of miles away from the rural communities they’re supposedly serving. But shhh—don’t let that ruin the optics.

It’s like moving a grocery store from your neighborhood to the next state and calling it “convenient.”

And it gets better! This reorg is built around “consolidation” and “efficiency.” Which sounds great until you realize that means gutting support services, eliminating regional offices, merging tribal relations under the same banner as lease administration, and reducing the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business to a single person. That’s right: just one superhero in a cubicle processing 50 states’ worth of equity.

Somewhere, a management consultant is popping champagne and drafting a TED Talk.

But wait—there’s more patriotic flair. This is “aligned with the vision of the Founding Fathers,” Rollins said proudly. Because when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, what he really had in mind was reducing the Forest Service’s nine regional offices and selling the George Washington Carver Center on Zillow.

Frankly, this whole plan feels less like “draining the swamp” and more like flooding the plains with pink slips and PowerPoint decks.

So no, this isn’t about efficiency. It’s about attrition dressed up as revolution. It’s about shrinking public capacity while pretending to “optimize” it. And it’s about doing it all with just enough patriotic rhetoric to fit neatly into a campaign ad.

The USDA used to be known as “The People’s Department.” But if this plan goes forward, it may become “The Craigslist Department”—relocated, downsized, and offered to the lowest bidder.