USDA leaders spent six months defying the spending laws Congress wrote to stop them. On Tuesday, a federal court caught up with them.
By Jim Pattiz –
In April 2025, Stephen Vaden sat before the senators who would decide whether to confirm him as deputy secretary of agriculture. When they asked whether he’d commit to working with Congress on any reorganization, he told them, “We carry out the will of Congress. USDA has no independent authority separate from Congress.”
Less than a year later, he helped launch the largest reorganization in the history of the U.S. Forest Service in defiance of the restrictions Congress wrote to stop it. On Tuesday, a federal judge in San Francisco concluded that USDA “has almost certainly been violating” the laws Congress wrote to stop it, and he froze the whole thing.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria’s 40-page order bars USDA from closing or eliminating any Forest Service office and from relocating or reassigning employees outside their local commuting area while the case moves forward. That means no new management-directed reassignment letters and no enforcement of the deadlines in the letters already sent.
The headquarters move to Salt Lake City is stopped, and so is the plan to shut down every regional office in the system Gifford Pinchot built more than a century ago, along with the closure of the 23 research facilities still on the chopping block. The same order covers seven other USDA components. The lawsuit was brought by four federal employee unions alongside a coalition of local governments and conservation groups. Secretary Brooke Rollins has two business days to notify every affected employee and seven business days to file a declaration with the court showing she’s complied. A USDA spokesperson told Federal News Network that the department is reviewing the decision.
The Reorganization Saga
In April, I reported that this reorganization violated two laws that Congress passed and the president signed, Section 716 of the agriculture appropriations act and Section 421 of the Interior appropriations act. Both prohibit exactly what the administration announced on March 31. I also reported that USDA’s own general counsel had told the agency to treat those provisions as unconstitutional and proceed anyway. By then, the administration had already gone after our original coverage of the dismantling. The White House called our reporting lies, Deputy Secretary Vaden posted a seven-tweet thread attacking the article. Then the Forest Service responded to our reporting by adding a section titled “Setting the Record Straight” to its official reorganization page, telling the public that our claims were inaccurate and listing them as “myths.” Chhabria’s ruling rests on the same two provisions cited in our April reporting. And because his order requires USDA to post it on the agency’s reorganization website, the ruling now sits at the top of the same page the Forest Service built to rebut that reporting.
Interestingly, that ‘Setting the Record Straight’ section has changed since it went up months ago. It once told the public that the idea of the new state directors becoming political positions was a myth, and that “State directors will be filled exclusively by career federal employees.” That promise is now gone. The jobs were posted as Senior Executive Service general positions, a classification that allows them to be filled by political appointees. In July, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, a former logging industry executive, said he’d received roughly 300 applications, more than he needed. By October, ten of the fifteen jobs were still empty. Politico reported that few career employees want them, and that the agency has signaled it’s open to filling them with people from outside the Forest Service, breaking with a tradition that goes back to Pinchot of promoting its leaders from within. Schultz said in August that candidates would be recruited both internally and externally, and around the same time the Forest Service quietly deleted its promise that the jobs would go only to career employees.
Other claims are still up. The page tells the public that the reorganization doesn’t “eliminate scientific positions, cancel research programs, or reduce our national research footprint.” In May, I reported that the administration’s FY2027 budget zeroes out Forest Service research entirely. The Forest Service’s own budget justification to Congress says the budget “terminates the Forest and Rangeland Research program.” It cuts the program’s $308.7 million to zero and funds none of the 1,215 full-time positions the account supports today. The same document says the agency’s facility footprint would end up roughly half its current size, with research stations and labs among the closures. The page also tells the public that “There is a job for every existing employee,” even though the department’s internal planning, filed in this case, anticipated that a significant number of employees would refuse to relocate. And it says fewer than 200 employees are expected to need to relocate, a figure that matches neither the 250 USDA gave the court in September nor any number Schultz has offered Congress.
They’ve Done This Before
The theory USDA’s lawyers used to justify all of this isn’t new, and neither are the men behind it. In 2019, during Trump’s first term, USDA decided to move two of its research agencies out of Washington to Kansas City, even though Congress had passed a law barring the department from relocating offices or employees without its approval. At that time Stephen Vaden was running USDA’s Office of General Counsel, and a lawyer named Tyler Clarkson was his deputy.
When the department’s own Inspector General concluded the move was illegal, Vaden produced a memo declaring Congress’s approval requirement unconstitutional, which in his telling made the move legal. They went ahead with it. The Government Accountability Office later confirmed that the department had broken the law, but by then it didn’t matter. Most of the employees quit rather than relocate, and one of the two agencies fell to about a third of its normal staff. Today, Vaden is deputy secretary of agriculture, the second most powerful official in the department, and Clarkson is its general counsel, the department’s top lawyer. And in case anyone missed why Clarkson was brought back, Rollins spelled it out when he was confirmed, saying he would serve a critical role in “implementing” the planned reorganization.
Why This is Illegal
Congress controls federal spending. In this year’s agriculture and Interior spending laws, both signed by Trump, it banned USDA from shifting its money to close offices or relocate employees. The one exception was if the department notified the committees that oversee its budget and got their approval first. Vaden and Clarkson went after that exception. In 1983, in a case called INS v. Chadha, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress can’t act through a single chamber or committee in place of passing an actual law (here’s a plain-English summary). Citing that ruling, USDA’s lawyers told the department the approval requirement was unconstitutional, so all it had to do was notify Congress and proceed. For the Forest Service, according to the court, it didn’t even do that in writing.
On Tuesday, the judge agreed that the committees can’t grant approval on their own, but he ruled that striking the exception leaves the ban standing, and now there’s no way around it short of a new law. In his words, USDA “has almost certainly been violating those restrictions,” and halting the reorganization was necessary “to protect the congressional prerogative.”
Move Fast and Break Things
The theme in this administration is clear. The people carrying out the administration’s wishes simply don’t care whether something is legal in the end. They care about manufacturing enough legal cover to get it done before anyone can undo it. They lost the court fight over Kansas City and still got what they wanted, because by the time anyone ruled, the people were gone. They ran the same strategy here. In April, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, testified before House appropriators, and Federal News Network reported that the agency planned to proceed with or without Congress’s approval. It spent the summer handing out relocation deadlines, and the judge’s order can’t bring back anyone who moved or quit before he first stepped in on September 14.
The thinking behind it reaches the top of this administration. Russ Vought, the White House budget director and an architect of Project 2025, has spent years arguing that Congress’s control over spending is far weaker than the Constitution says. At his confirmation hearing, he told senators that “the President ran on the notion that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional.” That’s the 1974 law requiring presidents to spend what Congress appropriates. Last year, he used a maneuver Congress’s own watchdog calls illegal to cancel billions in foreign aid that Congress had approved, and the Supreme Court let it stand. USDA’s lawyers made a narrower argument in this case, but it comes from the same belief: that Congress can write whatever it wants into law, and the executive branch decides whether to follow it.
Administration officials have made clear they expect this Supreme Court to agree with them.
What the Record Shows
The rest of Judge Chhabria’s order describes a department that never expected anyone to check its work, or simply didn’t care if they did. Congress had required USDA to submit a spending plan that would serve as the baseline for judging whether money was being moved around illegally. The judge noted that the plan isn’t public, that it’s unclear whether USDA ever prepared it, and that the department never mentioned it through multiple rounds of briefing. And while USDA’s lawyers told the court the reorganization was lawful under existing funding, the department’s FY2027 budget asked Congress for an additional $55 million to pay for staff relocations.
USDA’s lawyers also complained that a pause would force it to keep paying for duplicate facilities. Judge Chhabria wrote that much of the harm USDA described was self-inflicted, the result of its own decision to proceed with an unlawful reorganization. Then he wrote, “There is no public interest in allowing the government to violate federal law.”
Six Months of Doing It Anyway
In the six months between the March 31 reorganization announcement and Tuesday’s ruling, the number of people the agency said it would relocate kept changing. Schultz told House appropriators in April it would be about 500. A May 14 letter to Rep. Jared Huffman said fewer than 500. In July, Schultz told the Salt Lake Tribune it would probably be fewer than 300. By September, USDA was telling the court 250 at most. The reorganization website says fewer than 200. Meanwhile, about 6,500 Forest Service employees had received letters saying their jobs could be affected, and agency whistleblowers warned Congress that mandatory relocations could reach as many as 1,900 people. In his order, the judge called the number a moving target.
It’s clear that USDA was counting on people leaving. Internal documents filed in the case show that USDA anticipated in April 2025 that a significant number of employees would refuse to relocate, and that its workforce plan called for cutting Forest Service staff by 15 percent. In June, Vaden told the Senate Agriculture Committee the reorganization was meant to align the agency’s workforce with available resources. At the same time, USDA told the court that every current employee would have a position and that it had no plans for layoffs. Both statements can only be true if you expect the people you’re relocating to quit rather than uproot their families. This was the same agency that had already lost almost 6,000 employees in 2025. The Partnership for Public Service found that permanent staff were leaving at two and a half times the previous five-year rate while hiring fell to a third of normal.
Some of that damage can’t be undone. The judge found that relocation letters had set reporting deadlines as early as September 21, and USDA hasn’t said how many people moved before his first order or how many left the agency instead.
The research facilities are the one place where public pressure forced the agency to back off before any court did. In March the administration put 57 of the agency’s 77 research facilities up for closure. By September, after a facilities review, the list was down to 23. The agency presented that as a retreat while its own budget request was still asking Congress to end the research program altogether.
The Fight Moves to December
Judge Chhabria made clear that this protection might not last long. The restrictions he enforced are in a stopgap spending law that expires December 11. He wrote that if USDA wants to go ahead, it will soon have the chance to make its case to Congress, and Congress can choose not to extend the restrictions.
The timing works against the administration. December 11 falls 38 days after the midterm elections and 23 days before the new Congress is sworn in, so whatever happens to these restrictions will be decided by a lame-duck Congress. Democrats are heavily favored to win back the House in November, and they have a real shot at the Senate. As of this week, Decision Desk HQ gives them a 77 percent chance of taking the House and a 56 percent chance of taking the Senate. Even before any new members arrive, Republicans can’t pass a spending bill in the Senate without at least seven Democratic votes, so Democrats can block any attempt to quietly weaken this language. Analysts who track Congress expect that if Democrats win, they’ll prefer to hold off on a full-year deal and pass another short-term extension that carries the current rules forward until the new Congress is seated in January.
The administration has already shown what it wants. Its FY2027 budget proposed striking the language that bars USDA from acting while Congress is still reviewing a reorganization, and it proposed weakening the approval requirement for closing agricultural research facilities to a simple notice. Even the Republican-led House hasn’t gone along so far. Its FY2027 Interior bill keeps the restriction on the Forest Service shifting its funds, and the House-passed agriculture bill keeps the waiting-period language. The pressure to drop those provisions will come hardest from Utah. Gov. Spencer Cox called the headquarters move a “big win” in March, and he’s now defending the plan, saying the state-based model “strengthens federalism.”
What You Can Do
A federal judge just handed the people fighting for the Forest Service the biggest win they’ve had since this reorganization was announced. Whether it holds is now up to Congress, and Congress needs to hear from you before December 11.
Look up your senators and representative on our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard. You’ll see how each of them has voted on your public lands, and you can contact them directly from there. Tell them a federal judge has found that USDA almost certainly violated Section 716 of the agriculture spending law and Section 421 of the Interior spending law, the provisions Congress wrote to stop this reorganization. Tell them you expect both carried into any December spending bill word for word, with no new exceptions and no new loopholes for the administration to exploit. Ask them directly whether they’ll vote against any bill that weakens that language, and don’t accept a vague answer.
If your senators are Democrats, make sure they understand that their votes are what keep this protection alive in the lame duck session. Republicans can’t pass a spending bill in the Senate without them, so if they hold the line, this reorganization stays frozen until a new Congress is seated. If your members are Republicans, remind them that they already voted for these restrictions and that a federal court has now confirmed the administration ignored them. Tell them you’ll be voting this November and want them to stand up for the Forest Service. And if your members sit on the Appropriations Committees, tell them you’ll be watching every vote they cast in December.
Keeping things frozen isn’t enough, though. When the new Congress is seated in January, tell your members you want this reorganization ended for good. The temporary restriction should be replaced with a permanent law that bars any administration from closing Forest Service offices or shutting down its research stations without an act of Congress. Short of that, the appropriations language needs to be much stronger. And tell them you want the damage reversed. That means restoring the research program this administration tried to eliminate and putting back the stations and offices it tried to close. It also means requiring the Forest Service to rebuild the workforce it lost, starting with the thousands of employees pushed out in 2025 and the experienced people who left this year rather than uproot their families.
Finally, tell them you want real protection for the people who do this work. The career foresters, scientists and law enforcement officers who care for your national forests shouldn’t have to wonder every year whether they’ll be swept out in a mass firing or pushed out with a relocation order designed to make them quit. Congress can write those protections into law. Tell your members you expect them to, and that you’ll remember whether they did.
__
Republished with permission from More Than Just Parks.
__
If you like this story and independent radio news service you can help Fund Yosemite Radio, KNHA 100.9 FM with GoFundMe.
Leave a Reply