photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

The Douglas County USDA Service Center, located at 4920 Bob Billings Pkwy, is pictured on Thursday, March 13, 2025.

As part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts, the federal government has canceled a lease at the U.S. Department of Agriculture service office in Lawrence and laid off all of the Natural Resources Conservation Service employees in a six-county region.

Both of these developments were mentioned in a letter that Douglas County commissioners were sending to representatives in Congress this week, asking them to help those affected by the administration’s actions. A county spokesperson told the Journal-World that this information came from the Douglas County Conservation District, which is focused on helping people conserve, improve and sustain the county’s natural resources.

Nick Levendofsky, executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union, said this situation doesn’t surprise him. He said his organization had suspected that these types of disruptions might take place.

“This might happen in many of these offices across the state,” Levendofsky told the Journal-World. “… It’s certainly disappointing because it worries me that by doing this, they are basically causing more problems than they are solving.”

The Douglas County USDA Service Center is located at 4920 Bob Billings Pkwy., in the same building as the Risley Chiropractic office, and it has served as a central point for accessing services from the Farm Service Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service and Rural Development. Offices like this one offer assistance with programs like farm loans, disaster relief, conservation initiatives and more.

The Journal-World was able to confirm the lease cancellation for the office on a list of cuts to contracts, grants and real estate on the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, website. DOGE lists only a few pieces of information about the office: its square footage of 4,846 square feet; the annual lease cost of $120,110; and a “total savings” estimate of $70,064. No information was provided on how the savings estimate was calculated.

DOGE, which is spearheaded by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has set a goal of cutting around $1 trillion in federal spending by September, and it has been canceling contracts, ending leases and pushing federal agencies to reduce their workforces since its inception. Commentators have cast doubt on DOGE’s claims about the savings it’s generated, and NPR reported that the list of cuts on DOGE’s site — the so-called “wall of receipts” — is “full of inaccurate data that has been revised several times for accuracy.”

The Douglas County service center location was open on Thursday, and staff members were working there; when the Journal-World asked a staff member there about the office’s situation, they said to contact a media relations arm of the USDA via email. The Journal-World reached out to the USDA in this way for comment about when the lease was canceled, the specifics of the NRCS firings and whether other employees were laid off.

As of 4 p.m. Thursday, the Journal-World had not heard back from the USDA.

The Journal-World also contacted U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran’s office, and a spokesperson said the senator’s office was looking into the situation.

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For many farmers, worries about USDA staffing and services aren’t new. Levendofsky said there had been anxiety for several years in the agriculture community about the possible consolidation of USDA offices, even before Trump.

“We’ve always had issues with keeping some of these offices fully staffed (and) fully funded,” Levendofsky said. “So there’s always been that talk of ‘well, maybe we don’t need an office here, and maybe we don’t need an office there, and if our numbers are low in this office, why don’t we just consolidate and move everybody into this one?'”

But Levendofsky said these discussions have been happening more and more since the Trump administration has come in.

The first Trump administration, pre-COVID, did not provide a plan for addressing staffing shortages in USDA offices, Levendofsky said, but when the Biden administration came in, they put a plan forward for hiring people.

“We were on our way to getting those positions filled, especially those that we lost during COVID,” Levendofsky said.

Then, the leadership in D.C. changed again.

“[W]hen the Trump administration came in here in the last few months, we’ve just seen a complete turnaround,” Levendofsky said. He said some USDA staff were caught in the first big wave of Trump layoffs, which targeted probationary employees across many government agencies.

Those employees got some good news on Thursday, when U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of probationary workers who were let go. The agencies affected include the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, the Interior and the Treasury — the dozens of employees who were terminated at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence were employees of the Department of the Interior.

It makes for a strange sort of whiplash, Levendofsky said, having probationary staff let go and then all of a sudden hearing that they should be back again.

“It’s this whole back and forth business, kind of a cat and mouse game, that is causing a lot of uncertainty and stress that’s really unnecessary, but that’s what this administration is doing,” Levendofsky said. “There are the decisions they are making, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re going to see more of this.”

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Greg Doering, who works with the Kansas Farm Bureau, told the Journal-World that people who have concerns about these issues should reach out to their representatives in Congress, as well as local and regional stakeholders like the Farm Bureau. He said he didn’t know much about the cancellation of the service center’s lease or the employee layoffs and that it hasn’t been something the Farm Bureau has been involved with, because they hadn’t heard from members in the area about it.

“We’re kind of waiting until we hear from members (who) have been talking with the congressional delegation,” Doering said. “… When members encounter an issue or want to speak up about something, we encourage them to reach out to us and their congressman, congresswoman, senators and all that.”

The County Commission, too, wanted to send an alert to the Kansans in Congress with its letter. As the Journal-World reported, the letter is addressed to Republican U.S. Sens. Moran and Roger Marshall and Republican U.S. Reps. Tracey Mann and Derek Schmidt, who represent the districts that cover Douglas County. It asks for them to help those reeling from a variety of cuts, including the USDA office and the mass layoffs at Haskell.

“For those terminated, these reductions appear baseless — seeking out employees whose only ‘deficiency’ was that they were recently hired or reclassified to a different type of federal employee,” the letter reads. “There was no inquiry or analysis of the necessity or qualifications of these civil servants.”

It may be that the Kansans in Congress are hearing from affected residents all around the state. Other Kansas offices are seeing lease cancellations, too — at least, according to the DOGE site. They include the National Labor Relations Board office in Overland Park; the Food and Drug Administration office in Kansas City; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offices in Derby and Manhattan; and at least 20 others.

The Topeka regional office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency was also one of the offices targeted by DOGE. The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that after the office was closed, DOGE claimed there was a total savings of nearly $1 million. However, that office said that all of its workers were still employed with the agency even after the office closed.

For those who use the services these offices provide — including many farmers and ranchers across the state — Levendofsky said these disruptions will cause problems.

“If you close their county office and make them go to another county, you’re just causing more issues for them to get access to those services,” he said.