USDA reverses course on Salinas office closure, but funding still remains uncertain.

In March, a Monterey County office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture was caught in the crosshairs of cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which announced that the lease for the building would not be renewed in August of this year, with no plans of moving elsewhere.

Nearly three months later, those termination letters were rescinded along with seven other offices in the state that were slated for closure, according to a letter sent to U.S. Senator Adam Schiff by USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins.  

“Following my call to the Trump administration to reverse their plans to close USDA offices across California, I am pleased to announce that Secretary Rollins has informed me of their work with the General Services Administration (GSA) to ensure that many of these USDA offices will remain open,” Schiff said in a press release.

The Salinas office, located at 744 La Guardia St., is a service center that houses local offices of the Farm Service Agency (FSA), Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and Rural Development federal agencies, and shares the building with the Resource Conservation District (RCD), a locally governed, non-regulatory special district that works with landowners and the public to conserve and manage natural resources.

In the months following the announcement that the lease would be terminated, RCD workers developed a work-back schedule to prepare for the move, scouting potential new spaces and beginning initial negotiations.

“The RCD was doing stuff because we could,” says Paul Robins, executive director of RCD. “The federal agencies were simply told to hang tight.” He adds because federal agencies lacked guidance, they were not making the same preparations.

Had the termination of the office lease been carried out, RCD would have faced a hole in its budget of over $70,000 covered in rent by sharing the building, compounding impacts RCD was already facing from funding cuts. 

Most recently, RCD received two grant termination letters, one through NRCS for technical assistance to traditionally underserved producers, and one related to a project with CSU Monterey Bay for climate-smart agriculture.

Robins received notice April 18 that their federal award, titled Monterey County Historically Under-served and Urban Ag Outreach and Assistance, was terminated on the basis of discrimination, and that RCD was in violation of federal civil rights laws.

The letter states:

“The Secretary of Agriculture has determined, per the Department’s obligations to the Constitution and laws of the United States, that priority includes ensuring that the Department’s awards do not support programs or organizations that promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion ('DEI') initiatives or any other initiatives that discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or another protected characteristic.”

The grant allowed RCD to fill local NRCS service gaps related to engineering design services and agronomic technical services in Spanish and English. 

“We refuse service to no one who requests support,” Robins wrote in an email response to the termination letter, going on to explain how RCD works closely with federal office staff to share workloads that include technical support and managing application requests to meet the needs of local farmworkers.

RCD was impacted indirectly by the termination of a $5 million grant given to CSUMB to implement climate-smart practices. On April 22, researchers with the Department of Agriculture, Biology and Chemistry were told the project no longer met new criteria set by the USDA.

The team at CSUMB plans to reapply to the USDA for funding. Meanwhile, RCD has some certainty for now: “Despite whatever is going on with CSUMB,” Robins says, “we're continuing at the same level of work almost as last year.”