Farm Service Agency

Historically, the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Farm Service Agency has provided personalized service to farmers through thousands of field offices scattered across the country. These county offices run various commodity, loan, conservation, and emergency disaster assistance programs. In 1994, USDA was required to combine its field offices and reduce personnel and duplicative overhead expenses. Since then, the Farm Service Agency has closed more than 370 county offices and cut its county office staff by about 28 percent. These reductions were achieved primarily by closing and consolidating smaller county offices and by reducing staff at larger county offices. This report provides information on (1) the number of Farm Service Agency county offices with three or fewer permanent full-time workers; (2) the characteristics of these offices, including their proximity to another county office, their workload, the level of program benefits delivered, the relative contribution of farming to total county income, and the number of farms and farmland acres in the counties served by these offices; and (3) the ways in which varying the criteria associated with these characteristics can affect the number of county offices that are candidates for closure and consolidation.

GAO noted that: (1) as of November 1998, 673 of the nearly 2,400 FSA county offices, or almost 28 percent, had three or fewer permanent full-time employees; (2) most small offices, about 58 percent, had three employees, and the remaining small offices had two or fewer employees; (3) about 28 percent of these small offices serve two or more counties; (4) small county offices are located in every state except Rhode Island; (5) the number of small offices in each state varies greatly, ranging from one to 88; (6) additionally, the number of small offices as a percentage of total county offices in each state varies greatly, ranging from about 2 percent in Iowa and South Dakota to 100 percent in Alaska; (7) about 86 percent of these small offices are located within an estimated 50-mile drive of another county office; about 43 percent are within 25 miles of another office; (8) on average, employees in small offices spent a higher percentage of their time on administrative duties (as opposed to program delivery duties) than their counterparts in larger offices in fiscal year 1997, about 46 percent and 32 percent, respectively; (9) regarding program benefits, small offices provided benefits to an average of 296 farmers in 1997, compared with an average of 848 for larger offices; (10) for 1997, the dollar value of these benefits averaged about $1 million in small offices and about $4 million in larger offices; (11) on average, farming accounted for about 1.3 percent of total income for the counties served by small offices in 1995-1996; this average was about 3.7 percent for counties served by larger offices; (12) in addition, small offices served areas (one or more counties) containing, on average, about 720 farms and 367,000 farmland acres in 1997, in contrast, larger offices served areas with, on average, about 836 farms and 402,000 farmland acres; (13) the number of FSA county offices that are candidates for closure and consolidation varies, depending on which characteristics are considered and the criteria set for these characteristics; (14) by changing the threshold for one of the three characteristics, the number of offices with potential for closure and consolidation will change; and (15) however, before closing and consolidating any small office, other factors need to be considered, including whether the office serves a sizeable population of minority, socially disadvantaged, or limited-resources farmers.