Indianapolis is still set to land one of USDA’s five new regional hubs — and the timeline is right on track. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Hoosier Ag Today that the move is going forward as planned.
“Our goal is to get everyone moved out of D.C. before school starts in the fall,” said Rollins during her press conference last week at Commodity Classic in San Antonio.
“So, we’ll be able to make sure that those who are moving with their families to any of those five hubs: Raleigh, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Colorado Springs, and Salt Lake City have the opportunity to find their homes, get signed up for school, and get their children in school,” said Rollins.
She didn’t provide any further updates on which offices and personnel would be moving to Indianapolis—nor did she give information on a specific location where a new regional hub office building would be located in central Indiana.
“We feel pretty confident. We’ve been working hard for a year that we are going to meet those deadlines,” she said.
In preparation for the move, Rollins announced last week that USDA would be vacating the South Building in Washington, D.C., which is across the street from the department’s main headquarters—the Whitten Building.
“The South Building is 432,000-square-feet and has 7,000 offices. When it was built it was the largest office building in the world until the Pentagon was built,” said Rollins. “Today, those 7,000 offices, other than about maybe 600, sit empty. In addition, there’s about $1.6 billion in maintenance that is needed in that building.”
She added that the USDA South Building will be given over soon to the Government Services Administration (GSA)—and likely, be put up for sale.
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