Congress is threatening to use its power of the purse to save a key Department of Agriculture research lab. But that may be little more than bluster in the eyes of the Trump administration.
Deep in the spending package that ended the 43-day government shutdown, Congress inserted a few lines forbidding USDA from using appropriated funds to close or consolidate research facilities — a provision aimed mainly at the department’s 6,000-acre flagship Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland — without approval from the House and Senate Appropriations committees.
That’s an old trick that sends a message but doesn’t have much legal bite if the administration chooses to ignore it, according to experts in constitutional law.
One of the best-placed skeptics is the USDA official running the reorganization: Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden, who as the department’s top lawyer during the first Trump administration declared similar measures unconstitutional.
The issue then was the administration’s relocation of USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture from Washington to Kansas City, which the department pursued unilaterally.
Congress can’t legally require USDA to secure approval of congressional committees to relocate offices or agencies, Vaden said at the time, since just one committee could theoretically block executive agencies from exercising an authority officials clearly have.
“USDA is not required to abide by unconstitutional laws,” Vaden said in a written response to a USDA inspector general’s report on the matter.
“Therefore,” Vaden wrote, “the Department declines OIG’s recommendation to ignore Supreme Court, Office of Legal Counsel, and Government Accountability Office precedent and seek congressional committee approval of the relocations.”
At issue is a Supreme Court ruling in INS v. Chada, a 1983 case in which the justices ruled against the “legislative veto.” While the details are different — in that case, one house of Congress vetoed an executive action related to immigration — requiring agencies to obtain the permission of committees rings similar in some legal experts’ view.
“Presidents of both parties have argued that this type of oversight is unconstitutional,” said Michael Berry, an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Denver, who has written on the subject.
From 1985 to 2010, Congress passed nearly 800 statutes requiring committee approval — up from 150 in the years before the Chada ruling, he said.
“Although such statutes often require approval from committees of both chambers, this type of oversight seems to violate the Constitution’s bicameralism and presidential presentment requirements, which were the central pillars of the Chadha ruling,” Berry said.
On the other hand, the idea’s never been directly tested, said Soren Dayton, director of American governance policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, a libertarian-leaning think tank.
“It’s a surprisingly complicated question,” Dayton said.
Political pressure
In the case of the two relocated research agencies — the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture — USDA under then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue moved swiftly enough that the relocation was locked in before Congress could meaningfully weigh in. And Republicans supported the move.
While the legal lines around congressional approval may be blurry, Dayton said, the real question comes down to political will: What’s the risk in the administration starting the gradual shutdown at Beltsville anyway, a process the agency has said will take several years?
The Beltsville closure is part of a broader reorganization the department is planning — and to the extent USDA needs money from Congress to pay for it, lawmakers have some control, Dayton said.
Officials at USDA say the facility has fallen into disrepair over the years and isn’t the stellar lab it once was, an argument for moving its work to other places.
“While BARC once used to be a state-of-the-art research facility, it is no longer worth the cost to bring it into the 21st century,” USDA said in a statement through a spokesperson.
The department added, “USDA would need $500 million to fully modernize BARC to improve the facility and an additional $40 million a year in maintenance to sustain operations. This is not a wise use of taxpayer dollars when there are other USDA laboratories across the country with the capacity to house the research being conducted here.”
‘Will of Congress’
Republicans in Congress largely support the reorganization, in part because it could mean more USDA jobs in their states or districts as employees are moved out of the national capital region.
USDA has shown some willingness to test the boundaries with appropriators this year, including blocking or rescinding grants and taking tens of millions of dollars away from certain Forest Service programs in the middle of the fiscal year to compensate employees who took deferred resignation offers, generating little complaint from Republican lawmakers.
However, ignoring congressional directives to obtain permission may be more confrontational than the administration wants to be, especially when both chambers are run by the president’s party.
Usually, departments abide by the language even though it’s legally questionable, said a former congressional appropriations aide who lobbies on related issues and requested anonymity to discuss them openly.
“We’d do it, knowing it’s not legal,” said the former aide.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) — who helped shepherd the provision into the final fiscal 2026 Agriculture-FDA bill — will continue to defend the Beltsville lab, his office said. The senator, joined by fellow Maryland Demoratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, also secured $6 million to modernize buildings there.
“BARC’s research helps farmers across our country put food on the table for millions of Americans,” Van Hollen said in statement.
He added: “The Senate on a bipartisan basis has made it clear that the Administration’s attempts to shutter BARC are not in line with the will of Congress. This is not only clear in the report language we secured, but also in the funds we included to modernize BARC’s facilities. We will continue working to support and protect the critical work being done by BARC.”
Contact this reporter on Signal at hellmarcman.49
