Judge halts Trump administration’s move to close Beltsville Agricultural Research Center

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s flagship research facility in Beltsville will remain open for now after a federal judge in California halted the Trump administration’s plans to shutter it.

Administration officials announced plans to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in summer 2025 as part of a broader move to restructure the Department of Agriculture by closing offices and relocating employees.

The federal government first purchased land that would become the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, or BARC, in 1910, and the installation grew into the country’s premiere site for agricultural research — it’s where researchers first bred a commercially available Thanksgiving turkey and later developed the Roma tomato.

Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy said the court’s decision Tuesday saves about 1,000 jobs and, for the time being, prevents the loss of about $450 million in gross domestic product for Maryland.

“We were not going to let Trump shut down BARC without a fight,” Braveboy said in a statement.

Braveboy said in a television interview with WUSA9 late Tuesday that she was expecting the Trump administration to challenge the judge’s ruling.

An unnamed Department of Agriculture spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday that the department “is reviewing the Judge’s decision and will file its response with the Court.”

Prince George’s County was part of a coalition that included federal employee labor unions, local governments and nonprofits that sued the Department of Agriculture to stop its restructuring and the closure of BARC.

The coalition’s primary argument, according to Tuesday’s ruling, was that the congressional appropriations statutes funding the Department of Agriculture prohibit agencies from “reprogramming” money as part of a reorganization, unless they receive approval from Congress.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California wrote in his order that it was necessary to pause the Trump administration’s plans “to protect the congressional prerogative, prevent irreparable harm to federal employees, and vindicate the public interest.”

Chhabria wrote that the pause he ordered may be short, considering the relevant appropriations statutes are set to expire in less than two months.

“If the agency wishes to move forward with its plans to close offices and relocate employees, it will soon have the opportunity to convince Congress of the merits of those plans,” he wrote.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown led a coalition of attorneys general in filing a brief in September to support the lawsuit.

A press release from his office called the Trump administration’s restructuring a “thinly veiled attempt to drive large numbers of employees to resign by forcing them to move across the country.”

Brown said in a statement in September that “the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is a Maryland treasure that strengthens and protects our food system and public health far beyond our state’s borders, and closing it would be reckless.”

The attorney general’s release states that, among other consequences, Beltsville scientists on at least one project studying the foodborne parasite cyclospora had declined to move as part of the anticipated BARC closure, potentially forcing them to resign from the Department of Agriculture and throwing the future of their research into question.