WASHINGTON, D.C. (Cow Guy Close) — The future of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) is under scrutiny after the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced plans to close the aging Maryland facility, citing extensive deferred maintenance, deteriorating infrastructure, and rising costs.
On Tuesday’s Cow Guy Close, host Scott Shellady spoke with USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden about the decision, what he saw during a recent tour of the property, and why the department believes closure is the best path forward.
Q&A with USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden
Scott “The Cow Guy” Shellady: There’s an interesting — or actually a big — story about a piece of property in suburban Washington, D.C. It’s called the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, or BARC for short. It’s kind of a cross between a massive university and a medium-sized city. It’s got its own power plants and the like. It’s slated for closure by USDA as upkeep and one-off maintenance issues have become, quite simply, untenable.
What are your thoughts after touring the facility?
USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden: Well, it’s sad, just to put a period on it. We have more than 400 buildings on that campus in Beltsville, Maryland, and half of them are waiting to be torn down because they are in such abominable condition.
We’ve got four-story buildings where the sprinkler system activated and flooded all four floors. We have a building where a tree is literally growing through the center of it. We have abandoned greenhouses. We have abandoned buildings of all types.
And the taxpayers are being asked to pay for it, all the while our USDA scientists in similarly decrepit facilities located on the campus are being asked to conduct world-leading agricultural research. That’s impossible. It’s not taking science seriously, and it’s not using the resources taxpayers have given us wisely.
So what we’re doing, as you’ve shown, is closing this ancient, underfunded, decrepit facility down and moving these important research projects to the 94 other Agricultural Research Service labs where they can be done in modern, state-of-the-art facilities, which are usually co-located with our land-grant institutions.
Scott Shellady: I’m going to ask permission to ask a stupid question because I don’t really want to know the answer, but I’m going to do it anyway. Are you getting pushback against this common-sense closure?
Stephen Vaden: Yes, we are. And most interestingly, we’re getting it from the Maryland congressional delegation.
This facility is in Maryland. As you know, Maryland has had some incredibly important members of Congress. As a matter of fact, over the last decade or so, a Maryland senator has served as chair of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate, and in the House of Representatives, Representative Steny Hoyer has served in the past as chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
So despite having these senior leaders who are literally responsible for appropriating money for the entire federal government — and despite how important they claim these Beltsville, Maryland, facilities are today — they didn’t appropriate one extra dime to fix them up.
They have allowed, in their own backyard, this decay to continue. And now that we’re taking the obvious step to close it down, they’re throwing a fit, even though their own Office of Special Counsel, in an investigation begun under the previous administration, wrote a formal report saying this facility was a hazard for USDA employees to continue to work at, and its decay was entirely because of inadequate congressional funding that they control.
Exactly right, @SecRollins.
— Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden (@DepSecVaden) April 23, 2026
Closing failing infrastructure at BARC does not end the research. It means the same scientists doing critical work are in labs that ACTUALLY function.
We’re realigning @USDA to deliver maximum results for America’s farmers and to be better stewards… https://t.co/mup9fKLAbD
Scott Shellady: I mean, I’m shocked, but I’m not shocked because it seems like this is happening more and more often nowadays. That is the flag bearer for why we have a problem with $39 trillion in debt and why we have waste, fraud, and abuse.
Stephen Vaden: Well, that’s right. And we have 94 other research facilities for which taxpayers are already paying, which are modern, state-of-the-art, and frequently located at some of the leading research universities in this country.
Why in the world wouldn’t we conduct this important scientific research at modern facilities taxpayers have already purchased?
Instead of closing down this facility in Maryland — which, as you’ve seen from the video, is an embarrassment that we ask scientists to work there at all.
Scott Shellady: And then we’re expected, as USDA leadership, to go out there and recruit the best talent and brightest minds, then bring them back to this pig pen. Who’s going to want to take that job?
Stephen Vaden: Well, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
If you were to look at our org chart for Beltsville, we have multiple positions for which we have appropriations from Congress that remain unfilled.
Would you want to work there? Would you want to work at a facility where nearly every year another building closes because of improper maintenance or some other hazard?
Would you want to work in a town — and I think that’s how you adequately described it in terms of its size, its hundreds and hundreds of acres — where half of the buildings are vacant and literally falling apart?
Is that a great work environment for anyone?
And then you add on top of that, you’re expected to do cutting-edge, world-leading science in such a facility. It makes a mockery of it.
Scott Shellady: Common sense should rule the day. And I’d say, hey, if these Maryland legislators really want it that bad, they can pay for it themselves — but not out of the money that should be going to American farmers.
Stephen Vaden: Well, think about it. During the previous administration, they were not averse to spending money, as we all know. That’s what led to the inflation we’re dealing with the side effects from.
They spent trillions of dollars like it was a hundred-dollar bill, and yet with all of that spending — and all of these complaints from the Maryland congressional delegation about how vital this facility is — at a time when literally no one was minding the store in terms of spending, they couldn’t find an extra dime for Beltsville.
That tells you the whole story of why this facility is in the shape that it’s in.
And I’m sorry, I truly am, that they have allowed this facility to get into the condition that it has, but we have a responsibility to use taxpayer resources wisely, and we’re not going to continue throwing money into this pit that they have refused to fix for years.
