By JOE MURCHISON
Maryland elected officials believe that the Trump administration will not be able to sell the 6,000-acre Beltsville Agricultural Research Center to developers. They say the land will remain open space.
State Sen. Jim Rosapepe (District 21) said that he and other state legislators from the county achieved passage of a state law in 1993 stipulating that if the federal government sold BARC’s land, the acreage would immediately go into agricultural, open-space zoning.
Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced on July 24 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to vacate the research center south of Laurel and north of the Washington Beltway “over multiple years.” More broadly, her statement detailed a plan for the Agriculture Department to move most of its 4,600 employees based in the Washington, D.C., area to facilities in other parts of the country.
Later that day, Congressman Steny Hoyer (District 5) and eight other members of Congress from Maryland released a statement opposing the BARC closure. “BARC is the foundation of our country’s excellence in agricultural research, with its scientists working for more than 100 years on the front lines of protecting public health and supporting farmers and farming across the country,” the statement said. “Shuttering BARC and uprooting its workforce will undercut its critical mission, endanger public safety, and unnecessarily waste taxpayer dollars. … Congress and the courts must act swiftly to block this illegal and harmful reorganization and ensure BARC remains intact. The law demands it, and our farmers depend on it.”
Rosapepe said that Hoyer, a former House Majority Leader, held an online strategy meeting July 28 with a group of other members of Congress, as well as Prince George’s elected officials.
Rosapepe, County Executive Aisha Braveboy and County Council member Tom Dernoga (District1) were among the participants.
Rosapepe said Hoyer noted that both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had attempted to close BARC, but that Congress had blocked those efforts, passing a law in the 1980s that stipulated any sale of the center’s land had to be approved by Congress.
At the strategy meeting, officials discussed the possibility that the Trump administration would sue to overturn these BARC protections, Rosapepe said. He added that the group also discussed possible legal bases for a suit against the Trump administration to keep BARC open.
BARC, founded in 1910, has been one of the largest and most important agricultural research centers in the world. Its work has led to improved food crops, better protection of plants and animals from disease, greater protections against soil erosion and better understanding of human nutrition. Its campus also birthed what are now other federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.
For locals, BARC has provided high-skill scientific jobs and has preserved, in combination with the Patuxent Research Refuge, the largest single expanse of open space in a densely populated metropolitan area.
Despite its impact, BARC’s facilities have suffered from deterioration. In a report this summer, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel said whistleblowers working at BARC had complained that “the entire campus was frequently without running water, the temperature in most buildings was poorly regulated, many buildings had water damage or flooding from unstable plumbing, and dozens of buildings had not had working fire suppression systems since 2021.” The report said Special Counsel investigators had “largely substantiated the whistleblowers’ allegations.”