Telecommunications Relay Services allow persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind or have speech disabilities to communicate by telephone in a manner that is functionally equivalent to telephone services used by persons without such disabilities.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently in the process of transitioning our users from the existing Sprint Federal Relay contract to the Federal Communications Commission Telecommunications Relay Service program. We are committed to making this transition as smooth and user-friendly as possible and ensuring that quality services are provided throughout the transition and moving forward. We encourage you to transition to this FCC/TRS solution as soon as possible.

You may now transition to a vendor of your choice under the FCC's TRS program for the following services:

• Captioned Telephone Service
• Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Service 
• Internet Protocol Relay Service
• Speech-to-Speech Relay Service
• TTY Relay Service
• Video Relay Service

Information on how to register for TRS can be found on the FCC’s TRS website. This site provides information on the various TRS services, including the names, contact information, and websites of the Internet-based TRS providers for each type of Internet-based relay service.
In order to ensure your continuous access to Video Relay Service, please contact your agency’s Relay Official immediately after registering for VRS through FCC/TRS. You will need to provide your ARO the following information:

• Your 10-digit videophone number
• Your selected service
• Your selected vendor

Vendors will be contacting the agency relay officials to validate USDA relay users utilizing the information above. If you already have a registered videophone with a TRS vendor, you may use that for work purposes and can discontinue using VRS service via the FedRelay contract with Sprint immediately!

Agency relay officials contacts

The FCC's TRS program does NOT offer remote conference captioning or video remote interpreting.

We will be utilizing the department-wide deaf and hard of hearing interpreting services, blanket purchase agreement to ensure that RCC and VRI services will be covered for all USDA employees. Again, all other relay services are being offered via the FCC’s TRS program.

We will be reaching out to you in the near future when we have a task order in place for Remote captioning and VRI needs. We will also be scheduling an informational meeting to address any questions you may have regarding these services.

If you have questions prior to the informational meeting, please contact your agency relay official (listed above) or Eve Makle-Wood eve.makle-wood@usda.gov.

Thank you for your time.