The Federal Government has revealed that the cancellation of its plan to transfer water bureaucrats between departments cost taxpayers $365,000.

After the federal election in 2019, the government said it would move water staff from the agriculture department to the infrastructure department.

The shift was should have come into place on December 1 last year, but on November 28, Agriculture Department deputy secretary Malcolm Thompson was notified that the change had been scrapped.

The news came a day after staff were farewelled at an afternoon tea.

Mr Thompson says drought issues had forced the government to abort the change.

“The government had decided not to disrupt delivery of the important range of programs and the policy advice in the water division by moving that function,” he told a recent Senate estimates hearing.

This was all after $171,000 was spent on corporate strategy and governance, $121,000 on IT, $50,000 on finance and $23,000 on legal costs in preparation for the move.

But department secretary Andrew Metcalfe says the staff would have been doing something else if they were not working on the planned shift.

“It's not as if they were additional costs that went beyond the normal budget,” he told the hearing.

Labor frontbencher Jenny McAllister suggested doing something else would have been more useful.

“They might have been saving the Murray-Darling Basin - applying their efforts to that task,” she said.