Many big policy changes in the Trump administration's Agriculture Department "have been marred by missing pieces of critical data, assertions challenged by outside experts or other struggles to demonstrate the reasons for major shifts in federal food and farm policy," Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico. "The trend has raised questions from critics about how USDA leaders are making decisions with huge implications for struggling farmers, food stamp recipients and workers in dangerous meatpacking jobs, among other aspects of America’s food system." Many lawmakers, agricultural research experts and former USDA staff feel that Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and his top deputies are making political decisions first and gathering relevant facts later.
For example, when the USDA announced a July 2019 proposal to narrow eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the formal analysis of the rule did not include a critical measurement: how many low-income children would lose automatic access to free school meals. "Lawmakers hounded USDA officials for months to track down those figures, which turned out to be twice as high as USDA initially indicated," McCrimmon reports.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle protested last year when Perdue suddenly announced plans to shutter a Forest Service program that provides vocational training to disadvantaged rural teens and young adults. The administration planned to transfer the Job Corps program to the Labor Department, close nine centers and outsource 16 to state governments or private companies. About 1,100 employees were slated to lose their jobs. The official regulatory notice said that the centers underperformed, were inefficient and didn't achieve long-term positive outcomes, but provided no data to support that, McCrimmon reports.
"The Trump administration has also asserted in budget documents that the USDA-run sites on average were more costly and less effective than other centers managed by the Labor Department — even though their own performance data shows that most of the Forest Service centers scored in the top 25 percent of all job training centers, meaning they significantly outperformed the other sites," McCrimmon reports. Perdue ultimately backed off the plan after pressure from lawmakers concerned about their constituents losing jobs.
Agricultural economists have criticized the calculations the USDA used to structure its trade bailout program for farmers, McCrimmon reports. Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee lambasted the program's payment structure in a November report, saying that the calculations lacked transparency, and that it disproportionately helped Southern farmers, wealthy farms and foreign companies while paying Midwestern soybean and corn farmers less.
"In June of last year, the department’s internal watchdog launched an investigation into whether officials used flawed data to support a new rule allowing meatpackers to accelerate their pork processing lines to high speeds that could endanger plant workers," McCrimmon reports.
For example, when the USDA announced a July 2019 proposal to narrow eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the formal analysis of the rule did not include a critical measurement: how many low-income children would lose automatic access to free school meals. "Lawmakers hounded USDA officials for months to track down those figures, which turned out to be twice as high as USDA initially indicated," McCrimmon reports.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle protested last year when Perdue suddenly announced plans to shutter a Forest Service program that provides vocational training to disadvantaged rural teens and young adults. The administration planned to transfer the Job Corps program to the Labor Department, close nine centers and outsource 16 to state governments or private companies. About 1,100 employees were slated to lose their jobs. The official regulatory notice said that the centers underperformed, were inefficient and didn't achieve long-term positive outcomes, but provided no data to support that, McCrimmon reports.
"The Trump administration has also asserted in budget documents that the USDA-run sites on average were more costly and less effective than other centers managed by the Labor Department — even though their own performance data shows that most of the Forest Service centers scored in the top 25 percent of all job training centers, meaning they significantly outperformed the other sites," McCrimmon reports. Perdue ultimately backed off the plan after pressure from lawmakers concerned about their constituents losing jobs.
Agricultural economists have criticized the calculations the USDA used to structure its trade bailout program for farmers, McCrimmon reports. Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee lambasted the program's payment structure in a November report, saying that the calculations lacked transparency, and that it disproportionately helped Southern farmers, wealthy farms and foreign companies while paying Midwestern soybean and corn farmers less.
"In June of last year, the department’s internal watchdog launched an investigation into whether officials used flawed data to support a new rule allowing meatpackers to accelerate their pork processing lines to high speeds that could endanger plant workers," McCrimmon reports.
Rebecca Boehm, an economist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told McCrimmon that the administration has deliberately made data take a backseat in policymaking: "It’s obviously political, and special interests come into it. But bottom line is the public loses, farmers lose."
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