USDA names Rural Development deputy undersecretary, but there's still no undersecretary for it and other units

Bette Brand (USDA photo)

On Friday, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced Bette Brand as the new deputy undersecretary for Rural Development programs, following the retirement of D.J. LaVoy.

Brand has been the administrator Rural Development's Rural Business Service since January 2018. Before that, she worked for 35 years for a farm lender and served on various rural-centric non-profit boards in Virginia, according to the Department of Agriculture press release.

Though Brand is an undersecretary in name, in reality she will head the USDA section that oversees rural infrastructure, housing assistance, broadband connectivity, and more. Why? "There’s still no full undersecretary for rural development, more than a year since Congress reinstated the position in the 2018 Farm Bill (after Perdue tried to eliminate it)," Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico's Morning Agriculture.

Half of USDA's mission areas are headed by deputy officials, McCrimmon notes: "The department has no undersecretaries for food safety; research, education and economics; and food, nutrition and consumer services. Each area is led by a deputy undersecretary."

Why lead with deputies? Partly because they don't require Senate confirmation, McCrimmon writes. The confirmation process can be slow, and after two undersecretary nominees were stuck in Senate limbo for months, Perdue simply named the nominees to deputy undersecretary roles instead. That's in keeping with President Trump's preference for naming acting cabinet members as a way of getting around the Senate confirmation process.

However, "Senate inaction isn’t the only hangup," McCrimmon reports. "The White House didn’t get around to picking someone to lead the [Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services] branch until December 2019, and there’s still no nominee for rural development undersecretary."