Vilsack, in line for confirmation as secretary, says he will have 'a serious focus on getting stuff done quickly' at USDA

Tom Vilsack
(Getty Images photo by Alex Wong)

Tom Vilsack is one step away from another term as agriculture secretary, following the Senate Agriculture Committee's unanimous voice vote for his nomination Tuesday. The virtual hearing "was full of references to climate change, greenhouse gas mitigation and carbon credit programs, and lessons learned from the pandemic about the vulnerabilities of our food system," Laura Reiley reports for The Washington Post.

Vilsack was the only cabinet member to last all eight years of the Obama administration. The former Iowa governor and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council didn't want to come back at first, President Biden said in December, but Biden said he persisted because Vilsack knew the department "inside and out."

Vilsack said recently that he would arrive at USDA with a "serious focus on getting stuff done quickly" and would have the advantage of understanding the breadth of what the department can do and the challenges it faces, Chuck Abbott reports for the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Vilsack will face a new challenge in the pandemic, but will have considerable latitude in taking action to help those hurt economically, Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico's Weekly Agriculture that USDA is sitting on a $30 billion (for now) war chest that . . . Biden could tap to prop up struggling restaurants, pay farmers to implement climate-friendly production and potentially much more."

Policies have changed little since Vilsack left, University of Tennessee agriculture economists Harwood D. Schaffer and Daryll E. Ray write: "With the exception of the trade payments and the Covid-19 payments, the farm policies Vilsack inherits as he returns to the agriculture secretary job are essentially the same ones he shepherded through Congress when he previously served."

But other things have changed, so Vilsack's familiarity will be critical, said Ben Lilliston, director of rural and climate strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. "USDA was decimated by the Trump administration, including the attempt to end the undersecretary for rural development and the decision to physically move two key research agencies [the Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture] resulting in a major loss of research capacity," Lillston told Jan Pytalski of The Daily Yonder. "Vilsack knows the department and will rebuild USDA’s capacity and function in the short term."

Schaffer and Ray write that critics have called Vilsack ineffective, but "one could argue that in developing farm policy Vilsack had to deal with a Republican Congress that limited what he could do" after 2010. "For instance, he worked with chicken farmers on contracting issues and held a series of high-profile hearings, only to have Congress fail to fund the writing of new rules."

Progressives worry Vilsack is too cozy with Big Agriculture and has a poor track record on race. "A two-year investigation by Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Stucki of The Counter unearthed a series of other concerns related to Black farmers, including alleged manipulation of census data to cover-up historic discrimination and to falsely claim there was a renaissance in Black farming under Vilsack’s leadership," Martin Longman writes for the Washington Monthly.

Lilliston told Pytalski, "In terms of setting a new course for rural communities, one that isn’t primarily extractive and tied to the interest of often multinational companies, there are reasons to be skeptical that Vilsack will shift much from the Obama years." But Oleta Garrett Fitz, regional administrator of the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice, told Pytalski that Biden’s inital USDA appointments "give a semblance of hope that this administration will pay more than lip service to the rest of the department’s mission to support the health and economic wellbeing of all of rural America, including its most diverse populations."