USDA reorganization could make jobs more appealing to rural Americans

I’m not sure what to think about the U.S. Department of Agriculture reorganization plan. In case you haven’t heard Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced last week that the agency will vacate several Washington, D.C., buildings in favor of buildings in five hub locations‚ Raleigh, N.C., Kansas City, Mo., Indianapolis, Ind., Fort Collins, Colo., and Salt Lake City, Utah.

I know that part of this motivation for this move is to cut spending. According to Secretary Rollins press release on the reorganization, “Over the last four years, USDA’s workforce grew by 8%, and employees’ salaries increased by 14.5% — including hiring thousands of employees with no sustainable way to pay them. This all occurred without any tangible increase in service to USDA’s core constituencies across the agricultural sector.”

I would also hope that it would lead to more employees who know about farming and ranching, potentially some who have actually owned and worked on these farms and ranches being hired on at the USDA.

I say this because I once spent a few months in Washington, D.C., when I was in college and interned for a congressman representing North Dakota. The internship was intended to bring political science junkies to D.C. in an effort to recruit them for jobs.

I have to admit it was really cool and exciting to be in the nation’s capitol, watching lawmakers debate on the House and Senate floors, meeting people you had only seen and heard on the news, and visiting historic monuments and museums.

But the nation’s capitol is not the safest place to be, and this hillbilly who grew up in Edinburg, N.D., had some tense moments walking to and from work and being confronted by homeless people asking for money, food, cigarettes and/or booze. In fact, me and my three roommates — also from North Dakota — did what we called “watching crime in the streets” on the weekends. The three-story row house we lived in had bars on the doors and windows. And many of the convenience stores we frequented in our neighborhood had Plexiglass partitions between the customers and the workers.

Because of this, I never had any intention of taking a job in Washington, D.C., because living there was not safe. Not only was it not safe, but it was extremely expensive, and most of the people that I met who worked there had no cars because there aren’t any parking spaces.

I think people like me would probably be more apt to take a government position if it wasn’t in Washington, D.C.

So I hope this is one of the reasons behind the USDA reorganization and that it successfully draws in more people from rural areas of the U.S. because, in my opinion, we need those voices in the agency.