USDA reorganization critiqued ahead of hearing

Ahead of a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing Wednesday on the Trump administration’s plans to reorganize the Agriculture Department, two former officials and a prominent professor of food studies said today they think the proposal is a bad idea.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced last week that the administration plans to close the USDA South Building, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and other facilities and move 2,600 of the USDA’s 4,600 employees in the Washington area out of Washington to “hub” cities around the country.

In a telephone interview today, Robert Bonnie, the Agriculture undersecretary for farm production and conservation in the Biden administration and undersecretary for natural resources and environment in the Obama administration, told The Hagstrom Report he believes the proposal will hurt both the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Forest Service.

The proposal has been “poorly designed by a few people in the secretary’s office” and carried out without input from agriculture, nutrition and forestry groups or congress, Bonnie said. (Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., has said it is “disappointing” that Rollins did not give him any warning the proposal would be released.)

Bonnie said he is most concerned about the loss of senior staff at NRCS, which advises farmers on voluntary conservation initiatives. Many senior executives, he said, are near retirement age and won’t agree to move out of the Washington area.

Bonnie, who supervised the Forest Service as part of his job in the Obama administration, said that consolidating the Forest Service from nine regions to five will disrupt wildfire management.

Bonnie said the first Trump administration moved senior officials into the Farm Production and Conservation Business Center in a “haphazard manner” and that it took much of his time in the Biden administration “to undo the damage” and make the concept work.

This reorganization, he said, is much bigger and was announced so soon after the Trump administration took power in January. Trump officials “ought to hold public meetings, solicit public comment” and talk to groups with interests at USDA, he said.

If key employees or their successors in those positions are moved out of Washington, agriculture will lose influence in Washington, he said. Career people go to Capitol Hill all the time to talk to members of Congress or their staffs, he said.

“Think of all the fly-ins” of farm leaders, he said. At present, farmers on those fly-ins have four or five meetings at USDA, but if those career experts are in the field that won’t be possible, he said.

The plan to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center is “hugely problematic,” Bonnie said, noting that the National Agricultural Library is there.

The South Building is old, but it’s already being renovated “wing by wing,” he said. Experts from the other buildings the Trump administration is closing could be consolidated there, he said.

Asked if he thinks farm, conservation, nutrition and forestry groups will oppose the reorganization, Bonnie said, “The challenge we have right now is that groups are going to have to pick their battles. Some groups are concerned about speaking up, about retribution. That is why the administration wants to move as fast as they can. This whole thing feels rushed to me.”

Bonnie noted that he has joined the University of California at Berkeley Stone Center as a distinguished scholar.

Steven Silverman, a former director of USDA’s National Appeals Division and lawyer in the USDA general counsel’s office, wrote in Government Executive that the reorganization is “the latest attempt by the Trump administration to undermine the federal government’s ability to provide services to families and communities, in this case the farmers and ranchers of America.”

Marion Nestle, a professor of food studies emerita at New York University, wrote in her Food Politics blog post today: “The proposed destruction of the USDA: It’s deja vu all over again. My translation: Destroy the USDA. Decimate Washington, D.C., in the process. Recall the destruction of the Economic Research Service during the Trump I administration. I wrote about its forced relocation to Kansas City as a national tragedy; it destroyed a tiny unit within USDA that did fabulous research (it is still producing reports, but not like the ones formerly issued). You don’t believe me? See the Government Accountability Office’s analysis of the move: It caused most skilled personnel to resign and did not save any money. This will do the same.”

The hearing will be held at 11 a.m. in Room 328A of the Russell Senate Office Building and will be livestreamed.