Agriculture Department
Quick and Dirty
- Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue was the subject of multiple ethics complaints and investigations during two terms as governor of Georgia. In one headline-making case, he approved a tax bill with a little-noticed provision that retroactively saved him $100,000 on a land sale.
- Perdue has filled the department’s top ranks with former agribusiness executives and lobbyists, along with an unusual number of Trump campaign workers without other obvious qualifications.
- The Agriculture Department has OK’d sharply higher line speeds for hog and poultry slaughterhouses and cut back on USDA meat-safety inspections, letting some big employers hand that responsibility off to low-wage workers.
- While in Wisconsin for a conference of dairy farmers at a time of widespread distress and a surge in farmer suicides, Perdue implied that they should just get used to it, telling reporters, “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out.”
- The department has proposed taking three million people off food stamps.
- The department has loosened many environmental and health and safety regulations and dismissed concerns over climate change.
What Am I Doing Here?
- As governor of Georgia, after issuing an order prohibiting gifts worth more than $25 to state employees, Perdue accepted sports tickets, airplane flights, and other gratuities valued at over $25,000.
- He signed a tax bill with a last-minute tweak that saved him $100,000 on an already-completed land sale. One of the legislators backing that bill had worked part time for Perdue on his personal legal business.
- As a founder or part-owner of more than a dozen agribusiness companies, Perdue collected $278,000 in federal farm subsidies between 1996 and 2004.
- In his campaigns for political office, Perdue received large contributions from the likes of Monsanto and Coca-Cola.
- In a 2014 article, Perdue dismissed efforts by “some on the left or in the mainstream media” to connect extreme weather events to climate change. “Liberals,” he wrote, “have lost all credibility when it comes to climate science because their arguments have become so ridiculous and so obviously disconnected from reality.”
Handouts to the Undeserving
- The department has authorized much higher line speeds for giant poultry and hog slaughtering companies, and in some cases let them turn the job of safety inspection over to low-paid slaughterhouse workers, typically earning a couple of dollars over minimum wage.
- In his confirmation hearings, Sonny Perdue emphasized his commitment to “customer service.” The customers who have received the best service from his department are giant multinational food and pesticide companies. “They have his ear, he’s hired their lobbyists as top staffers, and pretty much down the line he’s been fulfilling their requests,” says Ben Lilliston of the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
- With relatively little public notice, oversight, or hard data, Perdue’s department has distributed more than $28 billion in emergency relief to farmers injured by the administration’s trade war with China. This program has been massively tilted toward multinational agribusiness companies. More than $62 million, for example, has gone to the world’s largest meat processor, JBS, owned by a pair of billionaire brothers who have served prison time for bribing hundreds of government officials in their native country of Brazil.
- Midwestern dairy and corn farmers and Maine blueberry growers, among others, have complained bitterly about the way the subsidies have been distributed. Perdue has belittled their protests. “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” he said in a speech delivered at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin.
- Perdue undid a set of newly adopted rules meant to keep agribusiness giants from engaging in price-fixing and other forms of collusion at the expense of farmers or consumers. He effectively eliminated the unit (known as GIPSA) responsible for enforcing the anti-fraud regulations that remained, making it part of an office dedicated to marketing and public relations.
- Working with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Perdue’s department pressured Mexico to weaken new nutrition disclosure rules for processed food, intended to combat obesity.
- The Agriculture Department went to bat for Dow Chemical in pressing China to accept its genetically modified, herbicide-resistant corn seeds. With that victory secured, Dow spun off its agriculture business into a new subsidiary, Corteva, which is now the top corn seed producer in the Asia-Pacific region.
- The department reinterpreted the Clean Water Act to let farmers use previously forbidden chemical pesticides and fertilizers at the risk of contaminating local waterways.
Undue Influence
- The number of former industry lobbyists and executives tapped for key jobs at the Department of Agriculture has been extraordinary, even by Trump administration standards, and ethical concerns do not seem to worry very many of them.
- A former pesticide industry executive, Rebeckah Adcock, was put in charge of a deregulation team and took part in the effort to get China to accept Dow’s genetically modified corn seeds. Before one high-level meeting on the issue, Dow lobbyist Hunt Shipman emailed Adcock: “Do you know who will staff the secretary?” Adcock treated the question as a joke: “Yes and u do too.” “Roger,” Shipman replied. Then, alluding to the potential conflict of a public servant helping former colleagues, he added: “Maybe you can have a chair on both sides of the table … Maybe you can staff them both?”
- Throughout Perdue’s tenure, chemical companies have enjoyed unprecedented physical and email access to top department officials. “A Wide-Open Door for Pesticide Lobbyists at the Agriculture Department,” is how ProPublica summed it up.
- Deputy Secretary Steve Censky came to the department after 21 years as CEO of the American Soybean Association, which has lobbied against disclosure rules for products containing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Censky had helped win passage of a 2016 law that repealed GMO labeling requirements.
- Brooke Appleton, Censky’s chief of staff, had been a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Association and National Association of Wheat Growers. In February 2019, after two years at USDA, Appleton left to become vice president of public policy for the corn growers’ group.
- Kailee Tkacz, tapped to serve on a nutritional policy advisory panel, had been a lobbyist for the Corn Refiners Association, the National Grocers Association, and the Snack Food Association, battling against federal efforts to discourage excessive sugar and salt consumption.
- Maggie Lyons, chief of staff to the acting deputy undersecretary of Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, was a former lobbyist for the National Grocers Association.
- Kristi Boswell, hired to advise Secretary Perdue on policies related to visas for seasonal farmworkers, had spent five years as a lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation.
- The department has a trade policy advisory panel loaded with representatives of such agribusiness groups as the Livestock Export Association of the USA, the International Dairy Foods Association, the U.S. Meat Export Federation, Archer Daniels Midland, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Cargill, the National Pork Producers Council, Sunkist Growers, and Corteva Agriscience.
Apparatchiks
- Politico reviewed 42 resumes of the department’s political appointees. Twenty-two had worked on the Trump presidential campaign.
- The list of appointees included a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a meter reader for a gas company, a country club cabana attendant, the owner of a scented-candle company, a Republican National Committee intern, and a former Washington state senator who mentioned on his résumé that he was the first elected official in his state to back Trump’s candidacy.
- The truck driver, Nick Brusky, received a GS-12 job, paying nearly $80,000 a year, at the department’s Foreign Agricultural Service. Although he had never been involved in developing international markets for farm products, Brusky pointed out that he had experience “hauling and shipping agricultural commodities.”
We Don’t Want to Hear About It
- The department’s economic research office concluded that the 2017 Republican tax cuts had given “the biggest benefits to the wealthiest farmers.” After that finding, Perdue decided to move the research office from Washington to Kansas City, even though some staff members had been working and living in Washington for years. Given 33 days to say yes or no to relocating, most of the affected employees decided they couldn’t move and lost their jobs.
- Perdue has done the same with the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which supports research at land grant colleges across the country. Here, too, a majority of the employees left rather than make the move. Addressing a Republican Party gala in South Carolina, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney described relocation as a “wonderful way” to shrink the size of government, bemoaning that it’s usually difficult to fire federal workers.
- Perdue’s disdain for broadly accepted climate science has helped spur an exodus of USDA professionals. “You get the sense that … this is not a place for you to be exploring things that don’t agree with someone’s political views,” says Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist who worked at USDA for more than two decades. “That’s so sad. I can’t even begin to tell you how sad that is.” Ziska was appalled by the department’s lack of interest in a study of the future of rice-growing and the 600 million people who depend on it. “It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie,” he says.
Further Reference
- A Wide-Open Door for Pesticide Lobbyists at the Agriculture Department (ProPublica)
- The state of the USDA: A quiet dismantling (Ben Lilliston, IATP)
- ‘They literally take food off their table’: Trump’s Department of Agriculture seeks to cut programs without knowing how many people will be hurt (Politico)
- Trump hires campaign workers instead of farm experts at USDA (Politico)
- Leveraging the revolving door: lobbying forms show how agriculture group targets officials with industry ties for advocacy (CREW)
- The Snack Food and Corn Syrup Lobbyist Shaping Trump’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans (POGO)
- A Lesson From the USDA: Want to Make Workers Unhappy? Move Their Office to Another State (Politico)
- USDA relocation has delayed key studies and millions in funding, employees say (Washington Post)
- Official says USDA departures ‘wonderful’ way to drain the swamp (Federal Times)
- House Democrats Are Failing to Protect Farmers from Trump (Washington Monthly)
- What’s Up With Trump Bailout Money And JBS? (Drovers)
- JBS: The Brazilian butchers who took over the world (Bureau of Investigative Journalism)
- Trump farm secretary: No guarantee small farms will survive (Associated Press)
- Soybean CEO named No. 2 at USDA (Successful Farming)
- We Found a “Staggering” 281 Lobbyists Who’ve Worked in the Trump Administration (ProPublica)
- Kailee Tkacz profile (ProPublica)
- Revolving Door: Lobbyists-Turned-USDA-Officials Work With Junk Food Industry to Keep Soda, Candy in SNAP Program (Sludge)
- ‘It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie’ (Politico)
- Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change (Politico)
- Sonny Perdue’s School Lunch Bait-and-Switch (Union of Concerned Scientists)
