Making the USDA work better for farmers and consumers
Some snippets from today's WSJ are very hopeful!
https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/NrXdb6AXmr2UO3omGbdF-WSJNewsPaper-3-15-2025.pdf
Congress elevated the USDA to cabinet status in 1889. Today it oversees 29 subagencies with nearly 100,000 employees, and it reports its total outlays last year at $228.3 billion….
On her first day in office, she demonstrated the point by plucking some low-hanging fruit. She terminated 78 contracts for, among other things, “diversity dialogue workshops,” a “Brazilian forest and gender consultant” and a “women and forest carbon initiative mentorship program.” That added up to $132 million…
Ms. Rollins says her broader mission is the “restoration of rural America.” The government tends to ignore farmers, she says, except to impose “burdensome and costly regulations that hamper innovation.” She wants to ease off, and her plan to lower egg prices, announced in these pages, exemplifies her approach—offering services to farmers without rushing to add new requirements. The USDA will offer free consulting to egg-laying chicken farms to help mitigate the threat of avian flu.
It would be great if USDA shared its testing protocols with farmers and allowed them to get second opinions on positive tests. Up until now, the federal agencies have been very secretive about the tests they use to make decisions about culling and quarantining milk.
The department will also invest in vaccine research, but Ms. Rollins is hesitant about mass vaccinations. “I have gotten a crash course in chicken vaccines,” she says. “Something I never thought I would say.” A White House official told her “we have to vaccinate all the chickens.” Then an expert said, “No, no, no, we can’t vaccinate all the chickens, because the labor on that is insane.” A veterinarian told her that 83% of vaccinated Mexican chickens get the flu anyway, and another vet, Gov. Jim Pillen of Nebraska, said “the virus always wins.” Her conclusion: It’s premature to spend “hundreds of millions of dollars on stockpiling avian flu vaccine and moving out, sticking chickens—not even considering the trade implications, the broilers on the other side of this.”
Very few broilers have gotten avian flu (the virus seems to prefer female egg layers and milkers for some reason, sparing meat cattle) but broiler exports will be reduced if the US starts vaccinating any chickens, as some countries will prohibit imports of our chickens if there are any vaccinations—Nass
Like the federal government as a whole, the USDA’s spending goes mostly to entitlements, including $122.1 billion, or 53% of its budget, to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as food stamps)…. Said our new Secretary, ““I will do everything I can to make sure that the people that truly need that will get it. It’s really important to me.”
American farmers will soon receive $10 billion in economic assistance to help them cope with a downturn in the markets. Mr. Trump has taken this approach before. During his first-term trade war with China, he authorized $23 billion in aid for farmers in 2018-19 to offset agricultural export sale losses.
Trump also lowered the tariff on Canadian potash for farmers to 10%, probably after Ms. Rollins spoke to him about it.
I believe this is a Secretary and USDA that wants to do the right thing. USDA is a massive web of bureaucracy (Imagine 100,000 employees, or about 30 for every US county) and USDA won’t be easy to tame—or to get the fraud and waste under control. But I think we have the right person at the helm. She is pragmatic, a very hard worker, and she grew up poor on a farm in rural Texas. She understands rural life and she also knows the ways of Washington. She has a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and a law degree. And she has a houseful of children, and she wants to make the world better for them.