Currently browsing posts about: USDA

The CDC continues to track the latest outbreak of illnesses caused by eating Romaine lettuce contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.

The outbreak at a glance:

• Reported Cases: 67
• States: 19
• Hospitalizations: 39
• Deaths: 0
• Recall: Yes

The FDA’s advice:

Consumers should not eat romaine lettuce harvested from Salinas, California. Additionally, consumers should not eat products identified in the recall announced by the USDA on November 21, 2019.

A former FDA official, Stephen Ostroff, says:

It’s not clear where this strain is hiding. Cattle? Water sources? Elsewhere? What is clear is that additional steps must be taken to make romaine safer.

The New Food Economy emphasizes some particularly distressing aspects of this particular outbreak.

• It is caused by the same strain of E. coli O157:H7 that caused outbreaks linked to leafy greens in 2017 and to Romaine lettuce in 2018.
• This strain of E. coli seems particularly virulent: 39 of the 67 cases had to be hospitalized.
• The source has not yet been traced.

Consumer Report’s advice: ”

People should avoid all romaine lettuce and that any currently in refrigerators should immediately be thrown out because of the risk of E. coli contamination…CR’s experts think it is prudent and less confusing for consumers to avoid romaine altogether, especially because romaine is also sold unpackaged and in restaurants, and customers can’t always be sure of the origin that lettuce.  “Much of the romaine lettuce on the market at this time of year is from Salinas,” says James E. Rogers, Ph.D., director of food safety research and testing at Consumer Reports.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler says enough is enough; It’s time to put warning labels on Romaine lettuce.

Marler’s advice: when in doubt, throw it out.

My comment:  Contamination of vegetables with toxic E. coli means that the vegetables somehow came in contact with waste from farm animals or wild animals or birds.  The most likely suspect is Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or large dairies because they produce so much animal waste.  If one animal is infected under crowded CAFO conditions, other animals also will be infected (but cows don’t show symptoms).

Preventing lettuce contamination means that CAFOs must manage their waste so that it is not infectious (USDA and EPA regulated) and vegetable farms must keep infected water from contaminating their crops (FDA regulated).  All of this means following food safety procedures to the letter, but also in spirit.

Constant Romaine outbreaks are further evidence for the need for consistency in USDA and FDA food safety policies, and a reminder that calls for a single, united food safety agency have been coming for more than 40 years.  Surely, it’s time.

I was astounded to learn that the USDA spends more than $900 million a year on nutrition education since I can hardly recall seeing any of it.

But now we have a Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis of USDA’s expenditures on nutrition education.

The GAO says that USDA does not:

• Coordinate its nutrition education efforts
• Use the expertise of USDA nutritionists
• Make nutrition education a priority
• Have leadership with responsibility for nutrition education
• Share information across sub-agencies and avoid duplicating efforts
• Assign nutrition education experts to appropriate sub-agencies

No big surprise here—I’ve been hearing such complaints since I worked for the government in the late 1980s—but it’s good to see them documented.

Most of the report is about nutrition education for participants in WIC, SNAP, and other nutrition assistance programs.

Note that there is no line budget for promotion of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a statement of of federal nutrition policy, or for MyPlate, a food guide directed at the general public.  Funds to promote these documents have to be authorized by Congress.

Note also that while $900 million seems like a lot of money, it is considerably below what companies like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola each spend on advertising every year.

I’m indebted to Jerry Hagstrom’s Hagstrom Report for this one.

The People’s Garden on the grounds of the Agriculture Department headquarters, intended by the Obama administration to highlight organic food, has been renamed and reconfigured.

It now features a “Voice of the Farmer” exhibit extolling the virtues of genetically modified alfalfa, corn and soybeans.

This is part of a “Trust in Food” initiative organized by Farm Journal magazine in partnership with its Foundation’s coalition of Big Ag companies.

It will be there until October 2020.

Will this encourage the public to have greater trust in food?  I doubt it.

▪ Agriculture Through the Voice of the Farmer: The Farm Journal Foundation’s website
▪ Trust in Food: A Farm Journal Initiative

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

The Washington Examiner reports on a speech given by Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and current budget head, on why the administration chose to move the Economic Research Service from Washington DC to Kansas City:, causing 70 to 80 percent of its researchers to resign:

What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time…It’s really, really hard to drain the swamp, but we’re working at it…Guess what happened? More than half the people quit. Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker. I know that because a lot of them work for me, and I’ve tried. You can’t do it.  By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out to the real part of the country,’ and they quit.  What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time…even that was difficult to do.

From my standpoint, the destruction of the ERS—now a done deal—is nothing less than an American tragedy.

The ERS was an apolitical research organization, producing carefully done and highly vetted studies on all aspects of USDA’s food programs—agricultural supports, GMOs, pesticides, crop insurance, conservation, trade, food insecurity, food assistance programs, dietary guidelines.

Sometimes their studies produced inconvenient results.  Sometimes truth is inconvenient.

I’ve always viewed the ERS as a national treasure.  I used to think it was Washington’s best kept secret.

Somehow, somebody in this administration found out about it.   It was a tiny agency and must have looked easy to get rid of.

A tragedy indeed.

Some of my previous posts on this topic.  I wish they had done some good.

• September 21, 2018: USDA’s double-speak proposal to “improve” the ERS: brute-force politics
• May 28, 2019: USDA’s destruction of the Economic Research Service: A National Tragedy
• June 18, 2019: The tragic destruction of the Economic Research Service, continued
• July 10, 2019: One more time: the Economic Research Service tragedy

And this just in:

USDA’s inspector general says the department may well have violated laws by moving ERS without congressional permission.

Every time I think the USDA has done the worst damage it possibly can—I’m still reeling from the destruction of the Economic Research Service—it comes up with another bad idea.

This time, the USDA has proposed to “close a SNAP eligibility loophole,” in quotes because this is USDA-speak for throwing people off the rolls.

The “loophole” refers to permitting states to automatically enroll low-income people on SNAP (and low-income children on school meals) if they qualified for temporary financial assistance.

But, as the agency explains in its press release,

The proposed rule would fix a loophole that has expanded SNAP recipients in some states to include people who receive assistance when they clearly don’t need it. In fact, the depth of this specific flexibility has become so egregious that a millionaire living in Minnesota successfully enrolled in the program simply to highlight the waste of taxpayer money.

The press release goes on to say that

This proposal gives USDA the ability to save billions of dollars, ensuring nutrition assistance programs are delivered with consistency and integrity to those most in need.

Yeah.  Right.

A USDA Fact Sheet explains that 3.1 million SNAP recipients get benefits because of the loophole.

USDA officials told reporters that 300,000 children will become ineligible for school meals unless their parents now go through application processes.

The USDA’s cost/benefit analysis, has interesting things to say, first about how much money will this measure save:

$9.4 billion over the five years 2019-2023. Included in this is an estimated reduction in Federal transfers of approximately $10.543 billion over the five-year period as well as a $1.157 billion increase in Federal administrative costs. The Department estimates an additional $1.157 billion in administrative costs to State agencies (for a total of $2.314 billion in additional administrative costs).

Bottom line: Just under $2 billion per year in savings, if the USDA’s numbers are right.

But what about costs?

The Department estimates that approximately 9 percent of currently-participating SNAP households will lose eligibility for SNAP because
their incomes or resources exceed Federal SNAP eligibility standards (an estimated 1.7 million households in FY 2020, containing 3.1 million individuals).

In addition, the Department estimates that households that remain eligible for SNAP (approximately 17.2 million households containing 34.7 million individuals) and new SNAP applicants will face additional burden associated with the application process, at a cost of approximately $5 million annually.

And all of this is likely to be an underestimation:

While overall about 9 percent of all households currently participating in SNAP will lose eligibility under this proposed rule, households with one or more elderly individual(s) and/or earned income will be disproportionately affected. Approximately 13.2 percent of all SNAP households with elderly members will lose benefits (7.4 percent will fail the income test and 5.8 percent will fail the resource test), as will 12.5 percent of households with earnings (8.6 percent will fail the income test and another 3.9 percent will fail the resource test). Households without children will also be disproportionately affected, with 10.1 percent losing eligibility (approximately 5.5 percent will fail the income test and an additional 4.6 percent will fail the resource test.).

You don’t like this?  File comments.  The deadline is September 23.

HOW TO FILE COMMENTS: Click the Comment button here.

The Food and Nutrition Service, USDA, invites interested persons to submit written comments on this proposed rule. Comments may be submitted in writing by one of the following methods:

• Federal eRulemaking Portal: Go to http://www.regulations.gov. Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
• Mail: Send comments to Program Design Branch, Program Development Division, Food and Nutrition Service, USDA, 3101 Park Center Dr., Alexandria, VA 22302. Email: Send comments to SNAPPDBRules@usda.gov. Include Docket ID Number [FNS-2018-0037], “Revision of Categorical Eligibility in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance” in the subject line of the message.
• All written comments submitted in response to this proposed rule will be included in the record and will be made available to the public. Please be advised that the substance of the comments and the identity of the individuals or entities submitting the comments will be subject to public disclosure. FNS will make the written comments publicly available on the internet via http://www.regulations.gov.

Every now and then I run into an excellent source of information about things I know nothing about.  I’ve just discovered Purdue University’s Ag Economy Baromoter, which tracks the opinions of producers of corn and soybeans.

Big Ag feels pretty good about current agriculture and trade policies, probably because USDA’s agricultural support system ihistorically has been firmly rigged in their favor.

If Purdue asked small and medium-sized producers, it might get a different stiory.

I was asked to do a more formal write-up of my blog posts on what’s happening with the Economic Research Service for World Nutrition, a publication of the World Public Health Nutrition Association.

My article is now published as “The Trump Administration’s destruction of the Economic Research Service: An American Tragedy (World Nutrition 2019;10(2):87-91).

It covers events through June 22, 2019.  Since then:

• A survey of employees suggested that 80% would quit rather than move to Kansas.
• The House passed a bill that omitted funds to pay for moving the ERS to Kansas.

I care about what’s happening to the ERS because I depend on the research it produces and have relied on its authoritative studies for decades.  I trust ERS researchers to be honest, independent, and wonderfully available to provide expert interpretation of USDA data.  It breaks my heart to see the destruction of an agency I considered to be a national treasure.  I thought it would be protected by being under the radar.  Apparently not.

Staff losses and politicization means that the ERS is highly unlikely to continue doing that same kind of independent, critical research.  This is an enormous loss.

The USDA sent out a press release announcing that the ERS offices would be moved to Kansas City.

USDA says it is doing this for these reasons:

The considerable taxpayer savings will allow us to be more efficient and improve our ability to retain more employees in the long run. We will be placing important USDA resources closer to many stakeholders, most of whom live and work far from Washington, D.C. In addition, we are increasing the probability of attracting highly-qualified staff with training and interests in agriculture, many of whom come from land-grant universities.

Do we believe this?  No, we do not.

As Politico reports,

The proposal has already sparked a brain-drain of veteran economists from ERS, and some lawmakers and ERS staff allege relocation is a back-door attempt to shrink the agency and clamp down on research that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s priorities.

Politico notes that “USDA paid the consulting firm Ernst & Young $340,000 to run the site selection process.”

In the meantime, ERS employees voted to unionize.  OK, better late than never.

Jerry Hagstrom of The Hagstrom Report  attended USDA Secretary Sonny Purdue’s announcement of the location of the move to ERS employees.  Union members expressed their displeasure openly (they have nothing to lose at this point).

This was a small agency doing quality work.  Its destruction is an American tragedy.

Thanks to the Hagstrom report for providing links to relevant documents:

USDA Research, Education, and Economics — ERS Directed Reassignment Letter (sample)
— Notice of Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority
— Offer of Directed Reassignment: Acceptance/Declination Form
— Application for Voluntary Separation Incentive Program Buyout
— Frequently Asked Questions: Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments (VSIP)
— Sample Buyout Computation Worksheets
— Tax Questions on Buyouts (VSIP)

KC Area Development Council — USDA + KC: Relocation
— KC Now (video)

The ERS union’s letter to USDA for help with the move