Currently browsing posts about: USDA

When President Trump was elected, he promised to downsize government.  He is doing that, for better or worse.  The latest move affects the USDA: GSA and USDA Unlock $1.6 Billion in Savings for Americans with Ag South Disposition.

Translation: The USDA is getting rid of the enormous, aging building it occupies across the street from its headquarters near the National Mall.

I love the positive spin: “The Ag South disposition will deliver significant value to taxpayers while advancing the Trump Administration’s objectives to reinvigorate, consolidate, and better utilize the federal real estate portfolio.”

Another account of this action reveals that two properties are involved, one of them currently housing the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), the agency that runs food assistance programs.

The USDA announced this plant last summer as part of the department’s major reorganization plan.  Its point: to relocate staff to new USDA hubs.

As explained in yet another account, this is about relocating staff:

Thousands of USDA employees have taken buyouts and left the department over the past year amid Republican U.S. President Donald Trump‘s effort to reshape and reduce the size and footprint of the federal government. The USDA has said it is planning to relocate much of its remaining staff in the U.S. capital to hubs in North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Utah.

From Government Executive, we learn:

The department announced the disposal of the South Building, which Rollins and other officials repeatedly described as dilapidated and mostly empty, last year as part of a larger reorganization that will push 2,600 employees out of the national capital region…USDA currently has 4,600 employees in the Washington area and is looking to shrink that number to 2,000…The department has already shed more than 15,000 employees from its initiative that allowed employees to sit on paid leave for several months before resigning.

Government Executive explains why this concerns me so much:

During Trump’s first term in 2019, the department relocated its Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City, over the objections of employees and some lawmakers. Following the move, both agencies lost more than half of their staff, leading to a significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover. Under President Joe Biden, both agencies moved their headquarters back to Washington while maintaining their Kansas City offices.

…USDA solicited feedback on its reorganization plan last year, leading to 14,000 unique responses. Of those, 82% expressed negativity toward the plan, while 5% took a positive tone. Employees, lawmakers and stakeholders submitting the comments warned of a significant brain drain and disruptions to key farmer-support programs if the changes were implemented.

Oh no, not again.

I long considered the Economic Research Service to be the best kept secret in Washington, DC.  It produced reliable, credible analyses of food issues.  I considered it a national treasure and was devastated by its destruction (I wrote about this often on this site).  In my view, the agency has never recovered from its loss of national experts.  USDA says the FNS will remain in the DC area.

It’s hard not to see this as yet another attempt to undermine food assistance programs and make it harder for people to enroll in them.

I received this e-mailed message from the Avocado Nutrition Center, sponsored by the Hass Avocado Board (a USDA-sponsored research & promotion—checkoff—program).

Indeed, the New Pyramid does highlight avocados.  What a gift to the Hass Avocado Board!

Comment: As I’ve pointed out repeatedly (see my previous posts on these guidelines), the new guidelines and pyramid have losers (ultra-processed foods, sugars, refined carbohydrates, and even whole grains) and winners (meat, dairy, beef tallow—and avocados.  The avocado board is not missing a chance to take advantage of this.  That’s its job!

Last September, the USDA said it would stop conducting the annual hunger survey, because they were “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.”

As I said at the time,

If you live in an Orwellian universe, you can use not measuring to pretend that food insecurity does not exist and certainly that it is not increasing as a result of your policies.

It took a long time for the anti-hunger community to achieve federal documentation of this enormous social problem.  I suppose we will now have to go back to the old days of local anti-hunger reports.  See my comments (with Sally Guttmacher) on state hunger reports.

On December 30, the USDA published the last of its formerly annual reports: 2024 Household Food Security report.

The inconvenient finding continues: food insecurity continues to rise.

And this was before the current Trump-era cuts to SNAP and increases in the cost of food and health care.

No wonder they don’t want to publish reports like these any more.

Regenerative is the new buzzword for sustainable agricultural practices.  Unfortunately, the term is undefined.

I like the approach of the Real Organic Project: regenerative begins with—and extends—certified organic production methods.

The USDA has now adopted the term for its own purposes: USDA Launches New Regenerative Pilot Program to Lower Farmer Production Costs and Advance MAHA Agenda.  It

announced a $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program to help American farmers adopt practices that improve soil health, enhance water quality, and boost long-term productivity, all while strengthening America’s food and fiber supply…(HHS) is also investing in research on the connection between regenerative agriculture and public health, as well as developing public health messaging explaining this connection.

This sounds great, but what does it mean?  Cutting through the rhetoric,

In FY2026, the Regenerative Pilot Program will focus on whole-farm planning that addresses every major resource concern—soil, water, and natural vitality—under a single conservation framework. USDA is dedicating $400 million through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and $300 million through the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) to fund this first year of regenerative agriculture projects.

Oh.  It’s investing in two existing programs that already paid farmers to reduce tilling, plant cover crops, and manage manure.

As Marcia Brown explains in Politico

It’s the most significant commitment toward regenerative agriculture the Trump administration has announced yet, but it comes months after it axed similar Biden-era conservation programs and as it pushes ahead with approvals for new pesticides that are considered forever chemicals.

She quotes Stephanie Feldstein of the Center for Biological Diversity:

Regenerative agriculture needs to be more than just buzzwords Big Ag uses to greenwash business as usual…While the Trump administration promises money for sustainable practices, it continues to cut conservation staff, support the pesticide industry, roll back environmental laws and play trade war games that hurt farmers and our food system.

Comment

All USDA agricultural support programs should require farmers to produce foods in ways that minimize damage to the environment.  This initiative needs to come with specific requirements, clear definitions, and accountability.  These are tiny programs in the context of USDA’s $20 billion annual expenditure on farm supports.  If the agency is serious about producing food more sustainably—which it absolutely should be—it will define what it means by regenerative and apply those principles to all its programs.

Otherwise, this is flat-out greenwashing.

The FDA is cutting down its safety inspections of foreign food imports, even though nearly all seafood, about 60% of fresh fruit and about 40% of vegetables are imported, and we increasingly rely on food imports.

As ProPublica explains, Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts.

These crucial foreign inspections are neither easy nor cheap. They typically last longer than domestic ones and cost nearly $40,000 a visit, and they can require months of logistical planning, special visas and diplomatic approval from the host country…Then Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, which set firm targets for the agency: It needed to conduct more than 19,000 foreign food inspections annually by 2016 and increase the number of food field staff to no fewer than 5,000 workers.

The FDA has never fulfilled this congressional mandate…ProPublica’s Annie Waldman and Brandon Roberts crunched the numbers and found that the U.S. is on track to have the fewest foreign food inspections since 2011 (excluding pandemic years).

This does not bode well for food safety.

It’s not as if we don’t already have plenty of food safety problems.

• The FDA’s list of current recalls and warnings
• The USDA’s list of current recalls and warnings

To review the status of food safety regulation:

• We have plenty of laws requiring all food producers to follow rigorous procedures to greatly reduce the risk of pathogenic contaminants.
• But these laws work much, much better when they are enforced through inspection.
• It’s not that food producers want to make customers sick; it’s that it’s all too easy to cut corners on safety.
• No food producer wants to test for pathogens; if they find any, they have to recall products.
• The system only works with firm oversight.

Fewer inspections gives producers license to be sloppier.

Not a good idea.

The USDA is engaged in a concerted effort to reduce enrollment in SNAP, even though people who qualify are entitled to benefits.

Assigning food stamps (SNAP) to the USDA was a mistake from the get go, but once SNAP was part of the Farm Bill it seemed to make sense.  SNAP takes up most of the USDA’s budget, the blue in this figure.

Even so, I’m stunned by the tone and relentlessness of USDA’s dealings with SNAP beneficiaries—as if they were all lazy, nonworking parasites cheating taxpayers, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Most SNAP recipients who can work, do work.  They just don’t get paid enough to survive .

Here are some recent USDA statements and directives.

• SNAP recipients will need to reapply for benefits.
• Lawfully resident immigrants are no longer entitled to SMAP benefits, effective immediately.
• States are not permitted to issue exceptions to work requirements

And then we have USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins’ announcement on X:

On the brighter side, the Food Research & Action Center has organized nearly 1500 National, State, and Community-based Organizations to sign a letter to Congress to protect SNAP benefits.

As I noted last May, I get asked all the time about what they will say, but have no inside information.  But this may be a good time to go over the clues.

The process

• A scientific advisory committee reviews the research and writes a report.  This was released in December.
• Unspecified (to date) people in USDA and HHS write the guidelines.

The promises

• They will come out “hopefully early fall” (this did not happen)
• Now, according to Reuters, the new dietary guidelines will be released some time in December.

What they won’t say

• They will not continue the tradition of “leftist ideology”  [I think this must mean plant foods]
• They will not promote seed oils (RFK Jr prefers beef tallow).
• They will not promote sugar; RFK Jr says sugar is poison.  [But declared a MAHA Win for Coca’ Cola’s replacement of high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar]
• They won’t say anything about sustainability [anything about climate change is forbidden]

What they will be about

[According to Reuters] Kennedy said the new guidelines would change the kind of food served to military service members and children in schools, but gave no details on the new recommendations.

“If we want to solve the chronic disease crisis, we have to tackle obesity,” Kennedy said. “Obesity is the number one driver of chronic disease,” he said, adding that 50% of the adult U.S. population was obese or overweight, driving costs up for diabetes care and cardiac diseases.

What they might say

Beef

• In its Plan to Fortify the Beef Industry, the USDA says the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines will “encourage protein as the foundation for every meal.”
• In an announcement to ranchers, USDA quotes RFK Jr, “we are restoring whole foods as the foundation of the American diet and ending the decades-old stigma against natural saturated fat in beef and dairy products. We will strengthen America’s ranching industry so families can choose nutrient-dense, minimally processed foods.”

Dairy

In a news conference, officials gave some clues.

We are going to be there for the dairy industry…our agencies are about to release more dietary guidelines in the next several months that will elevate those products to where they ought to be…There’s a tremendous amount of emerging science that talks about the need for more protein in our diet, and more fats in our diet, and there’s no industry that does that better than this industry.

Speculation

When RFK Jr first talked about the new guidelines, he said they would ignore the scientific advisory committee report and would be simple, short (5 pages), easy to understand, and out by September.  I’m guessing that the conflict between the science and ideology is proving more difficult to resolve than anticipated.

The science continues to argue for a largely (but not necessarily exclusively) plant-based diet, reduced in meat and ultra-processed foods from current levels.  RFK Jr initially talked about the need to reduce intake of ultra-processed foods, but the second MAHA report merely asked for a definition.

This administration seems obsessed with protein, a nutrient already in excess in US diets.

If it wants to do something about obesity, it needs the guidelines to suggest ways to reduce calories.  Nobody has mentioned that word so far.

As I keep saying, I can’t wait to see what the new guidelines will look like.  Stay tuned.

I wish USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins would use less inflammatory language in making her announcements.  They sound right out of George Orwell’s 1984—or the 1950s McCarthy era—and do not speak well for American democracy.

Let’s start with the banner at the top of USDA websites.  If nothing else, it violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from partisan public statements.

Next, take a look at ICYMI: Secretary Rollins Pens Newsweek Op-Ed “Theatrics Don’t Feed the Hungry” [my emphasis]

What began as a program for the neediest Americans, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps, has exploded to serve one in every eight Americans. The food stamp rolls have not only skyrocketed due to eligibility loopholes and regulatory boondoggles—each allowing for millions of work-capable adults with school age children to participate—but a program that has recently become a “leverage” point for Democrats in their self-inflicted government shutdown…So, the truth has revealed itself. Democrats’ support for programs like SNAP is now reduced to cynical control over people’s lives.

Instead of focusing on reopening the government and keeping programs like SNAP and WIC functioning…Senate Democrats are holding firm on propping up failed government programs with billions in health care subsidies that benefit corporations over people. Not to mention exposing their far left agenda items: illegal aliens, open borders, gender mutilation and more…It is unconscionable.

I agree on “unconscionable.”

On Monday, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins’ filed this comment on X:

@POTUS is doing everything he can to help our most vulnerable mothers and babies while Radical Left Democrats continue to obstruct.

Name-calling does not help.

Red-baiting does not help.

Civility might.