Trump’s Plan To Sabotage The Government Started With The USDA | EUROtoday
Five years in the past, President Donald Trump’s funds director and performing chief of employees flew dwelling to South Carolina for a Republican Party gala and celebrated the sluggish decay of the federal authorities.
Referring to Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” — he didn’t imply lobbyists — Mick Mulvaney introduced up two obscure analysis companies throughout the Department of Agriculture, the whole mixed personnel of which made up lower than 1% of the USDA workforce.
It’s “nearly impossible” to fireplace federal employees, Mulvaney stated. But the USDA had defied the percentages.
Just a few months prior, then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue informed the overwhelming majority of employees on the companies, largely economists and researchers, that they must choose up their lives and transfer 1,000 miles throughout the nation, from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City. They got only a few weeks to determine if they might transfer or else face termination “for declining a directed reassignment.”
Most of the civil servants — with youngsters getting into highschool, spouses employed in D.C., ageing dad and mom to look after, and retirements not far-off — balked. Hundreds left the civil service, stalling main scientific priorities and setting American agricultural analysis again years.
“More than half the people quit!” Mulvaney raved on the gala.
All it took to empty the swamp was telling folks they needed to transfer from the nation’s capital to “the real part of the country,” he stated. “What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
With Donald Trump’s palms but once more on the levers of energy, what occurred on the USDA is simply the beginning.
Just as this story was revealed, stories emerged of an executive-branch-wide electronic mail to, apparently, tens of millions of federal employees. It supplied them buyouts — and warned of “physical office relocations for a number of federal workers” who stay within the civil service.
Trump campaigned final yr on a promise to “dismantle the deep state,” and his choose to steer the White House funds workplace — Mulvaney’s successor and key Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought — has stated that federal employees are “villains” who needs to be “traumatically affected” after they go to work. Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” cheerleader Elon Musk has written concerning the “relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area” as a approach to “curtail administrative overgrowth.”
And Trump himself, in a marketing campaign video, stated he would “continue the effort, launched during his first term, to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington swamp.” He stated such strikes might “immediately” have an effect on 100,000 civil servants.
Five years after the relocation, present and former staff on the two USDA companies, the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA), have stated that the mass departure of consultants in agriculture and agricultural economics marked a dramatic, tangible loss for the general public — and may now be a vivid purple warning signal for the subsequent 4 years of Trump’s second time period in workplace, when the president will little doubt try related strikes at different companies.
“Very little happened for the first two or three years after the relocation because there just wasn’t anybody there,” stated Susan Offutt, who was administrator of ERS between 1996 and 2006 earlier than serving because the chief economist of the Government Accountability Office for eight years.
Even at the moment, after staffing ranges on the companies have rebounded, thanks largely to COVID-19 distant work insurance policies — which Trump has sought to reverse in an govt order — the lack of a era of extremely expert agricultural economists, scientists and different consultants has left a deep mark on the USDA.
“There’s still not much that would be [considered] policy-sensitive, or policy-relevant,” Offutt stated. “The portfolio no longer includes as much policy analysis as it had previously.”
James MacDonald, a former department chief at ERS who retired in September 2019 because of the transfer to Kansas City, got here again to the company two months later as a rehired annuitant — a retiree engaged on a part-time foundation — after which as a part-time contractor. Widely acknowledged as an skilled within the group of the American agricultural sector, he’s additionally now a analysis professor on the University of Maryland.
“We’re doing fewer, big, informed, difficult reports,” MacDonald informed HuffPost of ERS. “We do have a lot of publications, but I think many are kind of short, simple, easy things. Producing a serious research product is a real challenge, and I don’t think we’re nearly back to that level yet.”
If what occurred to ERS and NIFA is any indication, compelled company relocations might minimize “administrative overgrowth” at the price of hundreds of years of collective experience from departing federal staff. Laura Dodson, a present ERS agricultural economist and performing vp of the company’s union native, informed me in 2019 that she feared the relocation was a “test case” for what the Trump administration would possibly attempt to do to bigger companies.
In retrospect, she stated lately, it’s “pretty clear that the relocation was a way for them to enact a mass layoff” with out following federal rules for layoffs, or “reductions in force.”
“We had a lot of people who had spent their careers working on very specific fields — very niche questions,” Dodson stated. “And when they left, it was so sudden and abrupt that there wasn’t time to bring in the next generation. You had to just leave all of your work and go.”
Built To Irritate
Prior to the transfer, ERS and NIFA had spent a long time offering unbiased financial analysis and scientific funding targeted on the nation’s agricultural techniques. Under its present identify, ERS goes again to 1961, however predecessors in its mission to offer financial statistics and evaluation on the agricultural sector and coverage return a century. It’s one among 13 principal statistical companies within the U.S. authorities, alongside the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others, and its ranks are dense with economics PhDs and statistical whizzes.
NIFA, the USDA’s “extramural research agency,” administers over $1.5 billion in federal science funding — supporting discoveries in fields as numerous as bioenergy, soil administration and workforce improvement. It was created by identify in 2008, however its earliest predecessor dates again to 1888 when the “Office of Experiment Stations” coordinated publicly funded analysis between land-grant faculties.
And although each ERS and NIFA had small footprints even earlier than the transfer, the impression of their work was felt throughout the nation.
“When I go to the grocery store, all the time, I’m going, ‘I know the person that bred that apple, I know the person that bred that grape,’” stated Tom Bewick, the performing vp for NIFA’s union, which like ERS’s is an affiliate of the American Federation of Government Employees.
“We had a lot of people who had spent their careers working on very specific fields – very niche questions. And when they left, it was so sudden and abrupt that there wasn’t time to bring in the next generation. You had to just leave all of your work and go.”
– Laura Dodson, agricultural economist and union chief
At ERS, statisticians observe and analyze knowledge on issues like commodity pricing, farm revenue, pesticide use, the immigration standing of farmworkers and Americans’ diets. Employees have revealed analysis on every thing from uncooked milk consumption, egg manufacturing amid chook flu outbreaks and the impression of agricultural tariffs. Current and former staff pressured that given the affect of the stakeholders who use ERS analysis — company behemoths, highly effective politicians, nongovernmental teams, universities — the company took scientific integrity severely.
“Our whole career, we’re told we’re not supposed to comment on policy, or advocate one way or the other,” stated Constance Newman, an ERS economist for almost 20 years who left the company on account of the directive to maneuver to Kansas City. At ERS, Newman studied participation within the SNAP program, beforehand referred to as meals stamps. “There’s important decisions being made on all these facts, all these stats that are being put forward. So let’s make sure that we have the best quality statistics, and not just someone doing it from an advocacy point of view.”
Though the private and non-private trade each profit from ERS analysis — it’s all publicly accessible — many argue the company’s most essential purchasers are policymakers, each in Congress and the chief department. Measuring coverage outcomes on topics like tariffs, illness, diet and local weather change, ERS analysis typically tells onerous truths backed by ironclad knowledge, even when it goes in opposition to company pursuits or political slogans.
ERS analysis “had a cachet of being unbiased — not coming from just the farmer-rancher side, [nor] the up-the-chain packers, processors, and distributors side,” stated Dale Moore, who served a number of USDA secretaries as chief of employees between 2001 and 2009, and was later govt director of the American Farm Bureau Federation till 2022.
“The ERS existed for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations,” Offutt stated, “and it irritated both.”
The Purge
The first signal of bother was the Trump White House’s proposed funds for fiscal yr 2019, revealed in February 2018, which might have slashed ERS’s funds almost in half and proposed doing so “by eliminating low priority research that is being conducted within the private sector and by non-profits and focusing on core data analyses in line with priority research areas.” Congress ignored the prompt minimize, nevertheless it was a shot throughout the bow.
Then, in August, Perdue formally introduced the transfer that will really minimize ERS’s and NIFA’s workforces in half. The overwhelming majority of the company’s personnel could be relocating out of Washington, he stated, to a brand new location that will be introduced later.
The similar morning Perdue introduced the transfer, ERS staff realized that the company’s administrator, Mary Bohman, a veteran agricultural economist who’d been within the job for seven years, could be transferred to a unique a part of the USDA altogether, leaving others to deal with the transition. (Perdue didn’t reply to HuffPost’s interview request.)
Citing Washington’s “high cost of living and long commutes,” a USDA press launch stated the transfer was meant to enhance recruitment, place USDA assets nearer to stakeholders, and “benefit the American taxpayers” with financial savings on salaries and lease.
But when economists and statisticians aware of ERS’s and NIFA’s work began crunching the numbers themselves, they by no means appeared so as to add up.
In a convention name in September that yr, hosted by a number of statistical and research-related associations, Catherine Woteki, the USDA undersecretary who oversaw NIFA, ERS and associated companies through the Obama administration, stated the transfer was “ill-conceived at best and possibly in violation of the law.”
The USDA’s inspector normal’s workplace later bolstered this declare, discovering that the division had violated provisions of the 2018 spending invoice that Trump had signed into regulation. The USDA responded by asserting that the funds language was itself unconstitutional.
Referring to Perdue’s justifications for the transfer, Woteki stated, “None of them make sense.”
Others agreed. Over a thousand scientists and economists signed a letter opposing the transfer. Affected staff, a number of earlier directors of the companies and dozens {of professional} associations and nongovernmental teams pointed out that policymakers in Washington, together with USDA management and Congress, had been essential stakeholders in ERS’s and NIFA’s work, as had been different statistical and analysis companies headquartered within the metropolis with whom they typically teamed up on initiatives.
The companies had additionally traditionally had success recruiting sought-after economists, researchers and directors in Washington. And although the price of residing was excessive, the town appeared to make up for it. The cost-saving declare was equally doubtful: Even now, years after the relocation and the beginning of the pandemic remote-work period, ERS’s annual funds has really gone up.
Other justifications merely didn’t compute. After USDA officers claimed in a media name that ERS had an unusually excessive attrition charge, the American Statistical Association dug into the numbers and discovered the division was utilizing an inflated determine — by counting summer season interns as staff.
“We did a pretty careful analysis of what we were told, and we didn’t think that the reasons provided were very convincing,” stated Steve Pierson, the ASA’s director of science coverage.
‘Consider The Total Picture’
Without a satisfying clarification for the transfer, hypothesis reigned.
Offutt, on the 2018 convention name, puzzled whether or not “this is a move that is intended to still the voice of ERS as an independent and objective agency.”
In May 2019, Politico reported on ERS staff’ perception that the company had “run afoul of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue with its findings on how farmers have been financially harmed by President Donald Trump’s trade feuds, the Republican tax code rewrite and other sensitive issues.”
The story pointed to a 2018 ERS report that had wound up in The New York Times, and which discovered that a lot of the profit from tax breaks in Trump’s tax invoice “are accrued by higher-income farm households.” The Times quoted unnamed ERS economists who believed the transfer was “retribution for producing work that clashed with the administration’s agenda.”
USDA management persistently denied the transfer was meant to silence or retaliate in opposition to ERS or NIFA. But critics famous the irony of the extremely regarded analysis companies being kicked out of Washington based mostly on what appeared like remarkably shallow reasoning.
“The deputy secretary only talked about the savings to USDA,” stated Gale Buchanan, the USDA’s former chief scientist, on the convention name, after USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky had cited excessive lease, personnel prices and “quality of life issues” as motivations for the relocation.
“But in any kind of relocation, you’ve got to consider the total picture. This is what economists do so well!”
Investigators with the Government Accountability Office later supported Buchanan’s criticism, discovering that the USDA had “omitted critical costs and economic effects from its analysis of taxpayer savings,” resembling “costs related to potential attrition or disruption of activities for a period of time.”
The Agricultural & Applied Economics Association additionally estimated that “the cost to the nation of lost research amounts to $149–215 million,” and a bunch of statisticians working with the American Statistical Association wrote in 2022 that the ERS relocation “was marked by its abruptness, speed, and lack of consultation with Congress and stakeholders” and “epitomizes the ineffectiveness of internal agency agreements when officials in charge seem not to be acting in good faith for the mission of a statistical agency.”
After Mulvaney’s remarks in August 2019 — that the relocations and subsequent mass resignations had been “a wonderful way to streamline government” — the Trump administration’s motivations grew clearer.
“When I heard [Trump say] ‘We’re going to drain the swamp,’ I thought he was going to get rid of all the lobbyists, but what he meant was, ‘We’re going to get rid of all of these federal employees,’” stated Bewick, the NIFA union chief. Referring to Mulvaney’s feedback concerning the relocation resulting in resignations at ERS and NIFA, Bewick stated, “That’s exactly what happened. And that, I think, was the whole purpose. To take these senior people, and really pressure them [to leave].”
“I think the people at the head of the [White House budget office] at the time were the people who were actually hostile to government research and government statistical agencies, and I think they were perfectly happy to see if they could damage them,” MacDonald stated. “I think they took a day making up reasons after they made their decision.”
Moore stated that even when he sympathized with Perdue’s said causes for the relocation, Mulvaney’s remarks described “a rather mercenary way to handle an issue.”
Offutt was extra direct. When Mulvaney bragged about “draining the swamp” by forcing folks to maneuver cross-country, she stated, he’d merely “said the quiet part out loud.”
![](https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/6775e1b31800001b005fa99d.jpg?ops=scalefit_1280_noupscale)
Patrick Leger For HuffPost
The USDA’s Crown Jewel
Perhaps most irritating for affected staff had been the seemingly hole reassurances from the USDA’s leaders. Perdue, for instance, had stated in his announcement of the relocation that “none of this reflects on the jobs being done by our ERS or NIFA employees,” and Dodson described a heated assembly with USDA officers, together with Deputy Secretary Censky, that “devolved into them telling us that we were ‘a crown jewel of USDA,’ and us shouting at them, ‘Then why are you doing this to us?’”
A spokesperson for Censky, who served as CEO of the American Soybean Association each earlier than and since his temporary stint within the Trump administration, declined an interview request.
Nevertheless, the transfer chugged alongside. As dozens of cities put their names ahead to host the USDA researchers, the USDA employed Ernst and Young, the distinguished accounting agency, to slender down the choices. In March 2019, a Perdue advisor informed members of Congress that 253 ERS staff and 315 NIFA staff could be relocated, in comparison with simply 96 staff between the 2 companies who could be left in Washington, lots of whom labored on delicate commodities packages or in administrative places of work.
Soon after, staff at each companies voted overwhelmingly to unionize with the American Federation of Government Employees, with many citing frustration with the relocation as their motive for becoming a member of the hassle.
“There’s been no interest in finding out how this would affect our work, or what it would do to the stats we create on a weekly or monthly basis,” one unnamed ERS worker informed Government Executive in February 2019 within the midst of the union drive. The relocation, the particular person added, is “just one example of the many ways there can be threats to our ability to further our mission.”
Workers had been proper to be nervous concerning the relocation’s impression on their analysis.
In May, staff monitoring the exodus discovered that non-retirement departures from ERS had greater than doubled over the earlier three-year common, Politico reported.
By the time USDA officers introduced in June 2019 that almost all of each companies would relocate to the “Kansas City Region” — they didn’t specify which state, though the companies presently share an handle in Missouri — ERS and NIFA had been already hemorrhaging employees. At NIFA, Bewick stated, “We had essentially lost half of our workforce” in lower than a yr.
At an all-hands assembly for the Kansas City announcement, staff stood and turned their backs on Perdue in protest. They got only a month to declare their intentions, although the timeline was later prolonged till Sept. 30.
“This is the brain drain we all feared, possibly a destruction of the agencies,” Jack Payne, then the University of Florida’s vp for agriculture and pure assets, informed The Washington Post in July after a USDA tally confirmed round two-thirds of affected staff declining the relocation.
By early October 2019 — simply after the deadline to just accept the transfer to Kansas City — ERS vacancies had skyrocketed. The Washington Post reported that employees numbers at each ERS and NIFA had dropped about 75% because the relocation. The Congressional Research Service later discovered that “about 75% of affected employees declined to relocate and left the agencies.” The similar report, revealed in May 2020, discovered that in comparison with what the USDA stated could be full staffing ranges, “NIFA and ERS are operating with approximately 33% of their staff.”
‘The Agency Couldn’t Function’
The impression was quick.
“Within the next six months [of the relocation], they realized the agency couldn’t function,” Dodson stated. Management began hiring again individuals who’d left as short-term contract employees and rehired annuitants, however the losses had been dramatic. “I would go into the office and there’d be nobody there. I didn’t have a supervisor, I didn’t have any teammates. People who I’d worked with on a 12-person team as a coordinator — everybody left.”
“The quality of things we’re working on is diminished from where we were before,” she stated.
By the tip of the yr and into 2021, staffing on the companies started to rebound, notably following the onset of the COVID-19 distant work insurance policies. Today, staffing ranges are roughly at pre-relocation ranges, although solely a fraction of staff work in or close to Kansas City, the union officers stated, whereas most have been allowed to work from across the nation, the results of distant work allowances that started after the beginning of the pandemic.
But the uncooked numbers belie a generational loss in experience. The GAO report discovered that by the tip of fiscal yr 2021, “the majority of ERS (66 percent) and NIFA (79 percent) permanent full-time staff had worked there for 2 years or less” — the inverse of the pre-move statistics, when the overwhelming majority of employees at each companies had been there for longer than two years. “I calculated that more than 2000 years of ERS experience vanished in 3 months,” Marca Weinberg, a senior ERS economist who served as performing administrator through the transfer, informed Science lately.
“I’m certain you’ve got some young and energetic new researchers for whom this is a great opportunity,” stated one former ERS worker, who requested to not be named as a result of he’s now working elsewhere in authorities. “But I do know that if somebody’s a career researcher, they’re often building on decades of work. And so you’re starting with a new group of folks who will need another decade or two to build that level of background work.”
“The organization was gutted,” the previous worker stated.
“You’re starting with a new group of folks who will need another decade or two to build that level of background work.”
– Former ERS worker
As a results of the transfer and subsequent employees exodus, “the agency’s statistical programs have been abridged and federal and state governments are suffering from inadequate agricultural statistics generally, but especially statistics to inform rural development, food assistance and security, and agriculturally related natural resource conservation policies,” the American Economic Association wrote in January 2021. That July, Spiro Stefanou, who had been tapped as ERS administrator the earlier yr, stated ERS was “on a rebuilding mission – we are hiring aggressively after having lost about 70-plus percent of our staff.”
The variety of stories produced by ERS plummeted, and researchers’ work grew extra targeted on key stories, simply because the White House’s 2019 funds proposal had referred to as for. Amid the turmoil, MacDonald stated that ERS’s mandated knowledge merchandise — farm revenue forecasts, agricultural productiveness progress estimates — turned the precedence and had been revealed on time.
Even at the moment, “I think we’re producing noticeably fewer [research products] than we would have done six or seven years ago,” he stated, referring to fields like precision agriculture, genetic engineering and modifications in antibiotic use in livestock manufacturing, a area the place ERS has been a serious participant for years.
In current years, customers have demanded much less antibiotic use in livestock, and producers, in flip, have decreased it. But because the relocation, the ERS workforce finding out these dynamics basically “doesn’t exist anymore,” MacDonald stated.
“There does appear to be significant reductions in antibiotic use in livestock,” he stated, notably in Europe and the United States. “We know there’s a lot going on, but we don’t have a great handle on it. And that’s what’s missing — that’s what we lost by losing that team of people.”
At NIFA, remaining employees scrambled to tackle their departed colleagues’ work.
“I went from managing one program, and providing support for other programs, to managing seven programs,” Bewick stated, stressing that his colleagues poured themselves into holding the company operating.
Some packages weren’t supplied in any respect; some grants had been switched from aggressive to noncompetitive, given the brand new problem of recruiting scientists for skilled panels to evaluation purposes. “We used some administrative tools that we don’t normally like to use, but that are available to us,” he stated.
“It was a quagmire, it was a slog,” stated Jane Kolodinsky, professor emerita of group improvement and utilized economics on the University of Vermont, who’s labored on NIFA-funded initiatives for years. “We were awarded a grant in 2019 that really didn’t get started until 2021, because of administrative burden and people having to re-learn the ropes… the wheels stopped turning.”
Lapses in institutional data about long-term data-gathering initiatives additionally led to onerous efforts to reconstruct departed colleagues’ work. Dodson, for her half, needed to study a decades-old statistical program that her extra senior predecessors had relied upon earlier than leaving the company.
“A lot of us were stuck learning the old code that people had left behind, trying to forensic-science our way into how it was done,” she stated.
“It took several years to get the production of publications back to previous levels (if they are) due to the loss of researchers as well as editorial support staff,” Newman informed HuffPost in an electronic mail. “Major research projects were abandoned mid-stream either because the authors left or parts of a research team left.”
“Major research projects were abandoned mid-stream either because the authors left or parts of a research team left.”
– Constance Newman, former ERS economist
The high quality of ERS knowledge itself was imperiled, as effectively: A 2022 report from the USDA’s inspector normal discovered {that a} particular ERS council created in 2014 to periodically “provide comprehensive evaluations of the agency’s data products” had in reality not accomplished any critiques between mid-2019 and late 2021. An ERS official stated “the agency did not have the personnel to complete them.”
In a press release to HuffPost previous to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, a USDA spokesperson referred to as ERS and NIFA “two of our nation’s premier scientific institutions” and stated that beneath the Biden administration, each “have reached their hiring goals.”
“ERS continues to work with stakeholders to further expand the pipeline of agricultural economists and other technical positions,” the assertion stated. “NIFA leveraged several recruiting tools to attract national experts to meet the agency’s workforce needs.”
‘You Don’t Start With Social Security’
As present and former ERS and NIFA staff look again on the previous 5 years, many achieve this with a cautious eye towards the longer term.
Trump, in his first days again in workplace, has taken purpose squarely at federal employees, going to conflict in opposition to “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” packages, purging over a dozen inspectors normal, and instituting a gag order at well being companies. Grant critiques on the National Institutes of Health, which calls itself the biggest public funder of biomedical analysis on this planet, have reportedly been frozen.
The solely put up in NIFA’s newsroom since Trump’s inauguration, titled “Notice: Funding Opportunities Under Review,” is only a few phrases lengthy: “All NIFA Requests for Applications are currently under review,” it says, linking to a third-party electronic mail type for future updates.
Trump has additionally pursued an aggressive stance in opposition to distant work and will finally require ERS and NIFA staff to report back to Kansas City after most have been working from all throughout the nation for years. Still, present and former staff who spoke to HuffPost didn’t dwell on private hardship: All who left ERS discovered jobs elsewhere, largely throughout the federal authorities or in associated fields.
Instead, they had been nervous about others within the federal authorities whose work would possibly put them within the new administration’s crosshairs.
“Maybe there was a logic to starting with two really obscure agencies at USDA,” Offutt stated. “If you’re going to do it as a test, you don’t start with Social Security.”
“Maybe there was a logic to starting with two really obscure agencies at USDA. If you’re going to do it as a test, you don’t start with Social Security.”
– Susan Offutt, former ERS administrator
Now Trump — flanked by JD Vance, Russ Vought and Elon Musk — has made what Steve Bannon as soon as referred to as “deconstructing the administrative state” a key precedence.
Project 2025, the authors of which now populate the Trump administration, requires relocating regional EPA places of work, placing the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in Pittsburgh — “to recognize that the agency is field-driven and should be headquartered in the coal field” — and separating the Air Traffic Organization from the Federal Aviation Administration “and relocat[ing] it to separate headquarters outside the District of Columbia.”
Project 2025 additionally requires transferring the Bureau of Land Management again to Grand Junction, Colorado. The bureau was moved there throughout Trump’s first time period in a relocation strikingly much like the USDA relocations. But the Biden administration partially reversed the transfer in 2021, with a BLM press launch saying that the transfer “failed to deliver promised jobs across the West and drove hundreds of people out of the agency.”
After each the BLM and USDA company strikes, the range of each companies’ workforces plummeted.
The New York Times additionally reported a couple of days after Election Day that some on Trump’s transition workforce had been discussing transferring the EPA headquarters — and seven,000 EPA staff — out of Washington, D.C.
ERS and NIFA veterans stated if Trump emulated their relocation expertise elsewhere, notably at different analysis companies, it risked empowering massive gamers with their very own analysis budgets, ceding floor to these with company or partisan agendas.
Without unbiased analysis, MacDonald stated, “you’re left relying on people with an ax to grind, which might be industry people, or it might be advocates for tighter or looser regulation, each of whom is arguing in their own interests, and often with cherry-picked or poor information.”
“There’s always going to be lots of partisan voices out there,” Newman stated. With the lack of institutional data at ERS, “It just means there’s one less source that can be considered neutral,” she stated. “There’s one less voice that’s going to be a completely trusted, neutral source.
“Public goods are hard to measure. They’re hard to value. It is, then, difficult to say what is lost,” Offutt mirrored. “In the case of ERS, there’s less knowledge available outside a very small part of the government about what your tax dollars are doing. People should know these things.”
Otherwise, she stated, “it opens the door for special interests to control the agenda.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-usda-kansas-city_n_67993740e4b0032f678f7505