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Good, deep dive into who might get what jobs in the Biden Department of Agriculture by @hbottemiller @mmcassella & @liz_crampton at @politico. Important thing to know about USDA: [short thread].... https://twitter.com/quintforgey/status/1334910677698277377
....like a few other Departments (e.g. Energy, Homeland Security), USDA has a diverse set of missions. Any brand new Secretary is bound to be out of his/her depth in some of them at the start. The most obvious example: by (strong. Like, USMC strong) institutional tradition,
....USDA is the farmers’ Department. Yet much more of its budget is devoted to nutrition programs than to all farm support programs put together. It makes sense to think about a Secretary with deep knowledge of the former, able to delegate most responsibility for the latter.
Political tradition argues for doing things the other way around — hence the agitation for a Secretary who “speaks farmer” as a first language. Today’s reality, though is that while rural Americans are still a large constituency, farmers are not.
Picking a farm-oriented Ag Secretary from a red state, like Heitkamp or Vilsack, will by itself do precisely nothing to help the new administration reach out to rural America. Policy will be all that matters where this is concerned.
About policy....the Obama administration’s record with respect to agriculture and the environment showed generally good intentions combined with a willingness to accept incremental (if one is charitable) or glacial (if one is not) progress.
The key hang-up was, in a word, inertia: the traditional view of farmers as a uniquely favored constituency on whom it is unthinkable to make demands on behalf of the public — such as that farmers, like other industries, pay to reduce the pollution their operations generate.
This argues against recycling leadership at USDA — if the Biden administration intends to make reducing pollution as high a priority as the Biden campaign insisted it would be. I mean by this no disrespect to any of the potential candidates for high office at USDA, and....
....I take no position on the diversity question (discussed at length in the @politico article). It just seems to me that the new President’s stated objectives would be best advanced by USDA leadership oriented to what USDA mostly does,....
....and that values environmental outcomes more than the Department has traditionally. [end]
