This
month the United States Department
of Agriculture announced
an “historic investment” that will go towards “supporting [the] entire local
food supply chain.” The USDA is blessed with an ample amount of time and
a great deal of money, which means it must forever be inventing new ways to
spend the billions and billions of dollars allocated to it every year; thus
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offering the investment in order to “give
farms and ranches more market opportunities, provide consumers with more
choices, and create jobs in both rural and urban communities.”
Thanks
for that, Tom. Like nearly everything it does, the USDA’s local food
“investment” scheme is as dismaying as was the choice of Tom Vilsack for
Agriculture Secretary. Yet this latest attempt at bureaucratic do-goodery is
one of the USDA’s least concerning undertakings; in truth, the department has a
history of both vicious incompetence, remorseless fraud and sulky hostility
towards the constituency—farmers—it is pledged to serve.
The
incompetence and fraud are both well-documented; perhaps the greatest
combination of the two can be found in the Pigford v. Glickman case. Pigford
was a class action lawsuit leveled against the USDA by black farmers who
claimed they had been discriminated against while seeking federal loans from
the department; the lawsuit quickly ballooned to an enormous number of
claimants seeking redress for racial discrimination, which, as the New York Times reported, resulted in USDA employees finding reams
of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban
dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of
discrimination.
These
are not “suspicious” claims but openly false and fraudulent ones, as any
capable, mildly-intelligent adult can immediately discern. One would think that
the presence of such claims would give rise to a healthy suspicion: perhaps if
a lawsuit invites multiple identical claims, some of them from
“nursery-school-age children,” it is worth looking into whether the scope or
the scale of the lawsuit, or its vetting process, is appropriate and adequate
to the task. The USDA responded to these grim revelations by cheerfully going
along with the terms of the settlement: in one instance, they paid out nearly
$100 million to sixteen zip codes in which “the number of successful claimants
exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race;” in one town
in North Carolina, “the number of people paid was nearly four times the total
number of farms.”
Was
there no sensible, principled person within the entire Department willing to
put an end to such absurdity? Was there anybody sitting around that might have
mounted some kind of aggressive campaign to combat such naked deceit? Don’t
count on it. This is the same bureaucracy, after all, that has paid out tens of
millions of dollars to dead farmers. Last year alone the department’s whiz
kids made over $6 billion in
improper payments.
Nearly 66% of improper food stamp payments were “agency-caused.” (Luckily, the
Food and Nutrition Service only needs a cool $20 million in order to
investigate its own fraudulent and inept administrative wing. Thank God we
nixed the whole austerity thing.)
It
is not mere criminal fraud and lackadaisical stupidity that mars the USDA’s
name, but a distinct kind of broad-based pointlessness: there really is
seemingly no dumb government action the USDA is incapable of doing. Did you
know the department offers home loans? We all know how well
government-backed mortgages worked out the first time around, and nothing
screams “agriculture” like a thirty-year fixed-rate. You probably weren’t
aware, either, that the agency is in the business of alternative energy in
Alaska: for the low,
low price of $5.6 million, the USDA will get you “three wind turbines and about
100 thermal stoves” far from anywhere you live. And when it’s not busy helping
people buy their first homes or building energy windmills in Alaskan
backwaters, the magnanimous department is singing the praises of “innovative new wood
products” and developing
“plans for a forthcoming prize competition to design and build high-rise wood
demonstration products.” Your tax dollars at work, or whatever it is the USDA
does.
These
are but a few examples of the USDA’s chronic inability to do things right, or
to do wrong things in abundance. You can begin to see why the whole “historic
investment” towards local food is rather concerning. As an authentic local food
fanatic, I myself am deeply concerned with the USDA’s growing involvement with
local food systems: the department is largely unable to do anything without
chronic corruption or expensive imprudence, and they are not friendly in the
slightest to their own constituency, a fact well-documented by vocal farmers
such as Joel Salatin. A while ago I was volunteering at a
farmer’s market when a USDA employee made one of her random drop-ins to inspect
the vendors for protocol violation. The change in the atmosphere of the place
was palpable: farmers visibly stiffened up, appeared nervous, on-edge and
uncomfortable at the agent wandering around with her notepad and her
thermometer. This was not a representative of what Abraham Lincoln once
declared “the people’s Department.” Whatever purpose the USDA was originally
intended for, it has become an agency of waste, fraud, trendy and expensive
energy projects and, as I saw that day, fear.
The
progenitor of the USDA was established in 1862 in order to spread “useful
information on subjects connected with agriculture in the most general and comprehensive
sense of that word.” That was it: the entire scope of the department’s
existence could be summed up thusly; it was bound, by the fairly simplistic and
uncomplicated style endemic to mid-19th-century American political
legalese, to disseminate “useful information.” It is hopeless and offensive to
argue that even the “most general” sense of agriculture includes wood project
“prize competitions,” wind turbines, fraudulent payments and a climate of
antagonism and aggression towards the people you are supposed to be serving.
Down with the whole mess, I say. If there is one single thing we might do to
best serve the interests of American agriculture, it would be to close down the
department that unjustly appropriates American agriculture for its own wasteful
and dishonest purposes.
Daniel
Payne is a senior contributor at The Federalist. He blogs at Trial of the Century. You can follow him on Twitter.
Comments
The USDA is one of those unconstitutional agencies
established by the federal government. It is not one of the Article 1 Section 8, 18
enumerated powers allowed. It violates
the 10th Amendment. It should
be closed in an orderly way and left to “the States and the People”.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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