More than 18 months after the Agriculture Department relocated two research agencies from Washington to Kansas City, Mo., prompting a major exodus from both divisions, the agencies are still struggling to regain their strength.
Even after a round of hiring in the past year, the permanent staff of the Economic Research Service is down 33 percent from where it was near the end of the Obama administration, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture workforce has declined 34 percent. According to USDA, they have 115 and 130 job vacancies, respectively.
“We lost some of the nation’s best economists and agricultural scientists in the previous administration,” USDA spokesman Matt Herrick said in an email. “It will take time for the new administration to rebuild USDA’s scientific and research agencies and restore their confidence and morale.” Continue reading.
“Desperate sadness” pretty well describes the mood that has predominated for me from the moment Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Most of the time, this percolates below the surface, mainly because I put my hardhat on every day and go to work to do what I can to rectify the situation. This usually staves off the sense of helplessness, but not always. These days, I have other things to be desperate and sad about, but it always comes back to the president. The condition I find my country in today is not an anomaly. It’s more like the physical manifestation of the spiritual rot that I’ve observed every day for almost four years. I can’t say it was inevitable, because who knows when a novel virus will emerge? But it is the unavoidable consequence of putting a man like Trump in charge and of letting people like Mitch McConnell control the U.S. Senate. What we’re witnessing is merely the implicit becoming visible so that even