Michael Lewis
covers the Trump Administration's (and overall GOP's) hostile takeover of the federal government by focusing on the Cabinet Department that has the largest impact on the rural voters who foisted these clowns on the rest of the country. One of the main points of the article is that most people don't have any idea what U.S.D.A. does:
One day in his new job he was handed the budget
for the Department of Agriculture. “I was like, Oh yeah, the
U.S.D.A.—they give money to farmers to grow stuff.” For the first time
he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government
actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading—most of what it
does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of
national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with
inspecting almost all the animals people eat, including the nine billion
birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program; a bank
with $220 billion in assets; plus a large fleet of aircraft for
firefighting. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range
inside its D.C. headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study
bee-colony collapse.
A small fraction of its
massive annual budget ($164 billion in 2016) was actually spent on
farmers, but it financed and managed all these programs in rural
America—including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty
line. “I’m sitting there looking at this,” said Ali. “The U.S.D.A. had
subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used.
The fire department. The town’s water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten.”
And a little more along that thread:
There’s a drinking game played by people who have worked at the
Department of Agriculture: Does the U.S.D.A. do it? Someone names an odd
function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that
flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess if the
U.S.D.A. does it. (In this case, it does.) Even people who have worked
at U.S.D.A. for years wind up having to chug. So it’s no use pretending
that I can actually explain to you everything the place does.
Lewis ends up focusing on several areas where Trump will likely do the most damage. The folks who used to be at U.S.D.A he talks to come up with food aid for the poor, scientific research (especially related to climate change), food safety and rural development. I think they are correct in that assessment. Here are a couple of the most enlightening quotes from these sections:
“The food-stamps program,” he says, instantly, when I ask him for his
biggest concern. The Trump budget had proposed cutting food stamps by
more than 25 percent over the next 10 years and more or less abandoning
the notion that the country should provide some minimum level of
nutrition to its citizens. The Trump budget was just an opening bid and
unlikely to become policy, at least not right away, because Congress
could always fight it. But it signaled an intention and, perhaps, a
shift in public attitudes. “Why is it that people channel so many of
their hang-ups about people who are poor or unsuccessful into the
food-stamps program?” asks Concannon as we settle into our chairs, then
answers his own question. “No one really knows when you go to the doctor
and the government is paying. But people see you with this card or
coupon and react. People would say to me, ‘I saw someone buying butter with food stamps.’ And I would say, ‘Well, yes.’”...As the head of Oregon’s nutrition programs he learned that the country’s
willingness to feed people who are hungry does not mean that hungry
people are always fed. The federal government makes the benefits
available, but then leaves it to states to administer them. “Where you
live in this country makes a huge difference if you are poor,” says
Concannon. “And it’s not just the weather. You have states with these
60- or 70-page documents people have to fill out to get benefits. Poor
people are easy to wear down.” Georgia was usually a problem. Texas too.
“If they ran any of their football teams the way they ran their food
program, they’d fire the coach,” said Concannon. A Wyoming legislator,
proud of how badly he had gummed up the state’s nutrition programs, told
him, “We pride ourselves on doing the minimum required by the federal
government.” An Arizona congressman proposed that the card used by
people receiving food-stamp benefits be made prison orange, conferring
not just nutrition but shame. In 2016, after several counties in North
Carolina suffered severe flooding, the state tried to distribute federal
disaster-relief food-benefit cards on the day of the presidential
election, to give poor people a choice between eating and voting. In
Kansas, Concannon had explained to an executive who oversaw the state’s
food-stamp program how he had made it easier for people in Oregon who
were going hungry to access their program. “He said, ‘Jeez, if we did
that we’d have more people coming in the door.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but
isn’t that the idea?’”
This gets at the heart of the crazy experiment that is federal government in these United States. Just like with the Affordable Care Act, and throughout our history with slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the New Deal and environmental and safety regulations, state and local governments can actively oppose and intentionally undermine the best efforts of the federal government to achieve the lofty goals set by the founding documents of the nation. Promoting the general welfare is often not what states, especially in the American South are trying to do. Do you know which states are seeing some of the worst financial strains on rural hospitals? Well, Georgia and Texas are two of them. And this article gets at one of the strangest divides in American politics-that rural voters whose communities and infrastructure are most dependent on federal spending are most hostile to that federal government. To that point:
By the time she left the little box marked “Rural Development,” Lillian
Salerno had spent the better part of five years inside it. The box’s
function was simple: to channel low-interest-rate loans, along with a
few grants, mainly to towns with fewer than 50,000 people in them. Her
department ran the $220 billion bank that serviced the poorest of the
poor in rural America: in the Deep South, and in the tribal lands, and
in the communities, called colonias, along the U.S.-Mexico
border. “Some of the communities in the South, the only checks going in
are government checks,” she said. And yet, amazingly, they nearly always
repaid their loans....
As the U.S.D.A.’s loans were usually made through
local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware
of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like
the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a
government-shade-throwing, Fox News-watching, small-town businessman.
The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the
local paper. “He’s telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it
on his own,” said Vilsack. “The U.S.D.A. person goes to introduce
herself, and he says, ‘So who are you?’ She says, ‘I’m the U.S.D.A.
person.’ He asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ She says, ‘Well, sir, we
supplied the money you are announcing.’ He was white as a sheet.”
Salerno
saw this sort of thing all the time. “We’d have this check,” said
Salerno. “We’d blow it up and try to have a picture taken with it. It
said, UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, in great big letters. That was something
that Vilsack wanted—to be right out in front so people knew the federal
government had helped them. In the red southern states the mayor
sometimes would say, ‘Can you not mention that the government gave
this?’” Even when it was saving lives, or preserving communities, it
remained oddly invisible. “It’s just a misunderstanding of the system,”
said Salerno. “We don’t teach people what government actually does.”
I enjoy listening patiently to farmers bitch about how much money poor people are given by the government and then asking them how many poor people they think have been given more money by the government than they themselves have been given. Surprisingly, they often think most poor people do, which is laughable. However important all the economic damage the Trump and GOP clowns can do to poor people and rural areas, the threat to important scientific research is the most dangerous, because it is the hardest to recognize by everyday people. When the funding for the water system doesn't come through or when the folks you go to church with are having to get food from the church food pantry, you tend to notice, and changes can be made. But when research into climate change or contagious disease isn't getting done, we won't find out until it is too late:
We don’t really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees.
They exist in our society to take the blame. But if anyone ever paid
attention they would note that Woteki’s department, among other
achievements, had suppressed the potentially catastrophic 2015 outbreak
of bird flu. They’d created, very quickly, a fast new test for the
disease that enabled them to cull the sick chickens from the healthy
ones. Because of their work the poultry industry was forced to kill only
tens of millions of birds, instead of hundreds of millions. In the
early 1990s, the U.S.D.A. had also dealt with the outbreak of ring-spot
virus in papaya trees, when the papaya industry in Hawaii faced ruin and
extinction. Inside the little box marked “Science,” the U.S.D.A. helped
genetically engineer a papaya tree that was resistant to ring-spot
virus....
His (Sam Clovis, who has since withdrawn from consideration) appointment as the U.S.D.A.’s chief scientist felt like a practical
joke to those who had worked there: this was the place that, back in the
early 1940s, had taken Alexander Fleming’s findings and effectively
invented penicillin. It had triggered the antibiotics revolution. It had
coped with endless blights and outbreaks. The consequences of the
science it funded—or did not fund—was mind-boggling. The person Clovis
was replacing had taught at universities, worked in the White House,
and, along the way, been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences....
In recent years, much of the department’s research
has dealt with the effects of climate change. The head of science
directs nearly $3 billion in grants each year. Woteki directed the
science that leads to nutritional standards for schoolchildren. She set
research priorities. Hers had been food security; domestic and global
nutrition; safety of the food supply; and figuring out how best to
convert plants into fuel. “All of that has to be done in the face of a
changing climate,” said Woteki. “It’s all climate change.” It might
sound silly that the U.S.D.A. funds a project that seeks to improve the
ability of sheep to graze at high altitudes—until you realize that this
may one day be the only place sheep will be able to graze. “We’re going
to become even more reliant on the efficiencies that come from the
investment in science,” she said. One-quarter of the arable land in the
world is already degraded, either by overfarming or overgrazing.
“Changing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will force changes
in the way crops are grown and livestock are raised,” she said. “The
changing climate brings new risks of food-borne disease. Even the
pathogens are influenced by temperature and humidity.”
If
the Trump administration were to pollute the scientific inquiry at the
U.S.D.A. with politics, scientific inquiry would effectively cease.
The Trump Administration and Republican control of the federal government is going to do a lot of damage to the United States, and rural areas, while most responsible for putting them in charge, are going to be hurt the worst. Unfortunately, the damage done to scientific research, both at U.S.D.A. and in other areas of the federal government, are going to negatively impact all of humanity. This should be the first thing you should complain to your Congressperson about.
