News & Views

LOL. My February News & Views was out of date before it went to press. Never mind, as I write this, the tariffs will likely be applied by March 4, plus more, and the effects will be chaotic for markets and the economy in general. In July, 1945, just two months after Germany’s surrender, Winston Churchill, the man who rallied the allies to victory over the Nazis, was voted out as prime minister of Great Britain. “Dammed ingratitude”, he thundered, as the British people decided the great leader of the allied cause was not the best leader for peacetime. If U.S. rural voters are now thundering “Dammed ingratitude”, they are justified. Rural voters voted for, among other things, reasonable regulation of pesticides and water use, a de-emphasis of climate change policies, elimination of “woke” policies, immigration control, and the continuation of programs that conserve our soils and serve as income safety nets, such as crop insurance subsidies. The first four items we will get; the last two are in doubt considering the emphasis on eliminating grants and other handouts. Immigration control may come back to bite those farmers that rely on lots of hand labor, such as dairies and fruit and vegetable growers. But look at the baggage that came with the welcome changes. A trade war now looms that could drive customers to South America for corn, soybeans and wheat. Recovering those markets could take decades, if ever. Tariffs are planned for steel, aluminum, and vehicle parts which will inflate the cost of new machinery and the repair and maintenance of old machinery. Reckless use of the budget ax eliminated the Food Aid program that buys $1.5 billion of US farm goods yearly to give to desperate people in Africa an Asia. Medical programs to control Aids and other diseases have also been cut-off. If these programs and food aid is not restored soon, China, our competitor for world influence, will jump in to fill the vacuum. During Trump’s last trade war he distributed $20 billion to farmers to salve the wounds. That money came mostly from the USDA Commodity Credit Corporation’s emergency fund and didn’t require congressional approval. Today that fund contains much less (approximately $4 billion) and won’t go far to ease any economic pain. We tend to think the government workforce is bloated and wasteful. But in reality, as a percentage of the US population, the bureaucracy has nosedived in the past 50 years. Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution notes that while population has grown 68% the size of the federal workforce has actually shrunk. In 1984 the civil service employed 2.14 million workers. In 2023, the civil service workforce was 1.18 million. How can that be? The answer: Contractor and grant workers. In the same period contract workers have grown from 3.67 million to 5.22 million, and grant workers from 1.23 million to2.31 million. Through them, federal spending has quintupled. With Musk firing workers in every department willy-nilly, who is going to keep the contractors and grantees honest? We need more watchdogs, not less. (See Elaine Kamarck, “Is government too big? Reflections on the size and composition of today’s federal government.” Jan. 28, 2025.) As I write this, 30,000 federal employees have been fired by Musk, and I say willy-nilly be cause the only cause is that they are overwhelmingly new, probationary employees. So far, USDA has lost 4200 employees. Agricultural research has taken a big hit. Nationwide, ARS has lost approximately 800 people and NRCS 1200. Statistics for layoffs in the Northwest are incomplete, but Oregon experiment stations have lost 22 employees, over half of them research scientists working on real problems facing NW farmers. I need to tell my readers that this column will be the last for me. I will soon enter my 9th decade, and the research it takes to write these columns and meet a deadline has become burdensome. I still have a small farm to run, a memoir I want to write for my family, and maybe even write another book. I have enjoyed this soapbox to express my views, and I thank Agritimes for that privilege. Encouragement from my friends along the way has also been greatly appreciated.