Biden Transition Updates: NPR

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Tom Vilsack was Secretary of Agriculture during the Obama administration and was a trusted advisor to President-elect Joe Biden. Alex Wong / Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Alex Wong / Getty Images

Tom Vilsack was Secretary of Agriculture during the Obama administration and was a trusted advisor to President-elect Joe Biden.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

President-elect Joe Biden is considering appointing veteran Cabinet Obama and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary, a source familiar with the transition talks confirmed to NPR.

Vilsack returns to an agency he led for eight years as Barack Obama’s agriculture secretary.

The US Department of Agriculture is best known for supporting farmers, but it actually has a much bigger impact on the country through funding for food aid programs, including the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance program and meals. school. The USDA estimates that one in four Americans benefits from at least one of these dietary programs in a typical year.

Vilsack became the safe and comfortable choice for Biden after the competition for the USDA job sparked a battle between two wings of the Democratic Party.

Mainstream agricultural lobby groups have rallied around former Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, while reformers, who want the USDA to spend its money on hunger and climate change, have lobbied for it. Representative Marcia Fudge from Cleveland. Biden has now appointed Fudge Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the first black woman to lead the agency since the 1970s.

If Biden was hoping that both camps would both welcome Vilsack’s return, he will likely be disappointed. Vilsack is currently the CEO of the US Dairy Export Council, an organization supported by the dairy industry.

Advocates seeking to reform the USDA to better help low-income Americans have said that a Vilsack appointment would strengthen a status quo they say favors the interests of large agricultural companies.

“Vilsack has made a career of responding to the whims of corporate farming giants he went to work for,” said Mitch Jones, policy director of Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group.

Ricardo Salvador, director of food and environment for the Union of Concerned Scientists, says Vilsack “handled an impossible job well” during his previous tenure at the USDA. But Salvador says the situation now demands someone new. “If we measure what we need against what he has accomplished, he fails,” says Salvador.

Vilsack grew up in Pittsburgh and trained as a lawyer, but learned about agriculture as governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007.

It takes over a department traditionally focused on the well-being of farmers. Sonny Perdue, the current secretary, called farmers “customers” of the department and told department employees that “our mission is to provide our farmers, ranchers, foresters and producers with what they need, when they need it. need”.

Over the past two years, as farmers grapple with the impact of the Trump administration’s trade war and the coronavirus, Perdue’s department has sent them a record flood of government aid. In 2020 alone, direct federal payments to farmers are expected to reach $ 46 billion, far exceeding the amount of farm subsidies of any previous year.

Perdue was less enthusiastic about other parts of the USDA, including SNAP and school meals, which feed millions of low-income Americans. Perdue attempted to restrict SNAP benefits to non-disabled adults without dependents, although that decision was put on hold when the pandemic struck.

Perdue’s USDA also downplayed research devoted to climate change. Two of the department’s main research groups have been ordered to relocate from Washington, DC to new offices in Kansas City, ostensibly to promote closer contact with “stakeholders” in the department. Most of the staff at those agencies resigned, rather than agree to the move, which a White House official suggested as a welcome outcome.

Some are now calling for a shift in the department’s priorities, saying the USDA could become a lead sponsor of climate change action. Part of it is because the agency has money to spend. Its budget already includes billions of dollars for programs that can be used to pay for solar and wind power in rural areas, or for farming practices that capture carbon dioxide from the air.

The USDA also has a multi-billion dollar kitty called Commodity Credit Corp., which the Trump administration has used as a fundraising vehicle for its payments to farmers. Biden’s USDA transition team leader Robert Bonnie called for converting CCC into a “carbon bank” that would pay farmers for practices that limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Additionally, the USDA manages the US Forest Service, which manages nearly 200 million acres of land across the country. The Forest Service is often lost within the USDA, but that could change as forests become more vulnerable to a warming and fire-prone climate. The Forest Service is facing calls to manage these lands more aggressively, with more frequent prescribed burns to reduce the risk of catastrophic forest fires. It could also increase funding for reforestation, in part to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and slow climate change.

Cabinet officials rarely return to the same post in a different administration, but it has happened before. James “Tama Jim” Wilson, a Scottish immigrant who settled in Iowa, served as a farmer for 16 years, from 1897 to 1913, under Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

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