Bureaucrat Gets a Bust

Not many bureaucrats get immortalized in bronze, but Pearlie Reed did. The piece has a reference to his founding the National Association of Professional Black NRCS Employees.  When you search that website it seems that Louis E. Wright may also have been a founder, or maybe "the" founder.

USDA and FSA IT

The USDA CIO's office has a blog post touting their work towards "dashboards" consolidating access to data across the USDA.

Fedscoop notes in the second phase of the "lighthouse" project:

In this second phase, USDA plans to award contracts across the same five focus areas as Phase I — IT Infrastructure Optimization, Cloud Adoption, Customer Experience, Data Analytics and Contact Center — and an additional contract for support of its program management office.

 The same piece offers this quote:

"While the CoEs address a wide swath of IT modernization at USDA, the White House’s Matt Lira argued in June that what they all have in common is creating a better-functioning government.
“We are ultimately in the business of restoring the public’s faith in these institutions themselves,” Lira said.

I'm a little dubious of these efforts.  I do hope they are collecting metrics.  If I were feeling energetic, I'd file a FOIA request for available metrics of online usage. But then, if I were feeling energetic, I'd have better things to do than nitpick efforts.

Implementing the Trade War Payments I

Agweb has the announcement of the CCC programs, which include these details (from Jim Wiesemeyer, who was a pain in the neck  back in 1983 during the the implementation of the Payment-in-Kind (PIK) Program).

“USDA says it will take some time to develop the needed rules and regulations for the efforts and there will be a Federal Register notice published,” Wiesemeyer said. “There will be a relatively simple signup —producers will need to tell USDA what their 2018 production is for the crops targeted, and that level of what they actually produced times a payment rate and producers would get a payment based on that formula.”

Specific details for how the program will work, how the program will be implemented and how farmers can sign up for payments have not been announced. According to USDA undersecretary, Greg Ibach, the details will be released closer to Labor Day when USDA plans to fully implement the program.

“Payments are expected to start going to producers in September and will be also dictated by when the producer actually harvests the crops where the direct payments will be made,” Wiesemeyer said. “That would signal most wheat producers would be first up to receive the payments along with pork and dairy producers.”

I suspect there's some parallels with PIK--USDA and FSA have been working on the program for a couple months.  And they'll be working even harder now the announcement is out.  Based on my experience with PIK and other programs, the biggest problem will have been figuring out what decisions need to be made, specifically things like which commodities will be included and the economic logic for computing payment rates. How long do you assume the trade war is going to last is a big one.  Maybe you can compute an impact on prices for the 2018 crops of wheat, corn, soybeans, etc and assume that the trade war will be over in time for the 2019 crop?  But for dairy and pork the exact duration is more important.  Or maybe you set up a continuing program so you can do multiple computations and multiple payments?

Those are policy issues for the big shots in USDA and OMB--I hope Sec. Perdue's policy team is well staffed and works smoothly, much more smoothly than the administration's foreign policy team.

The bureaucratic issues are of more interest to me.  Developing the signup forms and procedures, writing the regulations, and getting OMB clearance on the forms and regulations are big jobs. In 1983 we didn't have all the tools they have now--IIRC Wordperfect was our major tool.  I know for sure we were still printing forms and procedures then. And those had to be shipped to state and county offices and arrive before farmers could sign up for the program.

 My big question on this program is how Trump's EOs on reducing the burden of regulations and the number of regulations will come into play.  I'm sure at the beginning of the year USDA and OMB didn't plan on having at least one brand new regulation, and more likely three new ones, to fit under the Trump rules.  Three new rules would mean having to do away with six old ones.  My cynical take is OMB will waive the rules and no one of any consequence will notice.

I'm also curious how FSA in DC will train the states and counties.  I know they're doing a lot of training online.  In 1983 DC had to train the states and the states would train the counties.  Preparing training materials when issues are still in up in the air is fun.  Getting up in front of 100 state people who are impatient to get going and nervous over the jam they're in is great fun.  The reality though is that "training" is more complicated than simply passing on information and procedures.  In-person training is an opportunity to find out the holes and flaws in what you (the DC specialist) has done.  And it's an opportunity over the long run to build trust--if you promise to get an answer from the big shots and are able to deliver, people trust you more.  And I think that trust ultimately pervades the whole network of people from DC specialist through to the farmer applying for benefits.

USDA in a Best Seller?? Maybe in a Movie?

Improbable as it seems, it's possible, not certain but possible, that USDA will be featured in a best selling book available for its bureaucrats to give as Christmas presents to their family members.

How?

Michael Lewis has a new book coming out in October, described in this NY Times piece.

“The Fifth Risk,” which W.W. Norton will publish in October, paints a dire picture of the chaos and mismanagement in the departments of Energy, Agriculture and Commerce during the transition from President Barack Obama to President Trump. Within these seemingly dull, benign bureaucratic systems, Mr. Lewis encountered devoted public servants struggling with understaffed and neglected agencies while confronting potentially catastrophic risks.

Lewis has a good history of hitting the best seller list.   And several of his books have been made into movies ("The Blind Side", "Money Ball").

I've already added it to my Amazon wish list.

Unions and Marketing Agreements

The Supreme Court struck down the ability of unions to charge fees to non-members for service rendered in representing them to management. 

A couple comments:

1. FSA in DC became unionized before I retired.  As a manager, it was another pain, another hoop to work through.  But it wasn't really that big of a deal, as I remember it.  My suspicion is that the union has become less effective over the years because of turnover in its members, meaning the original members who pushed to get the vote have retired and/or got tired.  That's the way humans do.  (Might be wrong, particularly as issues like Trump's attitude towards civil servants and more importantly Perdue's proposals for reorganization have come to the fore.)
2. As I've been distracted by working on a book for a relative I've not read the decision or evern detailed discussion of it.  But, not allowing that to stop me, I'd think the principles of the decision spell trouble for the agricultural marketing order/promotion system.  I'd think the argument is the same: being required to pay fees to a union or promotion fees to a promotion organization is a violation of free speech and free association.

That's not to say I like the fact.  While sometimes I lean libertarian I do think the government can appropriately encourage the formation of groups, like unions and marketing groups.

Time to Check Farmers.gov

Why?

USDA just got $10 million for it, one of three agencies to get the first awards from OMB's Modernization Technology Fund, according to this article.

Personally I wonder about two things:

1. what is the management and organizational structure supporting the effort?  Dedicated resources or detailed from the agencies? Full-time managers and programmers, or part-time?
2. what metrics do they have, and how are they fed back into the management structure?   

In other words, how is the bureaucracy organized.

The Parable of the Forms

This paper is written by a law professor, so it's directed at legal procedures, but he uses the design and use forms as a way to make his point.   I'd say the logic applies as well to the design of agencies: one reason why we have recurrent efforts to simplify how USDA deals with farmers, and recurrent failures.  The view from on high is much clearer than the view at the grassroots, and the grassroots typically have more staying power. 

Recommended for bureaucrats.

Working at USDA Is Injurious to Your Health?

Apparently USDA's South Building, where I used to work, is undergoing lead abatement work.  (Makes sense, given when it was constructed.)  Now employees are reporting health problems and tying it into the (non)availability of telework under Sec. Perdue's new policies.  See this GovExec piece.

USDA a "Lighthouse Agency"

That's from this FCW piece on some GSA IT contract awards:

"The awards support the first phase of work at five IT Modernization Centers of Excellence. Work will begin at the Department of Agriculture, which was selected as the government's "lighthouse" agency.
SIE Consulting Group will be working on cloud adoption, McKinsey & Company is tackling infrastructure optimization, ICF Inc. won two contracts for customer experience and service delivery analytics, while Kaiser Associates was awarded a contact center contract."

Don't know what "lighthouse" means--presumably a new bit of jargon that sounds good but turns out meaningless, like "tiger teams" back in the 90's. 

USDA EEO

Secretary Perdue is proposing to reorganize USDA civil rights offices--he's asking for comments on his proposal.  Strikingly, he's allowing only until March 25 for comments to be received.

I've long since lost my grasp of how USDA is organized so I don't really understand what he's doing.  One change seems to be giving each mission area (I think NRCS, FSA, RMA are now or will a mission area) one civil rights/EEO office.  That would mean taking the Office of Civil Rights out of FSA and putting it at the Under Secretary level.

It seems he's also changing the department level office. Given what happened under Reagan I'd suspect it would have less power, but that's pure speculation.

Shame on (Some) USDA Employees

Turns out the OIG found some USDA employees were using government computers to access inappropriate material on some websites (i.e., porn).  This week USDA is blocking access to some 400 sites, including Facebook and Twitter.  (I assume those employees authorized to post on the USDA Twitter and Facebook sites will still be able to.)

Civil Rights at USDA

The Civil Rights office at USDA has a long and not lustrous history, undergoing a number of reorganizations, changes of leadership, and unfavorable audit reports from OIG and GAO.

There's more controversy today, as an employee in the office made a very public (in the Jefferson auditorium)  allegation of sexual misconduct:

Before an audience of USDA employees in Jefferson Auditorium at USDA headquarters, Davis said she was fed up by what she described as years of sexual harassment and retaliation by senior management in civil rights offices. She said she had had consensual sex with D. Leon King, a director in the Office of Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, in exchange for a promised promotion. Davis also named Brian Garner, director of the Farm Service Agency’s Office of Civil Rights, and several other top officials as contributing to a hostile work environment.

Trump Budget Proposal

From here:

 The Budget supports the Secretary’s efforts to reorganize Agency functions to improve the customer and consumer experience. Under the new structure, the Farm Service Agency, Risk Management Agency, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service would be merged under the Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation. In addition, the Secretary has established an Under Secretary of Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs to sharpen USDA’s focus on increasing agriculture exports to foreign markets. The Budget also supports consolidating fair practices, standards work, and commodity procurement within the Agricultural Marketing Service. These, and other related reorganizations, are expected to improve the way USDA delivers its services. In addition, the Budget supports the creation of a business innovation center in each mission area that would handle support activities in order to avoid duplicative functions and maximize collaboration between agencies.
Improves Customer Service. Modernizing program delivery and improving customer service at USDA is an important focus of the Administration. USDA is partnering with the White House Office of American Innovation to modernize its systems undertaking four key strategies: strengthening strategic IT governance; consolidating end-user services and data centers; enabling a strategic approach to data management and introducing data-driven capabilities; and improving the USDA customer experience. The Budget supports these efforts to improve service delivery by requesting funds to develop a centralized customer service portal for customers served by the Department’s three service center agencies. This single, integrated, producer-centric web portal would provide expanded and more effective and efficient access to useful online USDA services to meet the needs of agricultural producers. By optimizing service delivery, USDA can support agricultural producers to reach their productive potential and advance the U.S. economy

The Budget proposes to optimize and improve crop insurance and commodity programs in a way that maintains a strong safety net. The Budget does this while also achieving savings, eliminating subsidies to higher income farmers, and reducing overly generous crop insurance premium subsidies to farmers and payments made to private sector insurance companies. The Budget includes a bold set of proposals, including those that would reduce the average premium subsidy for crop insurance from 62 percent to 48 percent and limit commodity, conservation, and crop insurance subsidies to those producers that have an Adjusted Gross Income of $500,000 or less. In addition, the Budget proposes reductions to overly generous subsidies provided to participating insurance companies by capping underwriting gains at 12 percent, which would ensure that the companies receive a reasonable rate of return given the risks associated with their participation in the crop insurance program. The Budget proposes to eliminate an unnecessary and separate payment limit for peanut producers and limit eligibility for commodity subsidies to one manager per farm.

Infoshare: Once More Unto the Breach

Thought I was quoting The Charge of the Light Brigade, but it turns out it's Shakespeare's Henry V.

This is triggered by an FCW piece/ report on a GovExec conference, quoting  Chad Sheridan, the CIO of RMA, discussing USDA's plans to consolidate CIO's, combine mission support functions of FSA, NRCS, and RMA, and serve as the pilot for a GSA program.  See also this FCW piece.

The new website, farmers.gov, went online February 1.  They're starting small, very small, which is good.

This is what they promise:


"Check back monthly for new features, including:

Mobile-friendly service center locator
Program descriptions with an interactive requirements tool
Improved account login process for easy access to USDA accounts
Customer and mobile-friendly digital forms
Calendar of local events and program due dates
Customizable data dashboard
And much more"

Changing SNAP (Corrected)

Just posted my guess on the SNAP proposal from the Trump administration--turns out I'm wrong.  There are existing programs to distribute staple foods: 

"Search here to find product information sheets for USDA Foods available to households through the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). Staff who operate USDA Foods programs and participants often use this information to help prepare healthy meals. Each fact sheet includes a description of the USDA Foods product, storage tips, nutrition facts, and two recipes that use the product."

So the proposal is to expand the existing programs, not to piggyback on school lunch.  (The website even has recipes for using the staples, though the ratings on most of them are 3 stars out of 5.)

Changing SNAP (Food Stamps)

The Trump administration's budget includes a proposal to provide a portion of SNAP (food stamp) benefits to families in the form of a monthly food package of staples.

The proposal won't go anywhere--the grocers will see to that--so I'm not going to spend time on researching.  Instead, I'll offer the guess, only a guess, that within the USDA bureaucracy someone looked at the existing setup to buy and provide staples to schools (used to be government surplus commodities) and suggest piggybacking on the arrangements to expand and provide packages to families.  For anyone who wants to go further, here's the FNS link.

What's Perdue Up to?

From FCW:

"The Trump administration announced the establishment of five centers of excellence at a Dec. 14 industry day hosted at the White House. The General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Service will lead the development of centers focused on cloud adoption, infrastructure optimization, customer experience, service delivery analytics and contact centers. The Department of Agriculture is the first customer.
Wilmer said the decision to name Agriculture as the home of the first center of excellence came down to the commitment of Secretary Sonny Perdue.
"The secretary of Agriculture was extremely supportive of modernizing Agriculture, I think that's one of his major objectives, and I think [he] understands the importance of IT in all of this.... So Agriculture seemed like a perfect example." Wilmer said. "When you have secretary-level-down commitment in making this happen, we wanted to make sure the first one that we roll out is going to be a success... then we can follow up rapidly with others."

Not sure what area of USDA is being targeted here.

USDA Attorneys

Politico reports on a problem with USDA attorneys: conflict between the union and their new leader.  (I didn't realize the attorneys had a union.  I wonder if it's a heritage from New Deal days.  Some of the attorneys then were notably left-wing, even communist, so likely they'd be activists on their own behalf as well as the rural poor.)

FSA SED's

At least the Trump administration is doing better with women in appointing State executive directors for FSA (I count seven out of 50 in this list) than with new US Attorneys (one of 27 in this tweet)

USDA in Vanity Fair

Michael Lewis has an article on USDA in Vanity Fair (hattip to Marginal Revolution). He's a good writer so it's interesting, contrasting the Trump Administration's approach to USDA with interviews with the assistant secretaries from the outgoing administration.  I like it, except for this:

By the time she left the little box marked “Rural Development,” Lillian Salerno had spent the better part of five years inside it.She was a small-business person first and had no affection for the inefficiencies she found inside the federal government. “You have this big federal workforce that hasn’t been invested in forever,” she said. “They can’t be outward-facing. They don’t have any of the tools you need in a modern workplace.” She couldn’t attract young people to work there. Once, she tried to estimate how many of the U.S.D.A.’s roughly 100,000 employees had been taught how to create a spreadsheet. Fewer than 50 people, she decided. [emphasis added]“I was always very aware how we spent money. When I would use words like ‘fiduciary duties’ or say, ‘Those are not our dollars,’ they would say, ‘Are you sure you aren’t a Republican?’ But I was really sensitive to the fact that this wasn’t our money. This was taxpayer money. This was money that had come from some guy working for 15 bucks an hour.”

I'm tempted to cast aspersions on the RD community, but I doubt they're that much different than FSA.  I know by the time I retired  I knew more than 50 people in FSA who were competent with spreadsheet software, including a couple (Joe Bryan and Loren Becker) who were using Lotus (yes, that's how long ago it was--20 years ago now) for very sophisticated purposes.  It might be true that FSA, and probably USDA in general, was slow to adopt personal software.  But in the mid 80's we were using DEC's Allinone software, which included a spreadsheet application.

The one thing in the paragraph I find crdible is "She couldn't attract young people...).