Charles Peters, NASS, and Bureaucratic Maneuvers

Charles Peters, the founder of the Washington Monthly, is a sometimes cynical viewer of the Washington merry-go-round (to mix up journalistic references).  He observed that whenever there was a battle over appropriations and budget cutting, the smart bureaucrats would, if they were in the National Park Service, plan to close the Washington Monument.  In other words, they'd threaten visible cuts of things near and dear to the appropriators, or at least the appropriators constituents. 

I think a hat tip is due to the bureaucrats at NASS, who may well have executed a classic closing-the-monument move.  With due credit to Chris Clayton, at DTN Progressive Farmer, he narrates:

Last week the New York Times had a good feature on the cutting of National Agricultural Statistics Service reports ranging from counting goats and catfish to minks, beer hops and bee keeping.

http://www.nytimes.com/…

It was good timing, as the House and Senate appropriators met to hammer out differences in budgets. Appropriators opted to spend $6-9 million more on NASS than the two committees had individually budgeted, as an agricultural economics firm highlighted Tuesday.

Appropriators wrote in their conference report,

"While it is imperative for all of USDA's agencies and offices to prepare to address potential reductions in funding, the conferees are concerned that the agency made this announcement before the final appropriation was determined."

In other words, You guys made us give you more money because we didn't want to hear from the catfish guys that you are neglecting to count them."

Appropriators asked NASS to reconsider its decisions about cutting the reports and reinstate as many as possible.

Habemus Billum? Not Yet

When the white smoke rises over the Vatican, the next step is the announcement: Habemus papam--we have a pope.

But according to Chris Clayton this morning, we don't yet have a draft farm bill to submit to the supercommittee.  (I never took Latin, so I've no idea what Latin for "bill" is.)

Complexity of Regulations

The Reps often complain about complex regulations, complain, that is when they aren't complaining about any regulation at all.  Some bloggers have talked about why regulations are complex.  There's probably some truth in all positions, but there was an episode Sunday which illustrates one factor.

Scene: surfing NFL football. A contested call.  The quarterback is standing on his own 1-foot line, he draws his arm back, so the football is over the end zone. He throws the ball and is called for intentional grounding.  Now the rule is, if you're called for intentional grounding while in the end zone (note: I think this was the situation, but my memory is untrustworthy, but the issue is right) it's a safety. 

So the official called a safety.  Then the officials conferred and ended up reversing the call.  The announcers agreed they'd never seen that exact situation, and suggested that the rule book would be changed in the future to clarify that the issue is whether the quarterback is standing in the end zone, not where the ball is.

So that's an example of how regulations grow: you start with a simple rule, then you encounter a situation you've not thought of so you change and add to the rules to cover it.  And things keep on growing. How much of the growth in regulations is accounted for by this process I don't know.  But it's significant, and a factor no one addresses.

[updated with this]  Here's a somewhat related Politico post, on the issue of tomato paste in school lunches. Politico addresses it as an issue of industry influence on regulations, and it is.  But back in the day we didn't have pizza in school lunches.  I'm not sure there was pizza in the 1980's.  Back then the Reagan administration notoriously tried to change the rules to give credit for the nutrients in ketchup (another form of tomato paste) in school lunches.  They got shot down because it was framed as calling ketchup a "vegetable".  It's an example of the same process: if you count nutrients in school lunches, how do you count, and what do you count when you've got pizza or ketchup involved.  The simplest solution is to go back to the school lunches in my day: meat loaf and overcooked vegetables, and only salt and pepper.

Common Reporting Dates

From the press release announcing FMA and RMA have come up with common acreage reporting dates(ARD):

Before the streamlining, RMA had 54 ARDs for 122 crops, and FSA had 17 ARDs for 273 crops. The review team consolidated all of them into the 15 common ARDs.

 RMA and FSA will implement the July 15, 2012, and August 15, 2012, ARDs for certain commodities during the 2012 crop/program year. The remaining common ARDs will be implemented during the 2013 crop/program year.

Back in 1993 or so there was an initiative along these lines. one which obviously was unsuccessful. I wasn't involved in those discussions.   I'd be curious whether the resistance in the 1990s, and up to now, came more from RMA or FSA,. My guess, given the ratio of dates to crops between the two agencies, is that RMA had more problems.  They also perhaps had greater leverage.  Note that only 2 of the 15 common dates are being implemented next year.  That's probably because RMA needs to revise crop insurance policies, which requires a long lead time. I can imagine meetings where the prospect of such a long time to implementation was a wet blanket on any enthusiasm on the FSA side. Maybe there was more leadership from the top in 2011 than there was in 1993/4. Or maybe the people at the operating level (i.e., branch chiefs and specialists) were more capable and flexible this time around..

This is one prerequisite for the ACRSI common reporting initiative. Not sure how the software will work when you don't have common reporting dates for the crops: might be a real problem, might not be, might be something to be solved by a kludge.

EWG and Direct Payments

EWG released their database on direct payments on Friday. Here's the press release.  A quote I can't figure out:

The EWG database also smokes out the names of the individuals who ultimately cashed the subsidy checks. Their identities have been hidden by these corporate structures and not publicly disclosed by the US Department of Agriculture since the 2008 farm bill.

(FSA quoted EWG what was, IMHO, a ridiculous price for doing the processing necessary to attribute payments made to an entity like a corporation down to the constituent individuals.) I'm not sure how EWG did this.  Their statement about individuals "who ultimately cashed..." is technically inaccurate.  What they mean to say is something like "individuals who were the ultimate beneficiaries of subsidy checks written to corporations."

Surprising Factoids

"...police work is actually less dangerous than nursing." 

The omission is a critical qualifier, in terms of nonfatal injuries.  From Matt Yglesias

A less surprising but completely true factoid: farming is twice as dangerous in terms of fatal injuries as police work.

Two Good Sentences From History

With apologies for the attitudes implicit here:

War aims, like a cat held up by the tail, have a way of clawing back at those who propose them....Women and war aims must be understood before they can be handled.

Via Brad DeLong's blog, the Harvard Crimson of Nov. 10, 1941 wrote on war aims (think Atlantic Charter and the Versailles peace conference).

One can only think of the long and extensive discussion of our war aims which occurred before the second Iraq war.

World Food Crisis?

So say some foodies.  But I see thisand I wonder:

Corn production outside the US in the 2011-12 marketing year is projected to be 6.6 percent larger than production of a year ago. Argentina, Brazil, China, and the Ukraine are all expected to have larger crops than those of last year. Of the larger producers, only Mexico is expected to have a smaller crop. Foreign wheat production is expected to be up 6.8 percent, led by a 39 percent increase in production in the countries that make up the former Soviet Union as that area recovers from the drought of 2010. Foreign soybean production is expected to increase by 1.4 percent

CFTC and MF Global

Chris Clayton has an outstanding post on the House Agriculture Committee's oversight hearings--two paragraphs:

"By my own count, the House Agriculture Committee has held six hearings on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's implementation of Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. More than 30 witnesses appeared before the committee, which has issued 13 news releases on its work from Jan. 27 to date.

But in the entirety of the House Agriculture Committee's work, no one, as far as I can tell from news releases and hearing transcripts, asked anything along the lines of "Are there any loopholes that need to be closed, or rules that need to be implemented to protect client accounts from being raided?" Or, "Is there a loophole big enough to drive a massive bankruptcy through?" "Is there anything we're missing?"

Veteran's Day and Calvin Gibbs

Today's Veteran's Day, a day on which many good words will be said and many good people honored.  But as a veteran myself, I want to remind us that Lt. Calley and Calvin Gibbs were also veterans. Good men and women can do great things; they also can do terrible things; they can also fail to act when terrible things are done (see Paterno, Joe).  The presence or absence of a uniform, the taking of an oath to serve the country, none of that affects the human capacity for good or evil. Veterans are human, just like the rest of us.