Identifying Discrimination in USDA Activities

USDA has published a notice of proposed rulemaking on nondiscrimination.  There's several changes, among them expanding the basis for political beliefs and gender identity.  I won't comment on that, but I will on requiring agencies to collect race, ethnicity and gender data on their customers, albeit on a voluntary basis.

I'm not sure how that works.  John Jones comes in and applies for a farm loan. He refuses to give his REG data.  He is turned down.  He appeals on the basis of REG.  Can the agency say we didn't know you were REG, so our basis for turning you down was totally rational and legal?  Can Jones say: look at me, it's obvious that I'm REG and you approved a loan in a very similar case to Sandra Smith, who wasn't REG?  And the agency says, but Sandra didn't provide REG data, so we approved her on a totally rational and legal basis?  Can the agency say only if you provide REG data can you appeal any rejection on the basis of REG?

My bottomline: I don't see how this approach to the REG data helps in the decision making and appeals process.

Grassley and Delegation of Authority

From Chris Clayton at DTN:

"Discussing the farm bill, Grassley said the principal negotiators may take his language defining an actively engaged farmer out of the farm bill and leave it up to USDA to determine who is actively engaged. This Congress is filled with lawmakers who have criticized administrative rulemaking usurping congressional authority. Yet, farm-bill conferees now seem intent on turning over rulemaking to USDA to redefine who is actively engaged as a farmer.

"The people who want to shovel this off to the administration for rulemaking, they don't want anything," Grassley said. "They want to take it out. If they could get away with taking it out, they would just take it out ... They think they can accomplish the same thing by giving to the department and the department might not do anything very significant."

Grassley's actively engaged rule only allows one person designated as the farm manager. He noted the Government Accountability Office has cited instances of 16 people classified as "managers" for a single farm entity.

Grassley reiterated there was no need to change anything in the payment-limit provisions because they were the same in both the House and Senate bills."

 I don't trust my memory because I tried and failed to find documents supporting the following: when "actively engaged" first became law, ASCS wrote regulations implementing the provision.  But I believe that the powers that be in Congress (Jamie Whitten perhaps, as he was head of House Ag and represented MS) got ASCS to back off a bit.  Don't know whether that was a provision in another law or just pressure on the USDA hierarchy.  Anyway, I'm sure FSA is looking forward to having this responsibility once again.  I'm sure.

Founders: Their Words

I may have mentioned this Founders site before, which contains the digitized correspondence of the Founding Fathers (and the Adams family).  What's neat is you can do a rapid search for terms.  Here's a list of terms and their occurrences.  (I discovered that searching on lower case picks up upper case, but not vice versa.)   Who would have thought that "electricity" would be mentioned more often than the "slave trade"?

Citizen 11,287
King 10,968
Colonies 5,581
Continent 3,334
British  17,460

United States 25,153
United Colonies  774
Constitution  7,731

Rights  16,033
Liberties 17,463
Society  17,242
Individual 6,188
Bear arms  174

Corn  2,919
Wheat 3,167
Potatoes 515
Tomato  5
Cabbage 157
Oats 806

Apples  425
Maple sugar  79


Horse 7,517
Oxen 452
Sheep 1,033
Cattle 1,782
Cow  496
Hen  151
Chicken  69

Compost  30
Marl 19
Lime 141
Manure 342

Rum  1,025
Whiskey 400
Wine 2,394
Cider  78
Ale 85
Beer 275

Gardening 1,842
Lawyer 2,673
Doctor 3,623
Farmer 2,516
Merchant 10,604
Commerce 7,537
Industry 2,392  (mostly working hard)
Teacher 485

Slave 2,953
Slavery 804
Slave trade 177

Electricity  381

What's Happening on MIDAS: Congress Wants to Know

Getting around to the omnibus appropriations bill:  the first part of the report  dings USDA for failing to report timely on MIDAS.  Also says:

"In order to leverage existing capacity and expertise within the Department, the Secretary is directed to explore the creation of a Center of Excellence for loan servicing support functions in order to provide consolidated customer service, field office support, and centralized loan services to USDA agencies and other Federal agencies. The Secretary shall consult with employee representatives and management in the Farm Service Agency Farm Loan Information Technology, Accounting, and Finance Office loan servicing support functions; the Rural Development Deputy Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Chieflnformation Officer functions; and the Rural Housing Centralized Servicing Center."

Not sure what the quote means, except that someone, an employee, a contractor, or a congressperson has a bee in their bonnet.  "Center of Excellence"?  Sounds like bs to me.

How Committees Work: Logrolling

Via Tom Ricks the Best Defense blog, I got to this Benjamin Wittes post on the recent NSA review panel.  A sentence:

The Review Group report often has the feel of a committee of very smart people getting together and amalgamating their particular obsessions without doing the work of prioritizing them

 This is, of course, how committees work, at least committees with a certain type of task.  I'm reminded of review efforts that occurred in ASCS after a change of administration: the new people would assemble a group of employees who had supported the "outs" to review agency operations.  The group would come up with a laundry list (why is it "a laundry list" I wonder) of recommendations, some of which were reasonable IMHO, some were not, but there wasn't any cohesive overall vision to it.  Maybe given the social and bureaucratic environment there couldn't and shouldn't be a cohesive overall vision.

I assume that the process which produces such reports is simple logrolling: everyone has a pet idea or two, because the committee is deliberately diverse no one has the knowledge or motive to fight against the idea, so to keep everyone happy everyone's idea is included in the report.

The End of the Clerk

Washington Post had an article on the vanishing clerk in government offices which was good.  Down to 4 percent of employees.

Two points:

• back in the day, way back in the day, a "clerk" was a high ranking position. The early Patent Office for example had a chief and a clerk, if I remember correctly.  As government offices grew, we kept inserting positions between the top and the bottom.  
• back in my day, the clerk position could be a stepping stone to advancement, though not always.  I remember a clerk in my first office, who was a spinster from Boston who'd come to DC for WWII and never advanced above that rank.  But I remember more clerks who showed intelligence and diligence and were able to transition out of the clerk to the technician and later the analyst positions.  In the days when many smart women didn't go to college, that was a well-established pathway to advancement.  And when the Feds started emphasizing EEO, we had various programs which enabled black to make a similar transition.  One downside of our current emphasis on meritocracy and college is we make the road to the top much more difficult for those who don't check all the educational checkboxes.  Then we complain about a lack of upward mobility.

I can't resist being chauvinistic enough to mention that some women clerks/secretaries advanced by marrying someone in the office.  These days what people have a fancy name (which I forget) which means college grads marry college grads, no more male boss marrying female secretary.  That's good on equality grounds, but it also limits mobility.

The Iron Triangle and Ideology

I've been looking at the history of FmHA recently.  Post WWII it started off mostly lending to farmers, operating and ownership loans.  Over time successive legislation gradually widened the scope to include lending for housing, for community facilities, to towns <2,500 people expanding to 50,000. 

I suspect, without researching it, that most if not all of these expansions went through without too much partisan controversy or debate. I see the "iron triangle" at work: the FmHA bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the Congressional committees working together to push the changes through and with support from rural representatives of both parties.  I don't see ideology as playing much of a role, except a generic pro-rural development stance.  Just guessing, I'd think partisan politics probably comes into play more when a new agency is being created, when it's not a matter of adding functions to an existing agency which already has a bureaucracy with ties to Congress and to interest groups but creating something mostly from scratch.

Did Vilsack Read the USDA Strategic Plan?

Apparently Robert Gates didn't read the President's plans--Tom Ricks discusses Gates' rules for Washington officials as reflected in his memoirs:

"... don't place too much faith in strategy documents produced by the bureaucracy. "I don't recall ever reading the president's National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures." (Tom: That said, I do wonder whether such documents are perhaps useful as guidance to subordinate officials? But obviously not very much if the SecDef doesn't know or care what they say.)"

US Is Not Truly Liberated

From Dirk Beauregarde's piece on the latest French news:

"However when François Hollande set up home at the presidential palace with his girlfriend, no one said anything. No one seemed to mind an unmarried head of state. No one seemed to care that the unofficial first lady had her own office, staff and security guards all paid for by the taxpayer. Can you imagine this happening in America?"

No, I can't.  We're still a bit puritan I guess.

Those Rich Farmers--Some Aren't

The least wealthy member of Congress:

"On the opposite side of the spectrum is Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., the least wealthy member of Congress. He had an average net worth of negative $12.1 million in 2012, due to loans for his family's dairy farm."

He's in partnership with his brothers.  I'm not sure how the net worth works, though.  Surely any commercial lender would ensure the partnership had assets to balance the loans--like $13 million worth of cows and barns and milking equipment and land?  So he might have a zero net worth, but not negative?  Something's going on here that's not explained.