USDA secretary nominee Tom Vilsack advances out of committee, will likely be approved swiftly by full Senate - Entrepreneur Generations

Tom Vilsack
(Getty Images photo by Alex Wong)

On Tuesday the Senate Agriculture Committee unanimously approved by voice vote the nomination of Tom Vilsack for Agriculture Secretary, clearing the last major hurdle before what will likely be an easy confirmation before the full Senate. The virtual hearing "was full of references to climate change, greenhouse gas mitigation and carbon credit programs, and lessons learned from the pandemic about the vulnerabilities of our food system," Laura Reiley reports for The Washington Post.

Vilsack, who served in the same role for President Obama, was the only cabinet member to serve for the entire eight years of the administration. The former Iowa governor and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council didn't want to come back to the USDA at first, President Biden said in December, but Biden said he persisted because Vilsack knew the department "inside and out."

Vilsack said recently that, as agriculture secretary, he would arrive at the USDA with a "serious focus on getting stuff done quickly" and that he would have the advantage of starting his tenure immediately understanding the breadth of what the department can do and what challenges it faces, Chuck Abbott reports for the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Vilsack will face a new challenge in the pandemic, but will have considerable latitude in taking action to help those hurt economically. "The Agriculture Department is sitting on a $30 billion (for now) warchest that ... Biden could tap to prop up struggling restaurants, pay farmers to implement climate-friendly production and potentially much more," Ryan McCrimmon reports for Politico's Weekly Agriculture.

However he'll mostly be on familiar terrain, University of Tennessee agriculture economists Harwood D. Schaffer and Daryll E. Ray write in a Policy Pennings column: "With the exception of the trade payments and the Covid-19 payments, the farm policies Vilsack inherits as he returns to the Agriculture Secretary job are essentially the same ones he shepherded through Congress when he previously served in that post."

That familiarity will be critical, said Ben Lilliston, director of rural and climate strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. "The USDA was decimated by the Trump administration, including the attempt to end the under secretary for rural development and the decision to physically move two key research agencies [Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture] resulting in a major loss of research capacity," Lillston told Jan Pytalski of The Daily Yonder in an email. "Secretary Vilsack knows the department and will rebuild USDA’s capacity and function in the short-term."

Schaffer and Ray note that many have called Vilsack ineffective, but "one could argue that in developing farm policy Vilsack had to deal with a Republican Congress that limited what he could do. For instance, he worked with chicken farmers on contracting issues and held a series of high-profile hearings only to have Congress fail to fund the writing of new rules."

Progressives also worry Vilsack is too cozy with Big Agriculture and that he has a poor track record on racial issues. "A two-year investigation by Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Stucki of The Counter unearthed a series of other concerns related to Black farmers, including alleged manipulation of census data to cover-up historic discrimination and to falsely claim there was a renaissance in Black farming under Vilsack’s leadership," Martin Longman writes for Washington Monthly.

“In terms of setting a new course for rural communities, one that isn’t primarily extractive and tied to the interest of often multinational companies, there are reasons to be skeptical that Vilsack will shift much from the Obama years," Lilliston told Pytalski.

But Oleta Garrett Fitz regional administrator of the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice, told Pytalski in an email that she hopes Biden’s USDA appointments are promising: "These appointments … give a semblance of hope that this administration will pay more than lip service to the rest of the department’s mission to support the health and economic wellbeing of all of rural America, including its most diverse populations."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/3rrJxFS USDA secretary nominee Tom Vilsack advances out of committee, will likely be approved swiftly by full Senate - Entrepreneur Generations

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