Robert Bonnie, the Agriculture undersecretary for farm production and conservation in the Biden administration, said Monday that he is “very concerned that USDA is being weakened” by the Trump administration’s staffing and budget cuts.
In his first public remarks on the Trump administration’s policies, Bonnie told the North American Agricultural Journalists at their spring Washington meeting that he is particularly worried about the loss of key personnel. Bonnie said he is prohibited from having direct contact with USDA officials for two years due to the ethics agreement he signed when he took his presidentially appointed and Senate confirmed post, but that he has learned that Tim Griffiths, the national coordinator of the Natural Resource Conservation Service’s sage grouse initiative, left USDA on Friday.
An email to Griffiths’ NRCS address in Montana on Monday resulted in the following automated reply: “I am sorry, but I am no longer available.” The response directed senders to another USDA official, and ended with “Your friend in conservation. Tim.”
Bonnie noted that the sage grouse initiative Griffiths led covers more than 9 million acres and “involves a couple thousand ranches in a voluntary, all incentive-based program.”Bonnie said it was terrible for USDA to lose “that type of leadership, creativity. Tim is one of many people lost.
“According to a biography on the Society for Range Management website, Griffiths has “spent his entire career working to achieve fish and wildlife conservation through sustainable agriculture and to reduce regulatory burdens associated with the Endangered Species Act. In 2011, Tim received the Secretary of Agriculture Honor Award for his work on the agency’s major sage grouse conservation initiative.” Bonnie also said that 75% of the federal government’s wildfire response “sits at USDA,” and that he is worried as the summer fire season approaches, the Forest Service is “going to lose senior people, the number of teams will be reduced.” Bonnie also pointed out that the Biden administration established relationships with Ducks Unlimited and other conservation groups, and that he worried that USDA will lose those relationships. Bonnie, who developed the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities during the Biden administration but also worked at USDA during the Obama administration, noted that during the Obama administration farmers “ran the other way from climate policy,” but during the Biden years the government and the farmers worked together on agriculture and forestry. Now, he said, there is “resistance” to the Trump administration’s holds on Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities grants. The Trump administration has changed the Partnerships initiative into the Advancing Markets for Producers (AMP) initiative, and Bonnie has said he hopes that the administration will follow through on the original goals.
But he said the Trump administration’s decision to require groups that had already been made partners and gotten grants to reapply to continue in the program will slow down development and create uncertainty. Bonnie said he also worried about the impact of cutting back on USDA programs under the Inflation Reduction Act, and the loss of U.S. international leadership. He also noted that the first Trump administration had pulled a dozen senior USDA executives from agencies into the business center it created and that the Biden administration had to “piece” back together management in the various agencies. The current Trump administration organizational changes are on a much bigger scale, he said. On biofuels, including sustainable aviation fuel, other departments are also involved, he said.The final guidance for the 45Z tax credit for biofuels was not completed because officials in an interagency process wanted to further examine a carbon calculator, but if the Treasury Department would put in place the peer review process established by the Biden administration, “farmers would be off the races on sustainable aviation fuel,” Bonnie said. But Bonnie said he is worried about the loss of leadership in all the agencies that play a role in biofuels. If the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department and the Transportation Department pull back, “farmers are going to pay the price,” he said.
–The Hagstrom Report