How Will Trump Sabotage Government? Look At What He Did To The USDA’s ‘Crown Jewel.’
HuffPost
The first Trump administration's strategy caused a "brain drain" and a generational blow to American agricultural research. And Trump’s not finished.
Five years ago, President Donald Trump’s budget director and acting chief of staff flew home to South Carolina for a Republican Party gala and celebrated the slow decay of the federal government.
Referring to Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” — he didn’t mean lobbyists — Mick Mulvaney brought up two obscure research agencies within the Department of Agriculture, the total combined personnel of which made up less than 1% of the USDA workforce.
It’s “nearly impossible” to fire federal workers, Mulvaney said. But the USDA had defied the odds.
A few months prior, then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told the vast majority of workers at the agencies, largely economists and researchers, that they would have to pick up their lives and move 1,000 miles across the country, from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City. They were given just a few weeks to decide if they would move or else face termination “for declining a directed reassignment.”
Most of the civil servants — with children entering high school, spouses employed in D.C., aging parents to care for, and retirements not far away — balked. Hundreds left the civil service, stalling major scientific priorities and setting American agricultural research back years.
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The first Trump administration's strategy caused a "brain drain" and a generational blow to American agricultural research. And Trump’s not finished.