The Economic Research Service is a Department of Agriculture office tasked with doing exactly what it sounds like: researching and reporting on the status of the nation's farming and farmers. It is a valuable tool for policymakers, farmers, and the markets. It is also running afoul of Team Trump's obsessive efforts to retaliate against any fact-producers that threaten to make them look bad, economists within the department are telling Politico:
“The administration didn’t appreciate some of our findings, so this is retaliation to harm the agency and send a message,” said one current ERS employee, who asked not to be named to avoid retribution.
Six of the department's economists resigned together in late April "out of frustration"; employees say researchers are quitting this year at more than double the previous rate.
At issue is the Economic Research Service's reports on how farmers are faring under Team Trump policies. This is not an intentional slight of their administration overseers, but the unavoidable facts on the ground: Trump's tariff wars are greatly harming the nation's farmers, and the Republican tax cuts have primarily helped, as could be predicted, only the largest and wealthiest corporate farms. Under Trump, most farmers are getting screwed.
Issuing reports on the state of farming that unavoidably come to the conclusion that Trump's actual policies are putting the screws to the nation's farmers is, of course, one of the most reliable ways to infuriate Trump's team of sycophants and hangers-on, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has, according to department employees, responded with multiple retaliatory measures. Perdue has moved to put the office under the control of the USDA's chief economist, an appointed position. He insisted that the agency's peer-reviewed research papers always include disclaimers marking the conclusions as "preliminary" and not to be "construed" as an "agency determination or policy."
And most dramatically, he announced plans to relocate most of the department out of Washington—and away from policymakers—and into the "heartland." A final location has not been determined yet, and Perdue has yet to offer any justification for the move other than his own say-so. Department economists, say Politico, see the move as an effort to shrink the department by obliging staff to either relocate or resign.
These are all rather dramatic steps to take to rein in a government research service that has had the unfortunate task of documenting the actual real-word effects of Team Trump's policies, rather than the version that Trump and associates mumble to television cameras. But it is consistent with the Trump team's aggressive steps to diminish the role of peer-reviewed science in every other government agency. If the facts contradict desired Republican policies, then it's the facts that need to go.