The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is as good an example of the depth and breadth of damage Donald Trump has done to the government as any. Under him, Secretary Sonny Perdue gutted the USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, splitting the agencies up and ripping hundreds of jobs out of Washington, D.C. and forcing employees to either relocate to Kansas City or quit. Many researchers whose jobs were studying threats to the food system—the largest of which is climate change that Trumpers aren't content just to deny, but to make worse—chose not to continue in their jobs.
Now President-elect Joe Biden and his pick for secretary, Tom Vilsack, are going to have to figure out how to put the pieces back together and make up for four years of critical research that were not only lost, but set back who knows how many years because of the disruption. It's left hundreds of jobs unfilled when the career-service researchers and economists in them chose not to relocate. In the meantime, the projects the agencies were taking on food safety, nutrition, conservation, farm economics, and climate change have either just been dropped or continued with little oversight or direction. "It's hard to pretend it never happened," former USDA Chief Economist Joseph Glauber, now a senior fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, told Politico. "You've uprooted everyone's lives, you had all these people quit—it's a tough situation." It's a situation Biden will have to try to figure out how to remedy.
To avoid creating yet another wave of disruption, the Kansas City office is probably going to stay—there are many new hires who took the jobs there who wouldn't want to relocate back to Washington. The pandemic has demonstrated one thing: The government, like millions of businesses, can function in large part remotely. At least, that's what USDA employees are asking of Biden and Vilsak. "If ERS mandated that everyone in K.C. move to D.C., it would be a disservice," a current ERS employee told Politico. "At the end of the day, many are happy in K.C. and have no desire to move. And if anything Covid has shown, it is that we can successfully collaborate remotely."
There are at least 400 jobs to fill to get the staffing just to the Obama-era levels, so the team has to figure that out fast. It's possible some of the departed employees would want to come back and resume their work. "Most of us are still struggling," said Laura Dodson, an economist at the agency and acting vice president of the ERS employees union. "New staffers cannot replace all the duties and responsibilities of the former staff. Many of us are overburdened and overworked, and unable to train new staff due to heavy workloads. […] The only path forward I can see is to allow us to hire back former staff in the District."
Robert Bonnie, the former Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment in the Obama administration, and other climate and resource experts participated in a review process called the "Climate 21 Project," which recommended a review of the Kansas City move and not just the staffing needs, but the "demoralized workforce" the whole mess created. They also call for a third-party review of the state of projects determining what's been postponed or abandoned and needs to be restarted. "The forced relocation to Kansas City has also meant dozens of reports and millions in research funding have been delayed or scuttled, setting back critical climate change and other research," the group said in a memo to the Biden transition team.
Bringing climate change research back and catching up to where the research should have been by now, after four years of derailment from Trump, is going to take a massive effort. So is trying to heal the whole of the USDA. And that's got to happen with every government department. The next year is not going to be a picnic for anyone.