ONE would be forgiven for thinking that the Department of Agriculture primarily concerns itself with farms. In fact, over 70% of its money goes to nutrition-assistance programmes like food stamps, a welfare scheme providing 42m Americans with pre-loaded debit cards to buy groceries. It also spends $6bn on forestry—a job one might think better suited to the Department of the Interior—and $1.4bn on rural rental subsidies, duplicating the work of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It also inspects food, with jurisdiction over pepperoni pizzas but not cheese; liquid eggs but not whole; open-faced meat sandwiches, but not closed-face.
Given these haphazard groupings, a government reshuffle might not seem a bad idea. On June 21st the White House released a plan, after several months of tightly guarded work by the Office of Management and Budget, to do just that. Some of its technocratic recommendations are well-considered, like charging a single agency with food-safety inspection or...Continue reading
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