5 years in the past, President Donald Trump’s price range director and appearing leader of workforce flew house to South Carolina for a Republican Birthday party gala and celebrated the sluggish decay of the government.
Regarding Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” — he didn’t imply lobbyists — Mick Mulvaney introduced up two difficult to understand examine businesses throughout the Division of Agriculture, the full mixed staff of which made up not up to 1% of the USDA personnel.
It’s “nearly impossible” to fireside federal employees, Mulvaney mentioned. However the USDA had defied the chances.
A couple of months prior, then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue informed nearly all of employees on the businesses, in large part economists and researchers, that they must select up their lives and circulation 1,000 miles around the nation, from Washington, D.C., to Kansas Town. They got only some weeks to make a decision if they’d circulation or else face termination “for declining a directed reassignment.”
Lots of the civil servants — with youngsters getting into highschool, spouses hired in D.C., ageing oldsters to handle, and retirements round the corner — balked. Masses left the civil provider, stalling main medical priorities and atmosphere American agricultural examine again years.
“More than half the people quit!” Mulvaney raved on the gala.
All it took to empty the swamp was once telling other folks they needed to circulation from the country’s capital to “the real part of the country,” he mentioned. “What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
With Donald Trump’s fingers once more at the levers of energy, what took place on the USDA is only the start.
Trump campaigned closing yr on a promise to “dismantle the deep state,” and his select to guide the White Area price range place of job — Mulvaney’s successor and key Challenge 2025 co-author Russ Vought — has mentioned that federal employees are “villains” who must be “traumatically affected” after they move to paintings. Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” cheerleader Elon Musk has written concerning the “relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area” to be able to “curtail administrative overgrowth.”
And Trump himself, in a marketing campaign video, mentioned he would “continue the effort, launched during his first term, to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington swamp.” He mentioned such strikes may “immediately” have an effect on 100,000 civil servants.
5 years after the relocation, present and previous staff on the two USDA businesses, the Financial Analysis Provider (ERS) and the Nationwide Institute for Meals and Agriculture (NIFA), have mentioned that the mass departure of professionals in agriculture and agricultural economics marked a dramatic, tangible loss for the general public — and must now be a vivid purple take-heed call for the following 4 years of Trump’s 2nd time period in place of job, when the president will without a doubt try identical strikes at different businesses.
“Very little happened for the first two or three years after the relocation because there just wasn’t anybody there,” mentioned Susan Offutt, who was once administrator of ERS between 1996 and 2006 sooner than serving as the executive economist of the Executive Responsibility Place of job for 8 years.
Even these days, after staffing ranges on the businesses have rebounded, thank you largely to COVID-19 distant paintings insurance policies — which Trump has sought to opposite in an govt order — the lack of a era of extremely professional agricultural economists, scientists and different professionals has left a deep mark at the USDA.
“There’s still not much that would be [considered] policy-sensitive, or policy-relevant,” Offutt mentioned. “The portfolio no longer includes as much policy analysis as it had previously.”
James MacDonald, a former department leader at ERS who retired in September 2019 because of the circulation to Kansas Town, got here again to the company two months later as a rehired annuitant — a retiree running on a part-time foundation — after which as a part-time contractor. Well known as knowledgeable within the group of the American agricultural sector, he’s additionally now a examine professor on the College of Maryland.
“We’re doing fewer, big, informed, difficult reports,” MacDonald informed HuffPost of ERS. “We do have a lot of publications, but I think many are kind of short, simple, easy things. Producing a serious research product is a real challenge, and I don’t think we’re nearly back to that level yet.”
If what took place to ERS and NIFA is any indication, pressured company relocations may reduce “administrative overgrowth” at the price of 1000’s of years of collective experience from departing federal staff. Laura Dodson, a present ERS agricultural economist and appearing vice chairman of the company’s union native, informed me in 2019 that she feared the relocation was once a “test case” for what the Trump management may attempt to do to bigger businesses.
Looking back, she mentioned lately, it’s “pretty clear that the relocation was a way for them to enact a mass layoff” with out following federal laws for layoffs, or “reductions in force.”
“We had a lot of people who had spent their careers working on very specific fields — very niche questions,” Dodson mentioned. “And when they left, it was so sudden and abrupt that there wasn’t time to bring in the next generation. You had to just leave all of your work and go.”
Constructed To Worsen
Previous to the circulation, ERS and NIFA had spent a long time offering independent financial examine and medical investment targeted at the country’s agricultural methods. Below its present title, ERS is going again to 1961, however predecessors in its project to offer financial statistics and research at the agricultural sector and coverage return a century. It’s one in all 13 predominant statistical businesses within the U.S. executive, along the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Exertions Statistics and others, and its ranks are dense with economics PhDs and statistical whizzes.
NIFA, the USDA’s “extramural research agency,” administers over $1.5 billion in federal science investment — supporting discoveries in fields as numerous as bioenergy, soil control and personnel building. It was once created by way of title in 2008, however its earliest predecessor dates again to 1888 when the “Office of Experiment Stations” coordinated publicly funded examine between land-grant faculties.
And despite the fact that each ERS and NIFA had small footprints even sooner than the circulation, the have an effect on in their paintings was once felt around the nation.
“When I go to the grocery store, all the time, I’m going, ‘I know the person that bred that apple, I know the person that bred that grape,’” mentioned Tom Bewick, the appearing vice chairman for NIFA’s union, which like ERS’s is an associate of the American Federation of Executive Workers.
“We had a lot of people who had spent their careers working on very specific fields – very niche questions. And when they left, it was so sudden and abrupt that there wasn’t time to bring in the next generation. You had to just leave all of your work and go.”
– Laura Dodson, agricultural economist and union chief
At ERS, statisticians observe and analyze records on such things as commodity pricing, farm source of revenue, pesticide use, the immigration standing of farmworkers and American citizens’ diets. Workers have printed examine on the whole lot from uncooked milk intake, egg manufacturing amid chicken flu outbreaks and the have an effect on of agricultural price lists. Present and previous staff wired that given the affect of the stakeholders who use ERS examine — company behemoths, tough politicians, nongovernmental teams, universities — the company took medical integrity significantly.
“Our whole career, we’re told we’re not supposed to comment on policy, or advocate one way or the other,” mentioned Constance Newman, an ERS economist for almost twenty years who left the company because of the directive to transport to Kansas Town. At ERS, Newman studied participation within the SNAP program, prior to now referred to as meals stamps. “There’s important decisions being made on all these facts, all these stats that are being put forward. So let’s make sure that we have the best quality statistics, and not just someone doing it from an advocacy point of view.”
Even though the private and non-private trade each have the benefit of ERS examine — it’s all publicly to be had — many argue the company’s maximum vital shoppers are policymakers, each in Congress and the chief department. Measuring coverage results on topics like price lists, illness, diet and local weather trade, ERS examine ceaselessly tells laborious truths subsidized by way of ironclad records, even if it is going in opposition to company pursuits or political slogans.
ERS examine “had a cachet of being unbiased — not coming from just the farmer-rancher side, [nor] the up-the-chain packers, processors, and distributors side,” mentioned Dale Moore, who served more than one USDA secretaries as leader of workforce between 2001 and 2009, and was once later govt director of the American Farm Bureau Federation till 2022.
“The ERS existed for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations,” Offutt mentioned, “and it irritated both.”
The Purge
The primary signal of bother was once the Trump White Area’s proposed price range for fiscal yr 2019, printed in February 2018, which might have slashed ERS’s price range just about in part and proposed doing so “by eliminating low priority research that is being conducted within the private sector and by non-profits and focusing on core data analyses in line with priority research areas.” Congress neglected the steered reduce, nevertheless it was once a shot around the bow.
Then, in August, Perdue officially introduced the circulation that will if truth be told reduce ERS’s and NIFA’s workforces in part. The majority of the company’s staff could be relocating out of Washington, he mentioned, to a brand new location that will be introduced later.
The similar morning Perdue introduced the circulation, ERS staff realized that the company’s administrator, Mary Bohman, a veteran agricultural economist who’d been within the process for seven years, could be transferred to another a part of the USDA altogether, leaving others to maintain the transition. (Perdue didn’t reply to HuffPost’s interview request.)
Bringing up Washington’s “high cost of living and long commutes,” a USDA press free up mentioned the circulation was once supposed to strengthen recruitment, position USDA assets nearer to stakeholders, and “benefit the American taxpayers” with financial savings on salaries and hire.
But if economists and statisticians conversant in ERS’s and NIFA’s paintings began crunching the numbers themselves, they by no means appeared to upload up.
In a convention name in September that yr, hosted by way of a number of statistical and research-related associations, Catherine Woteki, the USDA undersecretary who oversaw NIFA, ERS and linked businesses all through the Obama management, mentioned the circulation was once “ill-conceived at best and possibly in violation of the law.”
The USDA’s inspector basic’s place of job later reinforced this declare, discovering that the dept had violated provisions of the 2018 spending invoice that Trump had signed into legislation. The USDA answered by way of announcing that the price range language was once itself unconstitutional.
Regarding Perdue’s justifications for the circulation, Woteki mentioned, “None of them make sense.”
Others agreed. Over one thousand scientists and economists signed a letter opposing the circulation. Affected staff, more than one earlier directors of the businesses and dozens {of professional} associations and nongovernmental teams identified that policymakers in Washington, together with USDA management and Congress, had been the most important stakeholders in ERS’s and NIFA’s paintings, as had been different statistical and examine businesses headquartered within the town with whom they ceaselessly teamed up on initiatives.
The businesses had additionally traditionally had luck recruiting sought-after economists, researchers and directors in Washington. And despite the fact that the price of dwelling was once prime, the town appeared to make up for it. The associated fee-saving declare was once in a similar fashion doubtful: Even now, years after the relocation and the beginning of the pandemic remote-work technology, ERS’s annual price range has if truth be told long gone up.
Different justifications merely didn’t compute. After USDA officers claimed in a media name that ERS had an strangely prime attrition price, the American Statistical Affiliation dug into the numbers and located the dept was once the usage of an inflated determine — by way of counting summer time interns as staff.
“We did a pretty careful analysis of what we were told, and we didn’t think that the reasons provided were very convincing,” mentioned Steve Pierson, the ASA’s director of science coverage.
‘Consider The Total Picture’
With no pleasing cause of the circulation, hypothesis reigned.
Offutt, at the 2018 convention name, questioned whether or not “this is a move that is intended to still the voice of ERS as an independent and objective agency.”
In Might 2019, Politico reported on ERS staff’ trust that the company had “run afoul of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue with its findings on how farmers have been financially harmed by President Donald Trump’s trade feuds, the Republican tax code rewrite and other sensitive issues.”
The tale pointed to a 2018 ERS file that had wound up in The New York Occasions, and which discovered that a lot of the have the benefit of tax breaks in Trump’s tax invoice “are accrued by higher-income farm households.” The Occasions quoted unnamed ERS economists who believed the circulation was once “retribution for producing work that clashed with the administration’s agenda.”
USDA management constantly denied the circulation was once supposed to silence or retaliate in opposition to ERS or NIFA. However critics famous the irony of the very talked-about examine businesses being kicked out of Washington in accordance with what looked like remarkably shallow reasoning.
“The deputy secretary only talked about the savings to USDA,” mentioned Gale Buchanan, the USDA’s former leader scientist, at the convention name, after USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky had cited prime hire, staff prices and “quality of life issues” as motivations for the relocation.
“But in any kind of relocation, you’ve got to consider the total picture. This is what economists do so well!”
Investigators with the Executive Responsibility Place of job later supported Buchanan’s complaint, discovering that the USDA had “omitted critical costs and economic effects from its analysis of taxpayer savings,” reminiscent of “costs related to potential attrition or disruption of activities for a period of time.”
The Agricultural & Carried out Economics Affiliation additionally estimated that “the cost to the nation of lost research amounts to $149–215 million,” and a bunch of statisticians running with the American Statistical Affiliation wrote in 2022 that the ERS relocation “was marked by its abruptness, speed, and lack of consultation with Congress and stakeholders” and “epitomizes the ineffectiveness of internal agency agreements when officials in charge seem not to be acting in good faith for the mission of a statistical agency.”
After Mulvaney’s remarks in August 2019 — that the relocations and next mass resignations had been “a wonderful way to streamline government” — the Trump management’s motivations grew clearer.
“When I heard [Trump say] ‘We’re going to drain the swamp,’ I thought he was going to get rid of all the lobbyists, but what he meant was, ‘We’re going to get rid of all of these federal employees,’” mentioned Bewick, the NIFA union chief. Regarding Mulvaney’s feedback concerning the relocation resulting in resignations at ERS and NIFA, Bewick mentioned, “That’s exactly what happened. And that, I think, was the whole purpose. To take these senior people, and really pressure them [to leave].”
“I think the people at the head of the [White House budget office] at the time were the people who were actually hostile to government research and government statistical agencies, and I think they were perfectly happy to see if they could damage them,” MacDonald mentioned. “I think they took a day making up reasons after they made their decision.”
Moore mentioned that despite the fact that he sympathized with Perdue’s said causes for the relocation, Mulvaney’s remarks described “a rather mercenary way to handle an issue.”
Offutt was once extra direct. When Mulvaney bragged about “draining the swamp” by way of forcing other folks to transport cross-country, she mentioned, he’d merely “said the quiet part out loud.”
Patrick Leger For HuffPost
The USDA’s Crown Jewel
In all probability maximum irritating for affected staff had been the apparently hole reassurances from the USDA’s leaders. Perdue, for instance, had mentioned in his announcement of the relocation that “none of this reflects on the jobs being done by our ERS or NIFA employees,” and Dodson described a heated assembly with USDA officers, together with Deputy Secretary Censky, that “devolved into them telling us that we were ‘a crown jewel of USDA,’ and us shouting at them, ‘Then why are you doing this to us?’”
A spokesperson for Censky, who served as CEO of the American Soybean Affiliation each sooner than and because his transient stint within the Trump management, declined an interview request.
Nonetheless, the circulation chugged alongside. As dozens of towns put their names ahead to host the USDA researchers, the USDA employed Ernst and Younger, the outstanding accounting company, to slim down the choices. In March 2019, a Perdue guide informed participants of Congress that 253 ERS staff and 315 NIFA staff could be relocated, in comparison to simply 96 staff between the 2 businesses who could be left in Washington, lots of whom labored on delicate commodities systems or in administrative workplaces.
Quickly after, staff at each businesses voted overwhelmingly to unionize with the American Federation of Executive Workers, with many mentioning frustration with the relocation as their reason why for becoming a member of the hassle.
“There’s been no interest in finding out how this would affect our work, or what it would do to the stats we create on a weekly or monthly basis,” one unnamed ERS worker informed Executive Government in February 2019 in the course of the union power. The relocation, the individual added, is “just one example of the many ways there can be threats to our ability to further our mission.”
Staff had been proper to be frightened concerning the relocation’s have an effect on on their examine.
In Might, staff monitoring the exodus discovered that non-retirement departures from ERS had greater than doubled over the former three-year reasonable, Politico reported.
By the point USDA officers introduced in June 2019 that almost all of each businesses would relocate to the “Kansas City Region” — they didn’t specify which state, even supposing the businesses these days proportion an deal with in Missouri — ERS and NIFA had been already hemorrhaging workforce. At NIFA, Bewick mentioned, “We had essentially lost half of our workforce” in not up to a yr.
At an all-hands assembly for the Kansas Town announcement, staff stood and grew to become their backs on Perdue in protest. They got only a month to claim their intentions, despite the fact that the timeline was once later prolonged till Sept. 30.
“This is the brain drain we all feared, possibly a destruction of the agencies,” Jack Payne, then the College of Florida’s vice chairman for agriculture and herbal assets, informed The Washington Submit in July after a USDA tally confirmed round two-thirds of affected staff declining the relocation.
Via early October 2019 — simply after the closing date to just accept the circulation to Kansas Town — ERS vacancies had skyrocketed. The Washington Submit reported that workforce numbers at each ERS and NIFA had dropped about 75% because the relocation. The Congressional Analysis Provider later discovered that “about 75% of affected employees declined to relocate and left the agencies.” The similar file, printed in Might 2020, discovered that in comparison to what the USDA mentioned could be complete staffing ranges, “NIFA and ERS are operating with approximately 33% of their staff.”
‘The Agency Couldn’t Serve as’
The have an effect on was once instant.
“Within the next six months [of the relocation], they realized the agency couldn’t function,” Dodson mentioned. Control began hiring again individuals who’d left as momentary contract employees and rehired annuitants, however the losses had been dramatic. “I would go into the office and there’d be nobody there. I didn’t have a supervisor, I didn’t have any teammates. People who I’d worked with on a 12-person team as a coordinator — everybody left.”
“The quality of things we’re working on is diminished from where we were before,” she mentioned.
Via the top of the yr and into 2021, staffing on the businesses started to rebound, specifically following the onset of the COVID-19 distant paintings insurance policies. As of late, staffing ranges are more or less at pre-relocation ranges, despite the fact that just a fraction of staff paintings in or close to Kansas Town, the union officers mentioned, whilst maximum were allowed to paintings from across the nation, the results of distant paintings allowances that started after the beginning of the pandemic.
However the uncooked numbers belie a generational loss in experience. The GAO file discovered that by way of the top of fiscal yr 2021, “the majority of ERS (66 percent) and NIFA (79 percent) permanent full-time staff had worked there for 2 years or less” — the inverse of the pre-move statistics, when nearly all of workforce at each businesses have been there for longer than two years. “I calculated that more than 2000 years of ERS experience vanished in 3 months,” Marca Weinberg, a senior ERS economist who served as appearing administrator all through the circulation, informed Science lately.
“I’m certain you’ve got some young and energetic new researchers for whom this is a great opportunity,” mentioned one former ERS worker, who requested to not be named as a result of he’s now running in other places in executive. “But I do know that if somebody’s a career researcher, they’re often building on decades of work. And so you’re starting with a new group of folks who will need another decade or two to build that level of background work.”
“The organization was gutted,” the previous worker mentioned.
“You’re starting with a new group of folks who will need another decade or two to build that level of background work.”
– Former ERS worker
Because of the circulation and next workforce exodus, “the agency’s statistical programs have been abridged and federal and state governments are suffering from inadequate agricultural statistics generally, but especially statistics to inform rural development, food assistance and security, and agriculturally related natural resource conservation policies,” the American Financial Affiliation wrote in January 2021. That July, Spiro Stefanou, who have been tapped as ERS administrator the former yr, mentioned ERS was once “on a rebuilding mission – we are hiring aggressively after having lost about 70-plus percent of our staff.”
The selection of studies produced by way of ERS plummeted, and researchers’ paintings grew extra fascinated by key studies, simply because the White Area’s 2019 price range proposal had referred to as for. Amid the turmoil, MacDonald mentioned that ERS’s mandated records merchandise — farm source of revenue forecasts, agricultural productiveness enlargement estimates — become the concern and had been printed on time.
Even these days, “I think we’re producing noticeably fewer [research products] than we would have done six or seven years ago,” he mentioned, relating to fields like precision agriculture, genetic engineering and adjustments in antibiotic use in cattle manufacturing, a box the place ERS has been a significant participant for years.
In recent times, customers have demanded much less antibiotic use in cattle, and manufacturers, in flip, have reduced it. However because the relocation, the ERS group finding out those dynamics necessarily “doesn’t exist anymore,” MacDonald mentioned.
“There does appear to be significant reductions in antibiotic use in livestock,” he mentioned, specifically in Europe and the US. “We know there’s a lot going on, but we don’t have a great handle on it. And that’s what’s missing — that’s what we lost by losing that team of people.”
At NIFA, ultimate workforce scrambled to tackle their departed colleagues’ paintings.
“I went from managing one program, and providing support for other programs, to managing seven programs,” Bewick mentioned, stressing that his colleagues poured themselves into conserving the company operating.
Some systems weren’t introduced in any respect; some grants had been switched from aggressive to noncompetitive, given the brand new problem of recruiting scientists for professional panels to check packages. “We used some administrative tools that we don’t normally like to use, but that are available to us,” he mentioned.
“It was a quagmire, it was a slog,” mentioned Jane Kolodinsky, professor emerita of group building and carried out economics on the College of Vermont, who’s labored on NIFA-funded initiatives for years. “We were awarded a grant in 2019 that really didn’t get started until 2021, because of administrative burden and people having to re-learn the ropes… the wheels stopped turning.”
Lapses in institutional wisdom about long-term data-gathering initiatives additionally ended in laborious efforts to reconstruct departed colleagues’ paintings. Dodson, for her section, had to be told a decades-old statistical program that her extra senior predecessors had relied upon sooner than leaving the company.
“A lot of us were stuck learning the old code that people had left behind, trying to forensic-science our way into how it was done,” she mentioned.
“Major research projects were abandoned mid-stream either because the authors left or parts of a research team left.”
– Constance Newman, former ERS economist
The standard of ERS records itself was once imperiled, as smartly: A 2022 file from the USDA’s inspector basic discovered {that a} particular ERS council created in 2014 to periodically “provide comprehensive evaluations of the agency’s data products” had actually now not finished any critiques between mid-2019 and overdue 2021. An ERS authentic mentioned “the agency did not have the personnel to complete them.”
In a commentary to HuffPost previous to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, a USDA spokesperson referred to as ERS and NIFA “two of our nation’s premier scientific institutions” and mentioned that underneath the Biden management, each “have reached their hiring goals.”
“ERS continues to work with stakeholders to further expand the pipeline of agricultural economists and other technical positions,” the commentary mentioned. “NIFA leveraged several recruiting tools to attract national experts to meet the agency’s workforce needs.”
‘You Don’t Get started With Social Safety’
As present and previous ERS and NIFA staff glance again at the previous 5 years, many achieve this with a cautious eye towards the longer term.
Trump, in his first days again in place of job, has taken goal squarely at federal employees, going to battle in opposition to “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” systems, purging over a dozen inspectors basic, and instituting a gag order at well being businesses. Grant critiques on the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, which calls itself the most important public funder of biomedical examine on the earth, have reportedly been frozen.
Trump has additionally pursued an competitive stance in opposition to distant paintings and may in the long run require ERS and NIFA staff to report back to Kansas Town after maximum were running from all around the nation for years. Nonetheless, present and previous staff who spoke to HuffPost didn’t stay on private hardship: All who left ERS discovered jobs in other places, most commonly throughout the federal executive or in linked fields.
As a substitute, they had been frightened about others within the federal executive whose paintings may put them within the new management’s crosshairs.
“Maybe there was a logic to starting with two really obscure agencies at USDA,” Offutt mentioned. “If you’re going to do it as a test, you don’t start with Social Security.”
“Maybe there was a logic to starting with two really obscure agencies at USDA. If you’re going to do it as a test, you don’t start with Social Security.”
– Susan Offutt, former ERS administrator
Now Trump — flanked by way of JD Vance, Russ Vought and Elon Musk — has made what Steve Bannon as soon as referred to as “deconstructing the administrative state” a key precedence.
Challenge 2025, the authors of which now populate the Trump management, requires relocating regional EPA workplaces, placing the Inside Division’s Place of job of Floor Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in Pittsburgh — “to recognize that the agency is field-driven and should be headquartered in the coal field” — and keeping apart the Air Visitors Group from the Federal Aviation Management “and relocat[ing] it to separate headquarters outside the District of Columbia.”
Challenge 2025 additionally requires shifting the Bureau of Land Control again to Grand Junction, Colorado. The bureau was once moved there all through Trump’s first time period in a relocation strikingly very similar to the USDA relocations. However the Biden management in part reversed the circulation in 2021, with a BLM press free up announcing that the circulation “failed to deliver promised jobs across the West and drove hundreds of people out of the agency.”
After each the BLM and USDA company strikes, the variety of each businesses’ workforces plummeted.
The New York Occasions additionally reported a couple of days after Election Day that some on Trump’s transition group had been discussing shifting the EPA headquarters — and seven,000 EPA staff — out of Washington, D.C.
ERS and NIFA veterans mentioned if Trump emulated their relocation enjoy in other places, specifically at different examine businesses, it risked empowering large gamers with their very own examine budgets, ceding floor to these with company or partisan agendas.
With out independent examine, MacDonald mentioned, “you’re left relying on people with an ax to grind, which might be industry people, or it might be advocates for tighter or looser regulation, each of whom is arguing in their own interests, and often with cherry-picked or poor information.”
“There’s always going to be lots of partisan voices out there,” Newman mentioned. With the lack of institutional wisdom at ERS, “It just means there’s one less source that can be considered neutral,” she mentioned. “There’s one less voice that’s going to be a completely trusted, neutral source.
“Public goods are hard to measure. They’re hard to value. It is, then, difficult to say what is lost,” Offutt mirrored. “In the case of ERS, there’s less knowledge available outside a very small part of the government about what your tax dollars are doing. People should know these things.”
In a different way, she mentioned, “it opens the door for special interests to control the agenda.”
