Biden Plans To Bring Vilsack Back To USDA, Despite Criticism From Reformers

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Tom Vilsack served as secretary of agriculture during the Obama Administration, and has been a trusted advisor to President-elect Biden.





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Perdue’s USDA also downplayed research devoted to climate change. Two of the department’s leading research groups were ordered to move from Washington, D.C. to new offices in Kansas City, ostensibly to promote closer contact with the department’s «stakeholders. Most of the staff of those agencies resigned, rather than accepting the move, which one White House official suggested was a welcome outcome.

Some are now calling for a U-turn in the department’s priorities, saying that the USDA could become a prime sponsor of action on climate change. That’s partly because the agency has money to spend. Its budget already includes billions of dollars for programs that can be used to pay for solar and wind power in rural areas, or for agricultural practices that capture carbon dioxide from the air.

The USDA also has a multi-billion dollar pot of money, called the Commodity Credit Corporation, which the Trump administration used as a funding vehicle for its payments to farmers. The head of Biden’s USDA transition team, Robert Bonnie, has called for converting the CCC into a «carbon bank that would pay farmers for practices that limit greenhouse emissions.

In addition, the USDA runs the U.S. Forest Service, which manages almost 200 million acres of land across the country. The Forest Service often gets lost within the USDA, but that could change, as forests grow more vulnerable to a warming, fire-prone climate. The Forest Service is facing calls to manage that land more aggressively, carrying out more frequent prescribed burns in order to reduce the chances of catastrophic wildfires. It could also boost reforestation funding, in part to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and slow down climate change.

Cabinet officials rarely return to the same job in a different administration, but it’s happened before. James «Tama Jim Wilson, a Scottish immigrant who settled in Iowa, held the agriculture post for 16 years, from 1897 to 1913, under Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.