Late in the evening Aug. 1, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the opening of a 30-day public comment period on the agency’s recently released reorganization plan.
According to the announcement, “all stakeholders, including USDA employees, members of Congress, and agricultural and nutrition partners, are encouraged to provide feedback by emailing reorganization@usda.gov.” The comment period ends on Aug. 26.
The call for public comment came after USDA’s reorg plan received strong pushback from Congress during a July 30 Senate Agriculture Committee hearing.
“It is unacceptable that we learned about this proposal just minutes before it was announced,” said Senate Ag Committee Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. “It is apparent that USDA did not consult with or even bother to notify Congress with this plan.”
Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D. — Senate Ag Committee member as well as chairman of Senate’s Appropriations Committee’s agricultural subcommittee — voiced support for the agency’s goals.
“But we want it to be a process where you work with Congress, with the Senate, both the authorizing committee and the appropriations committee on it, and we achieve those results together, and I think that’ll help garner a lot more support for the effort,” he said.
Others have pushed back against the reorganization plan as well. National WIC Association President and CEO Georgia Machell, for example, described the effort as “politically motivated acts of bureaucratic disruption, designed to erode USDA’s ability to function.”
Some have voiced support for the reorg plan, however. The California Avocado Commission endorsed the move, with the commission’s president, Ken Melban, describing Rollins as “helping restore confidence among growers and consumers alike.”
