Farm and food file: Half-baked USDA plan makes less sense even when '95% baked'

First, a little Trump-USDA history.

After U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers "published and funded objective analyses of issues such as climate change, the efficiency of food assistance programs, and tax cuts that mostly benefited the richest farmers... Trump officials proposed deep cuts to USDA research agencies," reported NPR in February 2021.

Back then, however, Congress wasn't today's bottomless pit of compliance; it "wouldn't go along" with the cuts. So "the administration came up with plan B: Move two agencies–the National Institute of Food and Agriculture [NIFA] and the Economic Research Service [ERS]–far from Washington."

And off to Kansas City both went–"closer to its farmer constituents," explained the White House. The results, predictably, were closer to catastrop