Donald Trump is not known for his love of data, facts, or evidence to support his ideas. His Agriculture Department is following his lead, Politico reports. The USDA has repeatedly rolled out new policies without data backing them up—Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and his underlings make big claims about what they’re doing, only for it to be revealed that they hadn’t bothered to find out what would actually happen.
Case in point: Perdue’s staff originally told members of Congress that 500,000 children would lose automatic access to free school lunches as a result of changes to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program eligibility. That’s a big number—except it turned out the real number was 982,000.
That wasn’t the only Trump USDA move to cut food assistance that didn’t have data behind it. When they decided to strip states of flexibility to waive work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, the USDA didn’t bother to look into how that would affect veterans, the homeless, or teens who aged out of foster care with no support.
Sometimes they have no data, sometimes they have false claims about what the data show, as with the plan to close job-training centers for at-risk youth run by the Forest Service. The USDA claimed that the centers slated for closure were underperforming and wasting money. But government data showed that in reality the Forest Service centers performed in the top quarter of job-training centers.
The Trump administration’s massive farmer bailout—necessitated by his trade war—has left out some types of farmers while sending too much money to others. Perdue claimed that his push to move the Economic Research Service from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City would save $300 million over 15 years, but independent analysts say it would cost $128 million, in addition to forcing veteran employees out and weakening the research the ERS could do … not that Perdue or Trump care about the loss of information about what’s happening with U.S. agriculture.
“The administration has made moves to reduce the amount of evidence that enters into the policymaking process,” Rebecca Boehm, an economist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Politico. “It’s obviously political, and special interests come into it. But bottom line is the public loses, farmers lose.”