Experts Abandoning WH After Getting Harassed By Trump

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The Trump administration keeps driving those away who are well-prepared to deal with the issues the United States and world are facing. POLITICO has now revealed that there’s a massive exodus from the Economic Research Service (ERS), which produces analyses of the U.S. economy for the Department of Agriculture. As that body has produced more and more reports outlining negative effects of Trump administration policies on farmers across America, higher-ups in the department have pushed back — and some figures have had enough, completely leaving the department over the pressure. On a single day in late April, half a dozen such economists resigned, and more are expected to do so soon from the agency that overall maintains a staff of about 329. Overall, non-retirement departures have more than doubled in comparison to averages across the last three years.

The policies they’ve been scrutinizing include the tariff situation that the president has enacted with successive rounds of harsh import taxes on diverse categories of goods from around the world. Targets have included steel and aluminum, well within the context of its domestic usage, and unintended but certainly not unforeseeable consequences have included retaliatory tariffs targeting domestic farm products like soybeans, sending income plummeting by massive amounts.

Since 2013, farm income has dropped about 50 percent across America, and the pace has only been quickened by an extra drain in millions from what what farms would have made in the absence of trade wars.

The Trump administration, as represented in this context by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, has refused to accept the seriousness of these issues. In what some take as retaliation, late last year, he announced that the entity would come under the oversight of the chief economist at the Agriculture Department, who reports “more directly” to Perdue himself. Concurrently, he abruptly announced that the agency would be moved out of D.C. and placed in a locale closer to the farm communities it’s supposed to serve — in this case, with the apparent agenda of presenting Trump-ian economic approaches as a significant boost for the economy. To that end, Perdue’s office directed the research services associated with the department to include disclaimers in peer-reviewed publications that the presented findings were “preliminary” and “should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy.”

Although it’s only a proposal that has to get through Congress and not final policy, the Trump team also sought in their budget proposals for the next fiscal year to dial back ERS operations, removing “low priority research” covering topics like food stamps and environmental issues. The slash would also cut staff levels by more than 50 percent.

Perdue defended his changes as meant to protect the integrity of the science the department is working with — although he didn’t offer any apparent examples at the time of the actual issues he was claiming exist. He said:

‘What I see unfortunately happening many times is that we tried to make policy decisions based on political science rather than on sound science.’

The defense calls a recent outlandish moment during a Congressional hearing to mind, when Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) suggested that former Secretary of State John Kerry wasn’t qualified to speak about scientific matters because… wait for it… he got a Bachelor of Arts degree in college and not something else. That’s the level of argument we’re dealing with here.

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