Federal

Employees of the Economic Research Service (ERS), an independent research office nestled within the Department of Agriculture (USDA), voted on Thursday to form a union. It was something of a landslide: 138 in favor to four against. There were a handful of contested votes, but not enough to sway the results. Both ERS employees and union organizers expressed hope that workers could gain the crucial leverage need to push back on controversial, upcoming changes to ERS. [node:read-more:link]

Economists in the Agriculture Department's research branch say the Trump administration is retaliating against them for publishing reports that shed negative light on White House policies, spurring an exodus that included six of them quitting the department on a single day in late April. [node:read-more:link]

 Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s plan to relocate the Economic Research Service outside the Beltway has triggered a brain drain of veteran economists, amid staff complaints the administration is cracking down on research that doesn’t align with White House priorities. [node:read-more:link]

For scientists, it’s a significant accomplishment to get your work published in a peer-reviewed journal. The process of submitting a paper, fielding reviewer comments, and revising the work can take months (or years!), and final publication in a respected journal lends credibility to any researcher’s work. So it was odd when the Washington Post reported last week that USDA was now requiring its researchers to label outside peer-reviewed scientific publications with the word “preliminary”. But this wasn’t actually news to me. [node:read-more:link]

Besides the plan to relocate the Economic Research Service outside Washington, D.C., USDA has also clamped down on the agency’s ability to disseminate its finding through academic journals, a union representative says. [node:read-more:link]

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has warned President Trump that his U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement on trade can't pass Congress if he retains steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico. "If these tariffs aren’t lifted, USMCA is dead. There is no appetite in Congress to debate USMCA with these tariffs in place," Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said [node:read-more:link]

The Trump administration is ready to provide more federal aid to farmers if required, a White House adviser said on Monday, after rolling out up to $12 billion since last year to offset agricultural losses from the trade dispute with China. “We have allocated $12 billion, some such, to farm assistance. And we stand ready to do more if necessary,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters.The U.S. Department of Agriculture had previously ruled out a new round of aid for 2019. As of March, more than $8 billion was paid out as part of last year’s program. [node:read-more:link]

The trade wars with China and Mexico are cutting into U.S. exports of beef and pork. Pork exports were down 9% in volume and 17% in value year over year, the U.S. Meat Export Federation reported in its monthly trade tally.Beef exports declined 6% in volume and 3% in value. That’s a stark contrast to last year’s record-breaking performance, which brought a 7% increase in volume and a 15% increase in value. [node:read-more:link]

After years of declining prices that are below the full cost of production for a large number of farmers and crops, scattered payments for some crops in a few counties are insufficient to ameliorate the growing financial crisis in farm country. So, what will things look like under the 2018 Farm Bill that begins with the 2019 crop marketing year? An article by Zulauf et. al. raises the question of fairness on the timing of the ARC/PLC election on the certainty farmers have in knowing the final marketing year price. [node:read-more:link]

Researchers at the Agriculture Department laughed in disbelief last summer when they received a memo about a new requirement: Their finalized, peer-reviewed scientific publications must be labeled “preliminary.” The July 2018 memo from Chavonda Jacobs-Young, the acting USDA chief scientist, told researchers their reports published in scientific journals must include a statement that reads: “The findings and conclusions in this preliminary publication have not been formally disseminated by the U.S. [node:read-more:link]