Trump’s Under-Radar Farm Chief Remakes Agency

Perdue is the U.S. secretary of agriculture, running an agency with a $140 billion budget and a low profile. He may be the most aggressive enforcer of President Donald Trump’s pro-business and deregulatory agenda that the fewest Americans have ever heard of. The short Perdue list includes reversing a regulation to boost protection of the welfare of animals in organic-food production; supporting revocation of a 2015 clean-water directive; axing another Obama-era decree giving small poultry producers more power to sue big buyers such as Tyson Foods Inc.; and reorganizing the USDA to give more official power to staffers tasked with promoting production and trade rather than food safety or rural development. Yet there is at least one area important to farmers and Trump where the agriculture secretary has been at odds with his boss: trade. Trump wants to erect new barriers while Perdue and many farmers who depend on exports do not.