When Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced he would move the Economic Research Service out of Washington, he said it would make it easier to recruit and retain highly qualified workers. The American Statistical Association says that based on its review of USDA data, the problem of staff turnover doesn’t exist, and its director called on lawmakers “to stop these illogical and unfounded moves.”
The statistical association, a professional society, said the ERS has an attrition rate of 8 percent a year, compared to the USDA average of 7 percent. It said a USDA spokesman had said the ERS turnover rate was 16.5 percent a year and the department-wide rate, excluding firefighters, was 12 percent. But those figures included summer interns, “a large program for ERS,” said the statistics society.
Executive director Ron Wasserstein said “the apparent willingness of USDA to use interns to inflate attrition statistics” illustrated worries in the scientific world about Perdue’s plan to shift the ERS to the countryside and to put control of the agency in his executive office. “The products of the ERS must be viewed by producers and consumers everywhere as objective and neutral,” said Wasserstein. Since 1994, the ERS has been part of the USDA’s research arm. Other critics have said that ERS work could be politicized if the agency, whose duties include analysis of USDA programs, reports directly to Perdue.
Senate Agriculture chairman Pat Roberts replied, “I don’t think so” when asked if Congress would write a rider into the farm bill to prevent the relocation of the ERS and a sister agency, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which awards $1.3 billion in research grants annually. The ERS has about 330 employees, and NIFA has about 345.