Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue brings with him a legacy of ethics violations, climate denialism, and deregulation, all of which could threaten the future of the Department of Agriculture, argues a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. The report, out today, gathers information from Perdue’s past political career and his current administrative and policy choices to analyze whether and how the Secretary’s tenure could have a long-lasting negative affect on agricultural research and policy.
Soon after he was sworn into office as Georgia’s governor in 2003, Perdue signed an executive order that barred any public official from accepting gifts valued at more than $25. But according to the UCS report, Perdue accepted gifts throughout his two terms as governor that totaled more than $25,000. He signed into law a tax provision that gave him a retroactive $100,000 tax break on a land deal. And in his eight years in office, the state’s ethics commission collected 13 complaints against him. In 2010, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named him one of the worst governors in the country.
During his tenure as agriculture secretary, several of Perdue’s appointees have been found in violation of ethics rules, the report says. For example, Rebeckah Adcock, a senior advisor to the Secretary and former lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation and CropLife America, met with her former coworkers at CropLife despite signing an ethics agreement that prohibited her from such meetings. Perdue has granted other appointees ethics waivers that allow them to advise the Secretary on policy matters that they recently lobbied on as representatives of the food industry.
The report points to Perdue’s support for the repeal of the Farmer Fair Practices Act–which would have given poultry farmers more leverage in contracting with powerful processors–skepticism of climate change, and reorganization of USDA as signs that he could have a long-term negative impact on food policy. The report recommends that, to mitigate those impacts, Congress should increase oversight of USDA, fully fund USDA’s research programs, and base any changes to nutrition programs or nutrition guidelines on “the best available science.”