The Agriculture Department has spent more than $430 million on a project to modernize the computer technology behind its farm-subsidy programs, yet the system “is $140 million over budget, two years overdue and just 20 percent operational,” says Harvest Public Media. The project, “Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems,” or MIDAS, was conceived during the George W. Bush administration and launched early in the Obama years. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack put MIDAS on hold in July 2014. An array of reports and audits blamed poor oversight of the project and unsatisfactory work by contractors. “Everyone’s in it together,” an official with the Government Accountability Office told Harvest Public Media.
At a House Agriculture Committee hearing last summer, Vilsack said there were different ideas at USDA’s Washington headquarters and the Kansas City office where some of the work on MIDAS was performed. “As a result of that conflict, things didn’t set up as they should have,” said Vilsack.
At the kickoff in June 2010, officials said MIDAS would link USDA’s 2,200 county offices, “place 30-plus government farm programs in one system and eventually allow farmers and ranchers to access data from their home computer” rather than drive to their local office. Vilsack told lawmakers last summer that one benefit of the project is that producers who own land in several counties can view all of their records at a single USDA county office.
On its website, USDA describes MIDAS as a “modernization initiative to provide a secure, long-term, web-based solution to simplify, integrate, and automate the delivery of Farm Programs across the United States.”