Zeta Syanthis @zetasyanthis@awoo.space

so, USDA headquarters is moving to Kansas City (they're not sure which Kansas City yet, just one of them) and firing 2/3 of their researchers along the way. I think this is a good idea and genuinely necessary; the loss of research careers is an unfortunate but unavoidable cost because that happens whenever an HQ moves.

Washington DC is a terrible spot for the center of agricultural policy in the United States. It is not geographically or culturally near where agriculture mostly happens in the United States, and it has completely unrelated weather patterns.

I want the USDA right in the fucking middle of climate change. I want them right where crops are being ruined by year after year of extreme weather - droughts followed by mass flooding, mostly down the Mississippi river. Well, this gives the USDA a front row seat to the chronic flooding of the Mississippi River to levels thought of as something that would happen "once every 500 years", three times in the last decade. This gives the USDA a front row seat to droughts destroying the wheat crop. This gives the USDA a front row seat to seasons of rain that turn fields into swamps and make planting impossible. These are things they should have a front row seat to.

This puts the USDA somewhere geographically closer to the majority of agricultural work in the United States. It puts them closer to the best agricultural colleges and universities in the United States - real STEM degrees that are just too blue collar to take seriously on the coasts.

Mostly I'm pissed off at seeing an attempt to put some part of the Federal government in the region I grew up in taken to be unavoidably part of an evil plot to destroy science. No, that's not plausible; it is going to create science careers in an impoverished part of the nation where no such careers can easily be had, but there's an awful lot of on-the-ground experience and people trained for those careers. The "Brain drain" people are afraid of from losing people already working at USDA headquarters? That's already happened, much worse than could ever happen by moving the USDA, by keeping agricultural policy away from agricultural parts of the nation. It ensures that people who know what they're doing can't create a voting bloc or strong opinion in the Midwest, taking a bunch of trained scientists out of swing states.

Let "flyover country" have its say in part of the government. Putting the USDA in Washington D.C. is a historical accident; there's never a "good time" to move it but the move seems clearly warranted to me. Make the USDA live in the middle of where their policies land and their policies will improve because they get to see the results of their policies through some lens other than media and lobbyists.

Moving the USDA out of D.C. weakens the power of agricultural lobbying because it moves the USDA closer to real agriculture and farther away from Lobbyist Central. D.C. is not a real place, it's a drug-fueled collective hallucination created primarily by lobbyists, and decentralizing our bizarrely concentrated Federal government can only help.

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