San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Bidenweighs pick for agriculture chief from diverse slate
WASHINGTON — One leading candidate for agriculture secretary hails from Cleveland, has the backing of progressives and has worked for years to boost food stamp programs. Another is a former senator from farm-state North Dakota who has championed production agriculture and boasts of a voting record squarely in the middle.
Three other possible selections have similarly varied backgrounds — one helped write and implement federal regulations for organic foods, another is California’s agriculture secretary and represented wine grape growers, and a thirdhas spent his career ensuring protections for farm workers.
President-elect Joe Biden’s choices for secretary of agriculture are as diverse as the department of 100,000 employees that she or hewould represent — and is especially critical this year as USDA provides extra aid for the hungry and oversees food production amid the pandemic.
For Biden, the emerging choice between Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, former Sen. HeidiHeitkamp of North Dakota and several other potential candidates seems like another test of his vision for the Democratic Party — a contest between urban and rural and liberals and moderates, with the pick potentially placing an added emphasis on anti-hunger programs, farm subsidies or worker protections.
Besides Fudge and Heitkamp, other candidates mentioned for the post — and who have been pushed by some advocacy groups — are Kathleen Merrigan, deputy agriculture secretary under President BarackObamaand one of the architects of federal organic rules; Karen Ross, California’s agriculture secretary, former USDA chief of staff and a former longtime president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers; and Arturo Rodriguez, the former president of the United Farm Workers.
Former Iowa Gov. TomVilsack, who served as Obama’s agriculture secretary for eight years, is also being considered.
“This isn’t like the secretary of defense where you’re a hawk or a dove,” says Eric Kessler, a Democrat who has long worked around agriculture policy and has been holding private calls with other influencers to speak with some of
the possible candidates. “The Department of Agriculture is a massive enterprise that is led by a manager who is dependent on a diverse team of people.”
And as Biden has said he wants his Cabinet to reflect the country’s diversity, Kessler says the decisions on USDA and other agencies will “be driven by lots of factors, not just the individual’s specific resume.”
The agriculture post has been closely watched as all but two agriculture secretaries in the last 120 years have beenwhite men. If chosen, Fudgewould be the first Black woman to lead a department that has for years reckoned with a history of discriminating against both Black people and women.
Fudge enjoys the strong backing
of South Carolina Rep. JimClyburn, the No. 3 House Democrat who gave Biden a key nod of support in the primaries.
Clyburn has aggressively pushed Fudge for the post, saying Biden should pick someone who “understands the other side of agriculture … It’s one thing to grow food, but another to dispense it, and nobody would be better at that than Marcia Fudge.”
As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, Fudge has fiercely advocated for food stamps and other federal programs that help urban areas stemhunger and grow food. Beyond Clyburn, she has the backing of progressive groups who hope she could turn the department’s focus. In a joint letter to Biden, several of those groups said Fudge “has long been an ally to farmers, food-chain workers, consumers and rural communities.” Some unions have also backed her as she has pushed for worker protections in meatpacking plants during the pandemic.
Heitkamp is a favorite of farm groups that have worked closely with her and of Democrats who want to improve their outreach to rural areas. But she has also been a strong supporter of food aid programs, having represented swaths of rural poverty until her reelection defeat in 2018. And her family relied on food stamps intermittentlywhen shewas growing up as one of seven children from a town of 90 people in the state.
While Vilsack, Merrigan and Ross all have significant leadership experience at USDA, Rodriguez would be an unusual pick as his experience mostly centers on the labor sector. But he has the backing of Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who wrote in an op-ed this week that appointing him as the first Latino secretary of agriculture “would finally give Latinos real power inthe agricultural industry, the industry that our labor has held up for so long.”