On the farm of my youth, our full-time field worker, Jackie, didn’t say much. When he did, however, he often offered creative euphemisms and descriptive epigrams. A favorite, for example, was if it rained the day after a big gully-washer, he might say the second rain was “Just worse and more of it.”
That useful phrase comes to mind when examining what the Trump administration has done — and continues to do — with and to the Department of Agriculture. From the Department of Government Efficiency 15 months ago to a late winter run-in with the United Soybean Board, its often unexplained actions are both petty and consequential.
For example, it was recently revealed that the White House reached way down into the routine, mundane approval process of five nominees to the soybean checkoff’s operating body, the United Soybean Board, to deny all five their well-earned seats.
Why? The White House gave no explanation for this historic meddling but, as Reuters first pointed out, four of the five were women.
And not just any women, as Chris Clayton of DTN explained in a lengthy post on May 1: “Each of the farmers who lost their seats on the USB are not only active farmers but also have a long history of volunteer work for state and national soybean boards… [and] had done significant… USB work in recent years.”
In other words, these five were not only ideal USB members, all were sitting USB members when the White House tossed their renominations. Two of the four rejected women also pointed out to Clayton that “2026 happens to be the United Nations’ International Year of the Woman Farmer.”
Talk about worse and more of it. Then there’s the ongoing “reorganization” of USDA.
On April 23, the USDA announced it will move both technical and administrative staff from the Washington-based Food Safety and Inspection Service, the Economic Research Service, the National Agriculture Statistics Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to either St. Louis or Kansas City.
USDA also noted that it plans to shutter the Beltsville, Maryland, Agricultural Research Center, the department’s showcase, 6,600-acre research facility located on the northeast corner of Washington’s famed Beltway.
The moves promise more chaos and disruption in USDA’s shrinking ability to deliver its hundreds of programs and billions of dollars in farm and food assistance. NASS, for example, is already under fire for bungling 2025 crop surveys. ERS — partially moved to Kansas City in 2019 under the first Trump Administration — is hobbled by an inability to attract and keep top talent.
Real estate developers — a former one works in the Oval Office, remember — have long seen USDA’s 10-square-mile Maryland research center as a valuable prize barely 10 miles from the White House. Is that its fate: not applied ag research but boxy condominiums?
There are, of course, worse outcomes for other White House actions. For example, a key foreign food aid program that American farmers benefited greatly from, the United States Agency for International Development, was targeted by DOGE in early 2025. Two months later, more than 80% of the humanitarian agency, which had purchased nearly $2 billion of U.S. crops every year for foreign distribution, had been vaporized.
The USAID cuts offered cover to others like the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada to cut their foreign assistance aid shortly thereafter.
Collectively, however, according to a February study published in The Lancet, England’s leading medical journal, “projects that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030, if the current funding trends continue.”
And, “About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.”
That’s worse than worse and more of it.
(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. Contact information is posted at farmandfoodfile.com. © 2026 ag comm)
