Nominees for top posts at USDA and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sailed through a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing Thursday, and Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said they would receive a committee vote next week.
Basil Ivanhoe Gooden, nominated to be undersecretary of agriculture for rural development, said he would work to cut red tape for applicants to RD programs and concentrate on staffing up the mission area.
“I would focus heavily on our staffing, making sure our staffing is adequately supported in our field-based operations where we meet the customers there on the ground, to make sure that they understand our programs and can access our programs,” Gooden said, answering questions from Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan.
Like many programs in USDA, Rural Development does not have enough employees to carry out its work, the department said in its fiscal year 2024 budget justification submitted to congressional appropriators.
“RD is at historically low staffing levels when compared to its loan portfolio,” the document said. “With an increase in workload and servicing expectations, RD may be unable to meet mission responsibilities and customer expectations if it does not receive adequate funding to improve its automated loan and accounting systems and increase staff to allocate for highest priority needs.”
The optimal number of employees to meet RD’s needs is 6,800, a 2022 analysis concluded. The department asked for funding to hire an additional 400 employees, which would bring the staffing level to 5,100.
He told Stabenow that RD is trying to hire more people to expeditiously allocate nearly $11 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for renewable energy projects.
“We're committed in Rural Development to ensure that we employ aggressive strategies to make sure we hire people to actually allocate the funding” in the Powering Affordable Clean Energy ($1 billion) and New Era ($9.7 billion) programs.
“We're committed to working with our Rural Utilities Service administrator and program to make sure that we meet the timelines to deploy these funds as Congress has intended,” he said.
Answering questions from Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet, Gooden said one of his top priorities “is really making our application process far easier to access and complete, whether that's working with our rural partners to provide technical assistance, and shoring up the support of our staff there on the ground in Colorado and across the country to make sure that they can help applicants better understand that process.”
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Summer Mersinger, who was confirmed last year as a CFTC commissioner, has been nominated for a five-year term. She is a former staffer for Ag Committee member Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.
She said the agricultural futures markets “are not only invaluable tools for price discovery, but also for mitigating those risks inherent in production agriculture, each and every day.”
She sponsors the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, which she said is “looking at some of the newer metals that are important to renewable energy and further electrification, looking at some of the physical infrastructure related to energy and how that could impact our markets, and what that means for prices for the average consumer.”
Mersinger also gently pushed back on questions from Marshall concerning possible manipulation of the cattle markets.
Citing recent price volatility, Marshall asked, “Heaven forbid, is there any type of … evidence of market manipulation going on here?”
“I do feel strongly that we would be able to see it if there was manipulation in the futures markets,” Mersinger said. “When we see fraud and manipulation, we put an end to it. We go after the bad actors.”
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