Dear USDA,
What happened to you? Agricultural research has always been fundamentally networked with farmers and their needs. But for some reason, at least with Forest Service R&D and ARS, there seems to have been an intentional effort to make it difficult for citizens to contact researchers.
IMHO we need to foster relationships between the public and scientists, not put barriers up to those relationships.
Why are you doing worse at this than Interior (USGS)? What’s going on?
Signed,
One Very Grumpy Retired Employee
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Well, I had the idea of posting a useful researcher and research project each day until the budget discussion has led to not zeroing out R&D. But sadly, I found that I couldn’t do this… because I associate great research with specific researchers.. and guess what? Instead of making NFS human beings more accessible, the FS has made R&D human beings less accessible. It doesn’t seem to be the FS’s fault though, because it happened to ARS as well (the other intramural research agency at USDA).
I suspect, but can’t prove that this effort started in the previous Admin (remember the disappearance of the employee directory?) and appears to have been driven by some non-partisanal force that we don’t yet understand.
Here’s how I used to look for researchers (and research)- the information was organized.
When you go to the people link, you got this alphabetized list.
This all seems very useful, at least to me.
But what does the homepage for RMRS look like now?
The people appear to be gone, and contact forms for the Station are supposed to substitute.. which I think would actually make more work for folks to route the questions. The same thing we noticed with NFS last year.
I tried to figure out if this was a USDA-wide thing by looking at ARS. I noticed that ARS also doesn’t have their data on people anymore, and did a Wayback to April 2024.
As a FS R&D employee, I can confirm that all researcher names were stripped from their project webpages and our profiles taken down in direct response to the current administration. This was a WO directive in response to the EO to remove all content involved with DEI. The agency chose to take everything down to respond immediately to the EO and the intent was to go through the pages and make sure we complied with the EO. However, the WO has not allowed R&D to restore profiles.
Do you know why? Is it because they are working on the “new websites broke all the links” problem?
This is the Trump administration’s doing, not the previous incumbent.
USDA research is being zeroed out in the President’s budget, thus USDA is ghosting its researchers.
Andy, somehow you got me to read the Prez USDA Budget proposal, as budget document averse as I am. The other research agencies are being reduced but not zeroed out.
But more to the point is ARS, the main intramural research arm (even I don’t want the info on all the people who get grants through NIFA). Maybe ERS or NASS would dispute the “main” intramural but..
2024 budget was 1847 Mill, 2025 enacted 1790 mill, 2026 proposed 1700 mill. not zeroed out.
So they plan to keep the people but not let us know who they are.
https://www.taxpayer.net/budget-appropriations-tax/president-trumps-fy2026-forest-service-budget-request/#:~:text=The%20President's%20FY2026%20Budget%20would,all%20funding%20for%20Wildland%20Fire
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2026-usda-budget-summary.pdf
I read elimination of FS R&D as well as STPF.
Deb, yes that’s in there. But the problem of getting rid of links to humans occurred both in ARS and the FS. The ARS is not on the House chopping block. Ergo, I don’t think removal of links to humans at the FS was because the FS on the chopping block. Otherwise ARS would have kept their links to researchers.
Hanlon’s Razor, which advises against attributing malice when incompetence could be the cause, could well be in play here. Sure, the current admin is doing things in a load, shoot, aim fashion, But also, the FS was involved in shifting all of the public-facing web sites from provider A to provider B.
As we’re government, someone somewhere in PAO land picked CY 2025 to do that, presumably ignorant of the potential complications that might arise from a new admin, though it could just have been a contract expiring. IDK. (Another example of gov’t think: I was supposed to present at a training last November. Training organizer got a great rate at a Portland, Oregon hotel! So DOGE! Why? Week of the election! Great time and place for a group of government people to meet! So these things happen.)
Despite assurances that all the links would automatically shift from provider A to provider B, guess what? All broken. All of them. All have to be fixed manually. Expunged? Maybe malice, maybe just rotten timing.
I don’t know either, but I do wonder whether a decision to switch in CY 2025 was probably made before CY2025 started… Wasn’t inauguration in January of 2025, with the DOGE EO on Jan 20? So could a new contract be advertised and awarded since February (when there was a curtailment of new contracts?). I think someone knows the story, wish we could get it.