What an amazing system! Poof! just like magic you can pretend that sophisticated medicines, that are years in development, should cost nothing just because! And then you can act all smug about it!
Not at all. The majority of the cost is subsidised by the Government who acts as a central purchaser to minimise profiteering and keep prices down.
Everyone pays a little bit towards it all via general taxation but if you prefer a system where individuals have to front the vast majority of their own costs, much of which is just being extracted as profit, then you are welcome to that. I prefer the option that leans a lot more towards socialism than rapacious capitalism.
They aren't pumping that much oil since Chavez, the expertise for extracting oil was lost during nationalisation. It needs a lot of work to restart extraction, it will take years.
So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns. No question that the USDA should be in someplace like Iowa or Nebraska
I've known people working in federal government where firing them would be a serious problem, as in they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.
> they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising.
If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
They actually often are in the short term (see the "significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover" quote in the article about the similar relocation from Trump's first term), and a gutted department of agriculture can remain incompetent longer than you can avoid supply chain disruptions and food poisoning.
What you do is open small distributed offices led by a driven person eager to live in that area, and let the small offices grow over the years as the DC offices shrink. Careers aren't that long on the timescales governments work on, you just have to be patient and be ok with slow, incremental progress in your own career instead of big splashy doge headlines followed by desperately trying to rehire and hire new expertise when you realize what you've actually done.
I'm skeptical though that 100% (or even more than 60%) of the workers in the DC offices are true specialists in agriculture vs. office workers who happen to do agricultural work. Certainly there's a set of institutional knowledge to be maintained. But the most committed specialists are going to be the ones who are willing to move to e.g. Ogden Utah, as the previous commenter mentioned. The slightly specialized office workers, being able to swap into some other role for ${BUREAUCRACY} are less likely to move and less likely to need to. There are people in Ogden and ${RURAL_CITY_[1-5]} who are able to do the support work needed.
However, as you say, the time scale is important and I did not really take that into account.
Why do you think specialist knowledge about crop and livestock management is that fungible? Particularly as it interfaces with the federal bureaucracy?
> Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge?
I don't have a strong opinion on this. But I think a farm and food specialist in D.C. probably has more sway than tens of distributed experts in Iowa and Kansas. Part of the purpose of these agencies is to inform policy. That's hard to do if you're not near the room.
I'm sure there's some, but the small point here is that it almost certainly is more motivated by factors other than financial gain. I'm sure it you search you can find such cases though.
The much broader point though is the dismissal of the bulk consensus of academic research because academics are in it for the "money".
I generally think that as well and so was surprised to read that they're planning to not label CRISPER fruits as such.
"European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones."
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