USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack had some tough words recently for House Ag Chair Glenn Thompson over Thompson’s recent attacks on EPA. Secretary Vilsack, on a press call on new meat and poultry processing grants, dismissed Thompson’s claim at a hearing on regulations that EPA’s hurting Ag even as USDA’s trying to help it.
Vilsack said, “The Congress has passed the laws, the courts are setting the deadlines, and all the EPA is doing is they are implementing the law that Congress passes. So, maybe the Chairman needs to take a look in the mirror.”
But Vilsack’s taking the onus off EPA comes after years of lawmaker and farm group criticism of the agency and its WOTUS, pesticide, livestock air emissions, and meat plant effluent rulemakings. Chair Glenn Thompson says sometimes, on herbicide and vulnerable species plans, USDA raised concerns. Thompson said, “Examples where USDA is directly at odds with the EPA during this administration are further proof that the ‘left hand’ does not know what ‘the far-left hand’ is doing.”
But Vilsack argued USDA worked with EPA on its meat plant effluent proposal to limit its impact on plant capacity. Vilsack said, “But the vast, vast majority of processing facilities were not necessarily going to be put in a situation where they were going to have to shutter the doors. I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration by the Chairman.”
But farm-state lawmakers and Ag groups see it differently and pleaded with Vilsack at times to defend against EPA rules like WOTUS that the Supreme Court upended after years of litigation. Thompson accuses EPA of a “war on agriculture” saying “wrongheaded and often, heavy-handed regulations are exactly why producers do not trust the EPA, and while I frequently hear it referred to as, ‘the excessive punishment agency.’”
Story by Matt Kaye/Berns Bureau; courtesy of NAFB News Service
