Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 18, 1994 TAG: 9402180176
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS Staff Writer
DATELINE: HILLSVILLE LENGTH: Medium
The department is waiting until Congress passes reorganization legislation for the USDA before announcing where the trims will come, said Mitchell Geasler, assistant administrator with the USDA's Extension Service office.
"We don't want Congress trading votes on offices," he said.
Geasler, former director of the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service at Virginia Tech, spoke Thursday to about 120 people attending a school in Hillsville for Virginia and North Carolina vegetable growers.
If he has his way, Geasler said, the department will not decide which county offices to close. He favors letting state and local agency officials decide where to put the offices after they have been told how many offices they can operate.
Under a plan announced in September by Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, 43 USDA agencies will be merged into 30. Geasler's own federal Extension Service agency will no longer exist after reorganization.
Farmers and federal employees will feel the effect of the reorganization on the county level, too.
Merged into a single new Farm Service Agency will be the farm-loan functions of the Farmers Home Administration, the Federal Crop Insurance agency and the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, which administers commodity price-support programs.
Besides saving taxpayers' money, the idea is to give farmers better service. "You park your pickup, and you are there," Geasler said in describing the concept.
The USDA's Soil Conservation Service will remain a separate agency, changing its name to the Natural Resource Conservation Service. Geasler said he hopes SCS local offices will be in the same place and have the same service desk as the new Farm Service Agency offices.
The FmHA's home-loan function will become part of a new Rural Development Agency, he said.
The Extension Service - a three-way partnership of federal, state and local government - will have to decide if it wants to put its offices with those of the new Farm Service Agency, Geasler said.
When the reorganization is complete, he said, the 3,700 separate USDA office sites around the country will be reduced to 2,542.
The USDA changes are part of the administration's government-wide initiative to reinvent government.
Reorganization is one of three activities being talked about in the federal government, Geasler said. The other two are "right-sizing" and "reinvention."
Right-sizing doesn't necessarily mean layoffs, as much as putting employees in jobs where they are needed. Nevertheless, he said, the federal government should have 252,000 fewer employees in a few years as a result of attrition, retirements and improved efficiency.
To illustrate reinvention of government, Geasler pointed to the 1,086 pounds of personnel regulations used to manage the USDA's 114,000 employees. "I could write a fairly good [personnel] policy for the department in 10 pages . . . maybe 12," he said.
"You don't have to have regulations to protect incompetence; that's where we've been."
by CNB