A ‘Period Dignity Officer’ Seemed Like a Good Idea. Until a Man Was Named.
Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling from New Jersey to Washington DC to cover a meeting of the American Farm Bureau Federation. It was a good meeting, to put it lightly. Many points were made, and there was much discussion.
The topic of the meeting was the Farm Bill, and the Farm Bill (and the USDA’s ability to enforce it) is critical to the future of the U.S. economy. The Farm Bill is not an easy bill to make, and the USDA gets paid in full for every dollar of food it gets. If they did not get paid in full for every dollar of food, they would not have to do their job.
One point I made was that an Agriculture Secretary makes his decisions for President Trump, and it is not a president’s job to judge whether or not a Secretary of Agriculture (or any other government official) is doing their job. That is a decision for those who make those decisions to make. That said, after hearing the Secretary of Agriculture speak about the ongoing crisis in the South, I had a feeling that the Farm Bill was not going to be passed this year.
(At that point, a friend who just happens to also work at a farm was sitting behind our table. I asked her if there was any good news to report, and she smiled, and said that “it looks like a secretary of agriculture would be coming up next month.”)
There are certain circumstances and conditions that should not be subject to politics, such as the Farm Bill. Yet, somehow, politics has come into the discussion about the Farm Bill, and has been the reason why the Farm Bill isn’t passed. It is not fair to hold a particular administration accountable for the Farm Bill’s failure to pass.
I said in the meeting that I would be writing a feature story about the Farm Bill for The Daily Beast. The reporter I have chosen to write that story is not a partisan Republican, like some in Congress, nor a Democrat with a farm background, like the President. No, the