The Grim Reapers of Crop Insurance

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency (FSA) is often described as overstaffed and inefficiently structured for its mission, which is to deliver and monitor a variety of federal subsidy and conservation programs. Currently, FSA operates offices in over 2,100 counties—almost all of those with any measure of agricultural production. Many of the offices are located within 20 miles of one another, and some don’t even have staff.
The county-based structure for FSA offices might have been reasonable in the early 1930s, when FSA (with a different name) was developing its infrastructure. At that time, farms were much smaller and far more numerous, 30 percent of the national workforce was directly involved in farming, transportation was much more costly, forms had to be processed by hand and by typewriter, and, to a large degree, program administration required face-to-face meetings between farmers and FSA employees.

Between 2006 and 2010, the insurance companies received an average of $1.44 from the taxpayer for every $1 of subsidy farmers received.

Things, of course, are vastly different today. So much so that even Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and most members of the congressional agricultural committees have acknowledged that there is an efficiency problem. In January, Vilsack announced that 131 FSA offices would be closed. The secretary’s action represents a de minimis response: Many more FSA county offices could almost surely be shut down and the FSA workforce correspondingly reduced, with no loss in effective administration of farm programs. And if a new Farm Bill actually rationalized and reduced the complexity and scope of farm subsidy programs, further workforce reductions would be more than justified.

Read more: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/august/the-grim-reapers-of-crop-insurance