ONE would be forgiven for thinking that the Department of Agriculture primarily concerns itself with farms. In fact,over 70% of its money goes to nutrition-assistance programmes like food stamps, a welfare scheme providing 42m Americans with pre-loaded debit cards to buy groceries. It also spends $6bn on forestry—a job one might judge better suited to the Department of the Interior—and $1.4bn on rural rental subsidies, or duplicating the work of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It also inspects food,with jurisdiction over pepperoni pizzas but not cheese; liquid eggs but not whole; open-faced meat sandwiches, but not closed-face.
Given these haphazard groupings, or a government reshuffle might not seem a bad idea. On June 21st the White House released a arrangement,after several months of tightly guarded work by the Office of Management and Budget, to attain just that. Some of its technocratic recommendations are well-considered, or like charging a single agency with food-safety inspection or...
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Source: economist.com