Analysis: Outlays skyrocket at USDA, Veterans Affairs, other agencies
Topline: Spending at the Department of Agriculture increased by 339% between 2000 and 2024, while staff numbers fell, OpenTheBooks found in its third and final review of federal agency spending trends.
Key facts: USDA spent $75 billion in 2000 with a staff of 106,715. By 2024, its staff headcount had fallen to 92,072, but the agency spent $255 billion.
Top salaries also increased recently at USDA. In 2023, the top paid official earned $252,840, the most ever for the agency at the time. In 2024, nine employees outearned that amount, with deputy administrator Cathy Glover taking home $287,269.
The Center Square recently highlighted some questionable spending from USDA. The agency’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Projects branch sent a $15,000 grant to Pennsylvania State University in 2018 for a study called “Sexuality and Sustainable Agriculture: Examining Queer Farmers’ Quality of Life in Pennsylvania.” The study was led by Michaela Hoffelmeyer, whose faculty page at her new job at the University of Wisconsin explains that she uses “feminist, queer, and labor theories” in her research to “inform agricultural programming.”
Grants of $15,000 were also awarded for “Farming as a Latinx: Analyzing how ethnic and gender identities shape Latino/a participation in sustainable agriculture” and “Gender, Sexuality, and Social Sustainability: Exploring Queer Farmers’ Relationships, Ethics, and Practices in the Midwest,” the Center Square reported.
A $717,000 grant to Ohio State University helped researchers promote bug-eating by fighting “cultural resistance in the USA and Europe [that] impedes the acceptance of insect proteins as food sources.”
USDA also spent $8.6 million buying guns, ammunition and other military equipment between 2015 and 2019, OpenTheBooks previously found.
Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com.
Background: Many other agencies saw their outlays more than double since 2000, such as the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, increasing spending from $406 million to $998 million.
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ staff headcount more than doubled and its spending increased by 736% — understandable given the number of soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, but still a challenge for the federal budget. VA doctors are some of the highest-paid employees in the history of the federal government, with 939 of them outearning the president last year.
Summary: The 21st century has been anything but consistent in terms of politics, but the one constant has been the increased pace of spending at nearly every federal agency.
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