Tom Vilsack’s reappointment as Secretary of Agriculture should not be a surprise. The former governor of Iowa and his wife supported President-elect Biden in his first run for president in 1988. They have been friends of the Bidens and their political allies for more than thirty years, and Vilsack himself helped craft the Democratic campaign platform on agricultural and rural policy. Among the leading candidates for the job, Mr. Vilsack was perhaps the most palatable choice for many farm interest groups. As Secretary of Agriculture for President Obama, like his predecessors in the Bush and Clinton administrations, the Governor’s record shows him supporting many of the policies pushed by farm lobbies. The question is whether his current farm policy positions have evolved with a new administration, or simply become another case of “back to the future.”
As Agriculture Secretary, Vilsack consistently supported federal farm price and income support programs and the $8 billion a year federal crop insurance program, regardless of how inefficient or poorly targeted they were. Under his tenure, the US Department of Agriculture implemented two new price and revenue support programs, the Price Loss and Agricultural Risk Coverage initiatives, together generously providing farmers an average of about $5 billion a year between 2015 and 2020.
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