World Perspectives

The Next Few Months at USDA

After Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president at noon (EST) today, a team of temporary political appointees moved to fill a number of jobs in the new USDA.Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States today, ushering in a new administration in all agencies, including USDA. There are approximately 250 political appointees at USDA, and there will obviously be many desks to fill since President Trump just this week announced former Georgia Governor George “Sonny” Perdue as his choice to be its secretary.That process started this afternoon as the Trump transition deployed beachhead teams into the agencies. This model was developed by the Mitt Romney transition that never had a chance to deploy it. These teams will...

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From WPI Consulting

Communicating importance of value-added products

Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.

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