A grant made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is an $18.5 million expenditure of taxpayer dollars that was given to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Hawai’i Pacific University, University of Guam, Arizona State University to “build a diverse pipeline” of new federal workers for the USDA.
The grant was made during the Biden Administration and is intended to build out the federal workforce with those who have been groomed into a certain ideology.
Now, the Trump Administration’s is working hard to cut the federal workforce dramatically — and without delay.
In fact, on Thursday, President Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management notified agencies they must lay off most of their probationary employees who have not yet worked long enough to obtain civil service protection.
The grant’s project start date was May, 2023, with an end date of June, 2028. Over five years, the grantees will focus on educating and preparing the next generation of “food policy leaders” for careers in the USDA and related federal agencies. Over the grant lifespan, 9,000 young people in Alaska, Arizona, Hawai’i, and Guam are to be put into the pipeline of food policy jobs.
Key activities in the program include role-playing simulations, “curated” internships, a “talent pipeline ladder,” USDA service gap analysis, and climate and food symposia. A trip to the nation’s capital for the young people in the program’s first year culminated in a professional photo of them taken with the Capitol Dome in the background.
The project seeks to demonstrate the importance of federal service in addressing climate and equity challenges and to strengthen the USDA workforce by increasing the number of diverse, food, agriculture, and nutrition-knowledgeable employees.
Although 9,000 “NextGen” students are to go through the program in five years, after the first year, only 91 had done so.
One of the courses offered in this program is “How to Land a Federal Job,” attended by 71 students.
From the grant report, it appears this grant is actually about climate and equity and recruiting into federal service a certain kind of federal worker — one who adheres to a certain ideology.
Keep it up! Celebrate and save the grant so it can be turned back to the feds. Clean out the intrusive ideology of woke and nothingness like DEI and the junk pushed at this country by “sickos” in government. Murkowski and the former congressman, Peltola. Start in the local area of life and living and education. Out with bad educators like the Superintendent of schools in Anchorage. Look at the damage done to the university system in Alaska.
Mediocre brick and mortar colleges and universities are closing across N. America. Does anyone know oa a more mediocre university than UA? UA offers remedial courses in reading and arithmetic! The actual cost per student as UA exceeds that at Harvard! I would support giving the entire UA subsidy to the BSA if that was the only choice offered.
As per the US Fed Debt Clock (‘https://www.usdebtclock.org/)
… $36,479,000,000,000 (a really “YUGE” number!)
This Dodge endeavor is really important to flush out the waste, fraud, abuse. They’ve already making incredible progress with $94B in savings (as of this writing), something we expect our elected leaders to accomplish, but frequently fail. I’m hoping that this AK907 Dodge Team can accomplish similar results at the State level, and would certainly support it at the local Muni level too.
Does the USDA do anything to improve or increase food production and distribution? I understand they do a lot of inspecting. That’s good. But they also shut down a lot of food production operations. I’d rather have an abundant supply of safe food, but I don’t think more federal workers are going to get us to that point.
Rollo, from most of what I’ve seen and read over the past 20 or so years, the main job of both the USDA and the FDA is to throw roadblocks and burdens into the path of any nascent or existing small farmer or small food manufacturing business, clearly in order to protect their big corporate owners, er, “partners”, from competition. It has become completely egregious over the past decade, in particular.
Grooming and vetting processes of this kind have no doubt been carefully used since the Obama presidency to select woke/leftist FBI agents, DOJ attorneys, candidates for military academies, Department of State officials, and now the USDA. It will take many years to undo the leftist corruptions of Obama and Biden, but let us rejoice that the U.S. ship of state is now being piloted away from rocky shoals by a new captain.
USAID may end up being the biggest political scandal in our history
Will the Alaska DOGE committee be able to get to investigate the universities federal and state funds that they receive? There has to be waste and fraud deluxe buried in there.
A University’s “Indirect “ support slice of most grants usually includes an amount like $5,000 to go into a pool of funds to redistributed in house for so called “research “ grants”. A slick way to launder money.