USDA nominees get confirmation hearing

Following a confirmation hearing Wednesday on President Obama's nominees for three key posts at USDA, Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said he will try to get the nominations through the Senate before Congress leaves this week for recess.

Harkin said he would ask the Senate to discharge the committee from voting on the nominations so he can take them straight to the Senate floor. He said Senate Agriculture ranking member Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., has agreed to that approach.

The nominees are Kathleen Merrigan, a Tufts University professor and former aide to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to be deputy Agriculture secretary; James Miller, the chief of staff at the National Farmers Union and a former aide to Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., to be Agriculture undersecretary for farm and foreign agricultural services; and Joe Leonard Jr., an aide to Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., and former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, to be Agriculture assistant secretary for civil rights.

The hearing went smoothly for the nominees, but Chambliss told Merrigan, the author of many academic articles, that he was concerned that "in promoting your passion for organic production and sustainable agriculture, you tear down other types of agriculture with different points of view."

Chambliss told Merrigan that her job at USDA "won't be to focus on your personal interests or to promote one type of agriculture at the expense of another," but to help run the entire department.

Merrigan, who helped write the USDA organic program when she worked for Leahy, responded that she recognizes organic agriculture is only a "small slice of the pie, 2 to 3 percent" of U.S. agriculture.

Of her writings, Merrigan said, "I've always been a provocateur. That's part of my personality." But she added that when she was administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service in the Clinton administration, she worked on many conventional USDA agriculture programs, including milk marketing orders, check-offs and commodity purchases for feeding programs.

Miller, who will supervise crop subsidies and export and crop insurance programs, promised to "meet the intent of Congress" by implementing the permanent disaster program quickly. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on Tuesday he does not expect to make payments under that program until 2010 because his staff is finding it difficult to use USDA's aged computer system.