Bureaucratic Mismanagement? USDA Spent $2 Million an Intern

Aug 10, 2012

The USDA is in hot water over a funding project that went wrong. USDA officials had spent $2 million on an internship program and only had one participating intern. This issue occurred because the department failed to protect themselves from hackers, even after receiving $63 million in federal government towards boosting security measures.

This cover-up scandal was revealed after a USDA inspector report found that the Office of Chief Information Officer had “funded an intern program for a total of $2 million which, while funded as a security enhancement project, only resulted in one intern being hired full-time for ASOC [Agriculture Security Operations Center.”

This oversight sheds some light on USDA’s mismanagement of 16 projects that were supposed to protect the department from security threats. Back in 2009 the department requested an increase to the security budget from $18 million to $44 million. The stickler in the report is that even after an increase of $63.4 million in overall funding, the department received back in 2010 and 2011, however, the IT and security systems are still susceptible to risk. This sounds like a case of bureaucratic mismanagement at its best.

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.