Hiring at the Kansas City site remains well below the roughly 550 high-paying jobs local leaders had anticipated.
However, he said those frustrations have dealt more with reports published by other USDA agencies, and that some farmers may be confusing them.
For example, a two-year research project on pollinators such as honeybees was shelved because the entire team working on it left the agency rather than move to Kansas City.
In October 2016 — before Trump's first year in office — ERS had 318 permanent employees, according to USDA data.
“And here in the United States, what we do with groups like that — we can’t send them to Siberia, so we send them to Kansas City.”