Trump Has A Plan To Sabotage The Authorities — And It Labored Completely His First Time period

5 years in the past, President Donald Trump’s finances director and performing chief of employees flew house to South Carolina for a Republican Occasion gala and celebrated the sluggish decay of the federal authorities.

Referring to Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” — he didn’t imply lobbyists — Mick Mulvaney introduced up two obscure analysis businesses throughout the Division of Agriculture, the whole mixed personnel of which made up lower than 1% of the USDA workforce.

It’s “nearly impossible” to fireside federal employees, Mulvaney stated. However the USDA had defied the chances.

Just a few months prior, then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue informed the overwhelming majority of employees on the businesses, largely economists and researchers, that they must choose up their lives and transfer 1,000 miles throughout the nation, from Washington, D.C., to Kansas Metropolis. They got only a few weeks to resolve if they might transfer or else face termination “for declining a directed reassignment.”

A lot of the civil servants — with youngsters getting into highschool, spouses employed in D.C., getting older dad and mom to look after, and retirements not far-off — balked. Lots of left the civil service, stalling main scientific priorities and setting American agricultural analysis again years.

“More than half the people quit!” Mulvaney raved on the gala.

All it took to empty the swamp was telling folks they needed to transfer from the nation’s capital to “the real part of the country,” he stated. “What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”

With Donald Trump’s fingers but once more on the levers of energy, what occurred on the USDA is simply the beginning.

Simply as this story was revealed, reviews emerged of an executive-branch-wide e mail to, apparently, tens of millions of federal employees. It supplied them buyouts — and warned of “physical office relocations for a number of federal workers” who stay within the civil service.

Trump campaigned final yr on a promise to “dismantle the deep state,” and his choose to steer the White Home finances workplace — Mulvaney’s successor and key Undertaking 2025 co-author Russ Vought — has stated that federal employees are “villains” who ought to be “traumatically affected” after they go to work. Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” cheerleader Elon Musk has written about the “relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area” as a strategy to “curtail administrative overgrowth.”

And Trump himself, in a marketing campaign video, stated he would “continue the effort, launched during his first term, to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington swamp.” He stated such strikes may “immediately” have an effect on 100,000 civil servants.

5 years after the relocation, present and former staff on the two USDA businesses, the Financial Analysis Service (ERS) and the Nationwide Institute for Meals and Agriculture (NIFA), have stated that the mass departure of specialists in agriculture and agricultural economics marked a dramatic, tangible loss for the general public — and will now be a vivid pink warning signal for the subsequent 4 years of Trump’s second time period in workplace, when the president will little question try related strikes at different businesses.

“Very little happened for the first two or three years after the relocation because there just wasn’t anybody there,” stated Susan Offutt, who was administrator of ERS between 1996 and 2006 earlier than serving because the chief economist of the Authorities Accountability Workplace for eight years.

Even in the present day, after staffing ranges on the businesses have rebounded, thanks largely to COVID-19 distant work insurance policies — which Trump has sought to reverse in an govt order — the lack of a era of extremely expert agricultural economists, scientists and different specialists has left a deep mark on the USDA.

“There’s still not much that would be [considered] policy-sensitive, or policy-relevant,” Offutt stated. “The portfolio no longer includes as much policy analysis as it had previously.”

James MacDonald, a former department chief at ERS who retired in September 2019 because of the transfer to Kansas Metropolis, got here again to the company two months later as a rehired annuitant — a retiree engaged on a part-time foundation — after which as a part-time contractor. Well known as an skilled within the group of the American agricultural sector, he’s additionally now a analysis professor on the College of Maryland.

“We’re doing fewer, big, informed, difficult reports,” MacDonald informed HuffPost of ERS. “We do have a lot of publications, but I think many are kind of short, simple, easy things. Producing a serious research product is a real challenge, and I don’t think we’re nearly back to that level yet.”

If what occurred to ERS and NIFA is any indication, pressured company relocations may reduce “administrative overgrowth” at the price of 1000’s of years of collective experience from departing federal staff. Laura Dodson, a present ERS agricultural economist and performing vice chairman of the company’s union native, informed me in 2019 that she feared the relocation was a “test case” for what the Trump administration would possibly attempt to do to bigger businesses.

On reflection, she stated just lately, it’s “pretty clear that the relocation was a way for them to enact a mass layoff” with out following federal laws for layoffs, or “reductions in force.”

“We had a lot of people who had spent their careers working on very specific fields — very niche questions,” Dodson stated. “And when they left, it was so sudden and abrupt that there wasn’t time to bring in the next generation. You had to just leave all of your work and go.”

Previous to the transfer, ERS and NIFA had spent many years offering unbiased financial analysis and scientific funding targeted on the nation’s agricultural programs. Underneath its present title, ERS goes again to 1961, however predecessors in its mission to offer financial statistics and evaluation on the agricultural sector and coverage return a century. It’s considered one of 13 principal statistical businesses within the U.S. authorities, alongside the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others, and its ranks are dense with economics PhDs and statistical whizzes.

NIFA, the USDA’s “extramural research agency,” administers over $1.5 billion in federal science funding — supporting discoveries in fields as various as bioenergy, soil administration and workforce growth. It was created by title in 2008, however its earliest predecessor dates again to 1888 when the “Office of Experiment Stations” coordinated publicly funded analysis between land-grant faculties.

And although each ERS and NIFA had small footprints even earlier than the transfer, the impression of their work was felt throughout the nation.

“When I go to the grocery store, all the time, I’m going, ‘I know the person that bred that apple, I know the person that bred that grape,’” stated Tom Bewick, the performing vice chairman for NIFA’s union, which like ERS’s is an affiliate of the American Federation of Authorities Staff.

At ERS, statisticians observe and analyze knowledge on issues like commodity pricing, farm revenue, pesticide use, the immigration standing of farmworkers and Individuals’ diets. Staff have revealed analysis on all the things from uncooked milk consumption, egg manufacturing amid hen flu outbreaks and the impression of agricultural tariffs. Present and former staff burdened that given the affect of the stakeholders who use ERS analysis — company behemoths, highly effective politicians, nongovernmental teams, universities — the company took scientific integrity critically.

“Our whole career, we’re told we’re not supposed to comment on policy, or advocate one way or the other,” stated Constance Newman, an ERS economist for practically 20 years who left the company on account of the directive to maneuver to Kansas Metropolis. At ERS, Newman studied participation within the SNAP program, beforehand known as meals stamps. “There’s important decisions being made on all these facts, all these stats that are being put forward. So let’s make sure that we have the best quality statistics, and not just someone doing it from an advocacy point of view.”

Although the private and non-private trade each profit from ERS analysis — it’s all publicly out there — many argue the company’s most essential purchasers are policymakers, each in Congress and the chief department. Measuring coverage outcomes on topics like tariffs, illness, vitamin and local weather change, ERS analysis typically tells laborious truths backed by ironclad knowledge, even when it goes towards company pursuits or political slogans.

ERS analysis “had a cachet of being unbiased — not coming from just the farmer-rancher side, [nor] the up-the-chain packers, processors, and distributors side,” stated Dale Moore, who served a number of USDA secretaries as chief of employees between 2001 and 2009, and was later govt director of the American Farm Bureau Federation till 2022.

“The ERS existed for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations,” Offutt stated, “and it irritated both.”

The primary signal of bother was the Trump White Home’s proposed finances for fiscal yr 2019, revealed in February 2018, which might have slashed ERS’s finances practically in half and proposed doing so “by eliminating low priority research that is being conducted within the private sector and by non-profits and focusing on core data analyses in line with priority research areas.” Congress ignored the prompt reduce, nevertheless it was a shot throughout the bow.

Then, in August, Perdue formally introduced the transfer that may really reduce ERS’s and NIFA’s workforces in half. The overwhelming majority of the company’s personnel could be relocating out of Washington, he stated, to a brand new location that may be introduced later.

The identical morning Perdue introduced the transfer, ERS staff realized that the company’s administrator, Mary Bohman, a veteran agricultural economist who’d been within the job for seven years, could be transferred to a distinct a part of the USDA altogether, leaving others to deal with the transition. (Perdue didn’t reply to HuffPost’s interview request.)

Citing Washington’s “high cost of living and long commutes,” a USDA press launch stated the transfer was meant to enhance recruitment, place USDA assets nearer to stakeholders, and “benefit the American taxpayers” with financial savings on salaries and hire.

However when economists and statisticians conversant in ERS’s and NIFA’s work began crunching the numbers themselves, they by no means appeared so as to add up.

In a convention name in September that yr, hosted by a number of statistical and research-related associations, Catherine Woteki, the USDA undersecretary who oversaw NIFA, ERS and associated businesses throughout the Obama administration, stated the transfer was “ill-conceived at best and possibly in violation of the law.”

The USDA’s inspector common’s workplace later bolstered this declare, discovering that the division had violated provisions of the 2018 spending invoice that Trump had signed into regulation. The USDA responded by asserting that the finances language was itself unconstitutional.

Referring to Perdue’s justifications for the transfer, Woteki stated, “None of them make sense.”

Others agreed. Over a thousand scientists and economists signed a letter opposing the transfer. Affected staff, a number of earlier directors of the businesses and dozens {of professional} associations and nongovernmental teams pointed out that policymakers in Washington, together with USDA management and Congress, had been essential stakeholders in ERS’s and NIFA’s work, as had been different statistical and analysis businesses headquartered within the metropolis with whom they typically teamed up on tasks.

The businesses had additionally traditionally had success recruiting sought-after economists, researchers and directors in Washington. And although the price of residing was excessive, town appeared to make up for it. The fee-saving declare was equally doubtful: Even now, years after the relocation and the beginning of the pandemic remote-work period, ERS’s annual finances has really gone up.

Different justifications merely didn’t compute. After USDA officers claimed in a media name that ERS had an unusually excessive attrition price, the American Statistical Affiliation dug into the numbers and discovered the division was utilizing an inflated determine — by counting summer season interns as staff.

“We did a pretty careful analysis of what we were told, and we didn’t think that the reasons provided were very convincing,” stated Steve Pierson, the ASA’s director of science coverage.

And not using a satisfying clarification for the transfer, hypothesis reigned.

Offutt, on the 2018 convention name, puzzled whether or not “this is a move that is intended to still the voice of ERS as an independent and objective agency.”

In Might 2019, Politico reported on ERS staff’ perception that the company had “run afoul of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue with its findings on how farmers have been financially harmed by President Donald Trump’s trade feuds, the Republican tax code rewrite and other sensitive issues.”

The story pointed to a 2018 ERS report that had wound up in The New York Instances, and which discovered that a lot of the profit from tax breaks in Trump’s tax invoice “are accrued by higher-income farm households.” The Instances quoted unnamed ERS economists who believed the transfer was “retribution for producing work that clashed with the administration’s agenda.”

USDA management constantly denied the transfer was meant to silence or retaliate towards ERS or NIFA. However critics famous the irony of the extremely regarded analysis businesses being kicked out of Washington based mostly on what appeared like remarkably shallow reasoning.

“The deputy secretary only talked about the savings to USDA,” stated Gale Buchanan, the USDA’s former chief scientist, on the convention name, after USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky had cited excessive hire, personnel prices and “quality of life issues” as motivations for the relocation.

“But in any kind of relocation, you’ve got to consider the total picture. This is what economists do so well!”

Investigators with the Authorities Accountability Workplace later supported Buchanan’s criticism, discovering that the USDA had “omitted critical costs and economic effects from its analysis of taxpayer savings,” reminiscent of “costs related to potential attrition or disruption of activities for a period of time.”

The Agricultural & Utilized Economics Affiliation additionally estimated that “the cost to the nation of lost research amounts to $149–215 million,” and a bunch of statisticians working with the American Statistical Affiliation wrote in 2022 that the ERS relocation “was marked by its abruptness, speed, and lack of consultation with Congress and stakeholders” and “epitomizes the ineffectiveness of internal agency agreements when officials in charge seem not to be acting in good faith for the mission of a statistical agency.”

After Mulvaney’s remarks in August 2019 — that the relocations and subsequent mass resignations had been “a wonderful way to streamline government” — the Trump administration’s motivations grew clearer.

“When I heard [Trump say] ‘We’re going to drain the swamp,’ I thought he was going to get rid of all the lobbyists, but what he meant was, ‘We’re going to get rid of all of these federal employees,’” stated Bewick, the NIFA union chief. Referring to Mulvaney’s feedback in regards to the relocation resulting in resignations at ERS and NIFA, Bewick stated, “That’s exactly what happened. And that, I think, was the whole purpose. To take these senior people, and really pressure them [to leave].”

“I think the people at the head of the [White House budget office] at the time were the people who were actually hostile to government research and government statistical agencies, and I think they were perfectly happy to see if they could damage them,” MacDonald stated. “I think they took a day making up reasons after they made their decision.”

Moore stated that even when he sympathized with Perdue’s acknowledged causes for the relocation, Mulvaney’s remarks described “a rather mercenary way to handle an issue.”

Offutt was extra direct. When Mulvaney bragged about “draining the swamp” by forcing folks to maneuver cross-country, she stated, he’d merely “said the quiet part out loud.”

Maybe most irritating for affected staff had been the seemingly hole reassurances from the USDA’s leaders. Perdue, for instance, had stated in his announcement of the relocation that “none of this reflects on the jobs being done by our ERS or NIFA employees,” and Dodson described a heated assembly with USDA officers, together with Deputy Secretary Censky, that “devolved into them telling us that we were ‘a crown jewel of USDA,’ and us shouting at them, ‘Then why are you doing this to us?’”

A spokesperson for Censky, who served as CEO of the American Soybean Affiliation each earlier than and since his temporary stint within the Trump administration, declined an interview request.

Nonetheless, the transfer chugged alongside. As dozens of cities put their names ahead to host the USDA researchers, the USDA employed Ernst and Younger, the outstanding accounting agency, to slim down the choices. In March 2019, a Perdue advisor informed members of Congress that 253 ERS staff and 315 NIFA staff could be relocated, in comparison with simply 96 staff between the 2 businesses who could be left in Washington, a lot of whom labored on delicate commodities packages or in administrative workplaces.

Quickly after, staff at each businesses voted overwhelmingly to unionize with the American Federation of Authorities Staff, with many citing frustration with the relocation as their cause for becoming a member of the hassle.

“There’s been no interest in finding out how this would affect our work, or what it would do to the stats we create on a weekly or monthly basis,” one unnamed ERS worker informed Authorities Govt in February 2019 within the midst of the union drive. The relocation, the individual added, is “just one example of the many ways there can be threats to our ability to further our mission.”

Staff had been proper to be nervous in regards to the relocation’s impression on their analysis.

In Might, staff monitoring the exodus discovered that non-retirement departures from ERS had greater than doubled over the earlier three-year common, Politico reported.

By the point USDA officers introduced in June 2019 that almost all of each businesses would relocate to the “Kansas City Region” — they didn’t specify which state, though the businesses at the moment share an deal with in Missouri — ERS and NIFA had been already hemorrhaging employees. At NIFA, Bewick stated, “We had essentially lost half of our workforce” in lower than a yr.

At an all-hands assembly for the Kansas Metropolis announcement, staff stood and turned their backs on Perdue in protest. They got only a month to declare their intentions, although the timeline was later prolonged till Sept. 30.

“This is the brain drain we all feared, possibly a destruction of the agencies,” Jack Payne, then the College of Florida’s vice chairman for agriculture and pure assets, informed The Washington Publish in July after a USDA tally confirmed round two-thirds of affected staff declining the relocation.

By early October 2019 — simply after the deadline to just accept the transfer to Kansas Metropolis — ERS vacancies had skyrocketed. The Washington Publish reported that employees numbers at each ERS and NIFA had dropped about 75% because the relocation. The Congressional Analysis Service later discovered that “about 75% of affected employees declined to relocate and left the agencies.” The identical report, revealed in Might 2020, discovered that in comparison with what the USDA stated could be full staffing ranges, “NIFA and ERS are operating with approximately 33% of their staff.”

The impression was quick.

“Within the next six months [of the relocation], they realized the agency couldn’t function,” Dodson stated. Administration began hiring again individuals who’d left as short-term contract employees and rehired annuitants, however the losses had been dramatic. “I would go into the office and there’d be nobody there. I didn’t have a supervisor, I didn’t have any teammates. People who I’d worked with on a 12-person team as a coordinator — everybody left.”

“The quality of things we’re working on is diminished from where we were before,” she stated.

By the top of the yr and into 2021, staffing on the businesses started to rebound, significantly following the onset of the COVID-19 distant work insurance policies. Right now, staffing ranges are roughly at pre-relocation ranges, although solely a fraction of staff work in or close to Kansas Metropolis, the union officers stated, whereas most have been allowed to work from across the nation, the results of distant work allowances that started after the beginning of the pandemic.

However the uncooked numbers belie a generational loss in experience. The GAO report discovered that by the top of fiscal yr 2021, “the majority of ERS (66 percent) and NIFA (79 percent) permanent full-time staff had worked there for 2 years or less” — the inverse of the pre-move statistics, when the overwhelming majority of employees at each businesses had been there for longer than two years. “I calculated that more than 2000 years of ERS experience vanished in 3 months,” Marca Weinberg, a senior ERS economist who served as performing administrator throughout the transfer, informed Science just lately.

“I’m certain you’ve got some young and energetic new researchers for whom this is a great opportunity,” stated one former ERS worker, who requested to not be named as a result of he’s now working elsewhere in authorities. “But I do know that if somebody’s a career researcher, they’re often building on decades of work. And so you’re starting with a new group of folks who will need another decade or two to build that level of background work.”

“The organization was gutted,” the previous worker stated.

On account of the transfer and subsequent employees exodus, “the agency’s statistical programs have been abridged and federal and state governments are suffering from inadequate agricultural statistics generally, but especially statistics to inform rural development, food assistance and security, and agriculturally related natural resource conservation policies,” the American Financial Affiliation wrote in January 2021. That July, Spiro Stefanou, who had been tapped as ERS administrator the earlier yr, stated ERS was “on a rebuilding mission – we are hiring aggressively after having lost about 70-plus percent of our staff.”

The variety of reviews produced by ERS plummeted, and researchers’ work grew extra targeted on key reviews, simply because the White Home’s 2019 finances proposal had known as for. Amid the turmoil, MacDonald stated that ERS’s mandated knowledge merchandise — farm revenue forecasts, agricultural productiveness development estimates — grew to become the precedence and had been revealed on time.

Even in the present day, “I think we’re producing noticeably fewer [research products] than we would have done six or seven years ago,” he stated, referring to fields like precision agriculture, genetic engineering and modifications in antibiotic use in livestock manufacturing, a area the place ERS has been a serious participant for years.

In recent times, shoppers have demanded much less antibiotic use in livestock, and producers, in flip, have decreased it. However because the relocation, the ERS staff learning these dynamics primarily “doesn’t exist anymore,” MacDonald stated.

“There does appear to be significant reductions in antibiotic use in livestock,” he stated, significantly in Europe and america. “We know there’s a lot going on, but we don’t have a great handle on it. And that’s what’s missing — that’s what we lost by losing that team of people.”

At NIFA, remaining employees scrambled to tackle their departed colleagues’ work.

“I went from managing one program, and providing support for other programs, to managing seven programs,” Bewick stated, stressing that his colleagues poured themselves into conserving the company working.

Some packages weren’t supplied in any respect; some grants had been switched from aggressive to noncompetitive, given the brand new issue of recruiting scientists for skilled panels to overview purposes. “We used some administrative tools that we don’t normally like to use, but that are available to us,” he stated.

“It was a quagmire, it was a slog,” stated Jane Kolodinsky, professor emerita of neighborhood growth and utilized economics on the College of Vermont, who’s labored on NIFA-funded tasks for years. “We were awarded a grant in 2019 that really didn’t get started until 2021, because of administrative burden and people having to re-learn the ropes… the wheels stopped turning.”

Lapses in institutional information about long-term data-gathering tasks additionally led to onerous efforts to reconstruct departed colleagues’ work. Dodson, for her half, needed to be taught a decades-old statistical program that her extra senior predecessors had relied upon earlier than leaving the company.

“A lot of us were stuck learning the old code that people had left behind, trying to forensic-science our way into how it was done,” she stated.

“It took several years to get the production of publications back to previous levels (if they are) due to the loss of researchers as well as editorial support staff,” Newman informed HuffPost in an e mail. “Major research projects were abandoned mid-stream either because the authors left or parts of a research team left.”

The standard of ERS knowledge itself was imperiled, as properly: A 2022 report from the USDA’s inspector common discovered {that a} particular ERS council created in 2014 to periodically “provide comprehensive evaluations of the agency’s data products” had in actual fact not accomplished any critiques between mid-2019 and late 2021. An ERS official stated “the agency did not have the personnel to complete them.”

In a press release to HuffPost previous to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, a USDA spokesperson known as ERS and NIFA “two of our nation’s premier scientific institutions” and stated that beneath the Biden administration, each “have reached their hiring goals.”

“ERS continues to work with stakeholders to further expand the pipeline of agricultural economists and other technical positions,” the assertion stated. “NIFA leveraged several recruiting tools to attract national experts to meet the agency’s workforce needs.”

As present and former ERS and NIFA staff look again on the previous 5 years, many accomplish that with a cautious eye towards the longer term.

Trump, in his first days again in workplace, has taken intention squarely at federal employees, going to conflict towards “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” packages, purging over a dozen inspectors common, and instituting a gag order at well being businesses. Grant critiques on the Nationwide Institutes of Health, which calls itself the biggest public funder of biomedical analysis on this planet, have reportedly been frozen.

The one publish in NIFA’s newsroom since Trump’s inauguration, titled “Notice: Funding Opportunities Under Review,” is just some phrases lengthy: “All NIFA Requests for Applications are currently under review,” it says, linking to a third-party e mail type for future updates.

Trump has additionally pursued an aggressive stance towards distant work and will finally require ERS and NIFA staff to report back to Kansas Metropolis after most have been working from all throughout the nation for years. Nonetheless, present and former staff who spoke to HuffPost didn’t dwell on private hardship: All who left ERS discovered jobs elsewhere, principally throughout the federal authorities or in associated fields.

As a substitute, they had been nervous about others within the federal authorities whose work would possibly put them within the new administration’s crosshairs.

“Maybe there was a logic to starting with two really obscure agencies at USDA,” Offutt stated. “If you’re going to do it as a test, you don’t start with Social Security.”

Now Trump — flanked by JD Vance, Russ Vought and Elon Musk — has made what Steve Bannon as soon as known as “deconstructing the administrative state” a key precedence.

Undertaking 2025, the authors of which now populate the Trump administration, requires relocating regional EPA workplaces, placing the Inside Division’s Workplace of Floor Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in Pittsburgh — “to recognize that the agency is field-driven and should be headquartered in the coal field” — and separating the Air Visitors Group from the Federal Aviation Administration “and relocat[ing] it to separate headquarters outside the District of Columbia.”

Undertaking 2025 additionally requires transferring the Bureau of Land Administration again to Grand Junction, Colorado. The bureau was moved there throughout Trump’s first time period in a relocation strikingly related to the USDA relocations. However the Biden administration partially reversed the transfer in 2021, with a BLM press launch saying that the transfer “failed to deliver promised jobs across the West and drove hundreds of people out of the agency.”

After each the BLM and USDA company strikes, the variety of each businesses’ workforces plummeted.

The New York Instances additionally reported a number of days after Election Day that some on Trump’s transition staff had been discussing transferring the EPA headquarters — and seven,000 EPA staff — out of Washington, D.C.

ERS and NIFA veterans stated if Trump emulated their relocation expertise elsewhere, significantly at different analysis businesses, it risked empowering huge gamers with their very own analysis budgets, ceding floor to these with company or partisan agendas.

With out unbiased analysis, MacDonald stated, “you’re left relying on people with an ax to grind, which might be industry people, or it might be advocates for tighter or looser regulation, each of whom is arguing in their own interests, and often with cherry-picked or poor information.”

“There’s always going to be lots of partisan voices out there,” Newman stated. With the lack of institutional information at ERS, “It just means there’s one less source that can be considered neutral,” she stated. “There’s one less voice that’s going to be a completely trusted, neutral source.

“Public goods are hard to measure. They’re hard to value. It is, then, difficult to say what is lost,” Offutt mirrored. “In the case of ERS, there’s less knowledge available outside a very small part of the government about what your tax dollars are doing. People should know these things.”

In any other case, she stated, “it opens the door for special interests to control the agenda.”