Trump Just Nominated a Pesticide Exec to Oversee Science at the USDA
On Monday, while most media were still digesting President Donald Trump’s extraordinary travels abroad, the White House quietly named a long-time pesticide executive as chief scientist for the US Department of Agriculture.
If approved by the Senate, Scott Hutchins will be the third major player from Dow Chemical’s pesticide/seed division—now known as Corteva, after Dow’s 2017 merger with DuPont—to hold a high post in Trump’s USDA. Back in April, the administration tapped Ken Isley, a 30-year Dow Agroscience/Corteva veteran, to lead the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. In October 2017, another former Dow man, Ted Mckinney, was confirmed by the Senate as undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs. McKinney had served for 19 years on Dow Agroscience’s government affairs (read: lobbying) team.
Hutchins, the USDA’s presumptive new chief scientist, has been with Dow Agrosciences and later Cortva since earning a Ph.D. in entomology from Iowa State University in 1987. His most recent title is global leader of integrated field sciences; before the DuPont merger, he served as global director for crop protection research and development at Dow AgroSciences. “Crop protection,” of course, means pesticides—a category that includes bug killers (pesticides), weed killers (herbicides), and fungus killers (fungicides).
In his role as chief scientist—formally known as undersecretary for research, education, and economics—Hutchins would set the agenda for the USDA’s $2.9 billion research budget.
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2018/07/trump-just-nominated-a-pesticide-exec-to-oversee-science-at-usda/
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