Agriculture Secretary Imposes Freeze on Jobs

Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy imposed a department-wide job freeze and announced that he will cut the department’s Washington bureaucracy before he approves a reduction in field offices. He also plans to address the recent problems with tainted beef.

The job freeze, which was not publicly announced, came on Espy’s first day in office, Jan. 22, and was coupled with his promise to review a George Bush Administration plan to close more than 1,200 Agriculture offices outside Washington.

Espy is “very serious about making cuts in Washington” and has pledged to “make an example here” before closing field offices, said Joel Berg, Espy’s spokesman.

The Agriculture Department employs 128,324 workers nationally. It has 13,655 employees in Washington.

“The grease and the lard is right here in Washington, D.C.,” Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), a former agriculture newscaster, recently complained. “You’ve got over a thousand economists. You only need one,” Burns said.

The Agriculture Department also plans to look at “every possibility” to cut the risk of food poisoning from meat, such as the outbreak in January that killed two children and sickened 300 other people.

Espy will travel to Olympia, Wash., today to testify on the department’s efforts to find contaminated beef served by Jack in the Box restaurants in Washington state, Idaho and Nevada.

Investigators have traced the tainted beef to four one-hour “lots” of production Nov. 19, at Von’s Cos. plant in El Monte, Calif.