Trump wants a talk-radio host to be the USDA’s chief scientist

The Dept. of Agriculture’s science will be run by someone with no science experience.

Yesterday, the Trump administration formally named its candidate for the Department of Agriculture's undersecretary of research, education, and economics, a post that serves as the agency's chief scientist. Its choice? Sam Clovis, who has no scientific background but is notable primarily for having been a conservative talk-radio host. If approved by the Senate, the US' attempts to understand climate change's impact on agriculture will be led by someone who called climate research "junk science."

Clovis, who has also taught economics and management at an Iowa liberal arts college, was an early supporter of Trump's candidacy. He's been working at the USDA as a White House advisor since shortly after Trump's inauguration. Suggestions that he'd be nominated to this position have been circulating for a while, but his official nomination only came yesterday.

While the USDA doesn't have as prominent a role in science as, say, the Department of Energy, its Agricultural Research Service (ARS!) has over 1,000 permanent scientists and over 100 research facilities. It and other components of the research, education, and economics group are responsible for research in areas like nutrition, agricultural productivity, pathogens that affect agricultural animals, and non-food agriculture, such as forestry.

The USDA's research would presumably include figuring out how to adapt agriculture to our changing climate. Temperature stresses, water issues, and possible changes in the areas inhabited by agricultural pests are all potential issues that may already be influenced by climate change, and issues are only going to be more pronounced in the future. But given Clovis' past statements, it's not clear whether the USDA will continue this research.

In 2014, when Clovis was running for senate in Iowa, he did an interview with the state's public radio station in which he was asked about climate change. After the interviewer highlighted the widespread acceptance of climate change within the scientific community, Clovis responded by saying, in effect, that scientists were trying to fool him. "I have looked at the science, and I have enough of a science background to know when I’m being boofed," he said. (Pro Publica checked and found that Clovis had never even taken an undergraduate level course in any science.)

Despite his lack of expertise, Clovis went on to claim that "a lot of the science is junk science. It's not proven; I don't think there's any substantive information available to me that doesn't raise as many questions as it does answers." He then went on, somewhat incoherently, to talk about sunspots and volcanoes before saying that the whole thing was a conspiracy to support wealth redistribution. "This global warming, or whatever the climate change," Clovis said, "is really about income redistribution from rich nations that are industrialized to nations that are not."

Clovis' nomination will require Senate approval.