Friday, March 06, 2009

USDA's Recovery Sites

Well, USDA now has an active link from the recovery.gov site. It's a good bureaucratic creation, lots of boilerplate and repetition, (as is the pdf file entitled "USDA's plans") but it does contain links to three agency sites, FNS, FS, and NRCS.

From the NRCS link you get another bureaucratic page, then a link to this page, which shows promise of tying dollars to projects. Unfortunately, none of the 3 links on that page work, which seems odd because my impression is the stimulus package gave NRCS money to do more work under existing programs, so I would have thought they'd be able to link to existing pages. I would have notified NRCS of the problem, but got discouraged by the number of links I was facing.

FNS, on the other hand, does well, at least for SNAP (i.e. food stamps)--providing a page of explanation of the increased benefits. Unfortunately the other links under their recovery page haven't been updated for the stimulus package.

FS does so-so--they look good, but the video is out-of-date (done before ARRA was signed) and is possibly addressed both to FS employees and to the public and the text page is bureaucratically vague. Additionally, the chief forester promises the work will be done in 2-3 years, mostly. I wonder if that's what they promised OMB?

Where's FSA? Not a clue.

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