America’s rural crisis triggers calls for Biden to name rural czar

The incoming Biden administration is facing growing pressure to appoint a rural envoy within the White House to oversee a national strategy to uplift rural communities facing severe health and economic challenges.

Members of Congress and advocates are making the case that the problems plaguing rural regions exacerbated by the pandemic run so deep that a coordinated federal response is critical — a move they argue would speed up the nation’s economic recovery and boost Biden’s popularity among voters in red states. The envoy would work closely with the executive branch, especially the Department of Agriculture, which has offices in nearly every county in the U.S.

“I certainly think there has to be a big emphasis on developing rural America,” former Democratic Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear told POLITICO. “It has to come from the White House."

“It is past time that the rural areas of this country be targeted for not only economic development, but for health care, for broadband access, for all of the things that will lift this whole country up," he added.

Democratic lawmakers say that embarking on a rural strategy is an immediate way for President Joe Biden to draw a contrast with former President Donald Trump, whose leadership they argue failed rural Americans, most clearly with the pandemic that has disproportionately impacted rural areas. Biden's platform lays out many ambitious goals for rural regions, such as having the agriculture industry play a key part in fighting climate change, which his advisers believe translates into paying farmers for improving the environment as well as generating more "green" jobs.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is shining a big spotlight on the need for major investment in our rural communities,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, in a statement provided to POLITICO.

"After years of attempting to make these investments, what I know is this: the organization of government often makes it difficult to facilitate real on-the-ground success. A concept like a Rural Envoy at the White House who has real power to coordinate between agencies and make sure that each agency’s work supports another agency’s work in rural America would be an improvement,” Wyden said.

The Agriculture Department is expected to be the first response to many of these problems, given the department’s sprawling mission that touches nearly every corner of rural America, from funding affordable housing to building rural hospitals to deploying broadband access to combating climate change.

But the rural development branch of USDA has long been neglected by both Republican and Democratic administrations, as it’s been consistently underfunded and understaffed. Advocates say that an early order of business for Tom Vilsack, Biden’s pick to lead USDA, should be restoring morale among rural development career staff by elevating the public profile of the agency’s work.

“There has got to be definitive investments that are innovative or this administration will have no future in a rural vote,” said Charles Fluharty, founder of the Rural Policy Research Institute, which studies demographic trends and policy impacts on rural communities.

By nearly every measure, rural America is struggling. Most rural counties never fully recovered from the 2008 recession, only to be knocked backwards by the pandemic that has left countless Americans living in rural areas experiencing food insecurity, high unemployment and in need of affordable, reliable housing. An urgent issue for the Biden administration will be easing some pressure on rural health care systems strained by the influx of Covid-19 patients as the virus spread intensifies.

“There’s bright spots across the U.S., but on a whole, aggregate rural America has had a hard time with the 21st Century shifts in the economy,” said Anthony Pipa, a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution and co-author of a paper detailing how the Biden administration should approach rural challenges.

“There’s no reason to expect that will change without some sort of targeted policy,” he said.

Vilsack’s ability to hit the ground running once confirmed by the Senate — ultimately why Biden selected him — means expectations will be high for him to quickly deliver on policy.

Vilsack’s allies say his record proves he’s ready to confront the litany of problems rural Americans are dealing with and believe he will make rural development top priority when he takes the helm of USDA. In an interview this week with the Storm Lake Times, Vilsack cited rural economic development among many priority areas "that need significant work or even historic work."

The Biden team has also tapped Katharine Ferguson to serve as Vilsack's chief of staff, a sign that rural development issues could get special attention given Ferguson's experience in that realm.

While leading the Agriculture Department for eight years under Obama, Vilsack’s signature rural development action was launching the “Strikeforce” initiative intended to leverage resources in counties experiencing persistent poverty rates by partnering with local organizations. It started as a pilot project in three states and expanded to 16, and its work involved providing technical assistance to develop a cooperative business in the Georgia goat industry and developing a sustainable food system to address food deserts in Arkansas.

“[Vilsack] supported a much more comprehensive approach to rural communities’ economic development,” said Doug O’Brien, the former acting undersecretary for Rural Development under Vilsack. “He understood that manufacturing, information technology, the service sector, were all critical to rural, next to agriculture.”

Yet some experts believe that scaling up USDA’s rural development programs would not be enough and are also encouraging the administration to adopt a comprehensive rural blueprint that spans multiple agencies instead of placing responsibility solely on USDA. That's why some Biden allies are pushing hard for an official rural position close to the president, along with the reestablishment of the White House rural task force, which Trump disbanded in 2017.

“There must be policy infrastructure that reinforces and demands some outcome beyond ‘did you spend the damn money,’” Fluharty said. One idea that’s long had support among academic circles is to funnel federal dollars into densely populated areas within rural regions — so called cluster-based development.

Rural places are at a “funding disadvantage,” he said, and suggested that a federal strategy should target rural areas with a designated population size like the Department of Housing and Urban Development does with cities by making multiyear investments to stimulate capital planning and strategic investment.

Rural advocates are encouraged by an apparent growing realization among the public that rural communities are actually quite diverse, both racially and economically. That shift in thinking could translate into more effective policy, says Matt Dunne, founder and executive director of the Center on Rural Innovation, a Vermont-based nonprofit aimed at promoting digital economies in rural communities.

“It’s going to be a long-term shift in the narrative around rural,” he said. “But it’s starting. Rural America is not white America and rural economics are not completely dependent on agriculture. In fact, as agriculture automates, the number of jobs associated with agriculture is likely to go down as farms are more and more efficient. That’s not a bad thing but we need to recognize it.”