Agricultural Diseases And Pests: Nationwide Assessment and Strategy Needed to Enhance the Climate Resilience of Farms and Forests

Filed 45m ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Nationaal Archief · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A GAO report finds USDA has taken few steps to prepare farms and forests for the climate-related spread of diseases and pests, even as funding and staffing for the programs that would do that work have shrunk. USDA officials told investigators back in 2023 that these risks weren't yet folded into climate resilience planning, with integration merely planned for someday.

USDA's Climate Hubs have offered some research and forecasting, including models for the southern pine beetle, but GAO found the hubs losing staff and facing further cuts. When GAO asked USDA in April 2026 for updated information on the impact of those cuts, the department simply didn't provide it.

GAO calculates invasive species have cost U.S. agriculture and forestry at least $550 billion since 1960, and a 2024 federal budget analysis estimated climate change could add $300 million to $2.2 billion a year to crop insurance payouts. GAO's recommendation: assess the risk nationwide and build an actual strategy. USDA offered no written agreement or disagreement.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Asking a department to write a strategy and getting silence back is its own kind of answer. When the agency won't even hand over updated numbers on its own budget cuts, you start to wonder if the plan is the absence of a plan. A farmer watching his vines get eaten alive doesn't much care whether the report was filed on time.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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