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Matthew Moscou is a plant pathologist who worked at the U.S Department of Agriculture’s Cereal Disease Lab in St. Paul for about two and a half years. Part of Moscou’s job was to help growers breed wheat, barley and oats that are more disease resistant. 

“We’re really meeting key goals of the stakeholders,” Moscou said. “We have a national remit in what we do, and we get extremely positive feedback from plant breeders for breeding wheat in Texas and North Dakota … in Washington.”

Diseases like stem rust and head blight can cause some of the most damage among cereal crops. In extreme cases, they can cause yield losses as high as 50 percent. Moscou loved his work. But last week, he got an unexpected email from the USDA notifying him that he was terminated from his position. 

Moscou was one of at least three federal employees who lost their jobs from that particular lab, a small research facility on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus. His termination letter from the USDA states that it was based on “performance.” But, he and a few other colleagues who were fired say they never received negative evaluations. 

MPR News contacted the USDA Midwest Regional Office but received no reply. 

Moscou said he thinks there’s room to make cuts in the federal government, but these firings weren’t well planned.

“This was just to make the cuts, and following the precedent that we can always rehire later if we have to, and that’s just no what’s going to happen here,” he said. “You’re losing potentially huge amounts of expertise in this field that’s just not going to come back.”

Agricultural economist Vincent Smith agrees some reductions to the USDA workforce can be justified. He’s director of the American Enterprise Institute Policy Studies Program. But Smith said the way that the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE was administering the cuts didn’t seem reasonable.

“There’s a widespread view that what is happening with DOGE is arbitrary and capricious,” Smith said. “And does not reflect an understanding of what is needed from the government in terms of the services that they provide.”

The team Moscou was cut from at the USDA often works closely with plant pathologists at the University of Minnesota.

This relationship goes back more than a century. 

Brian Steffenson, a professor at the U of M, works closely with the Cereal Disease Lab and is disheartened by the dismissal of the USDA scientists. He foresees several negative ripple effects.

“It will certainly have a big impact on my research, because we have these collaborations, and I rely on them to, you know, provide some of the cultures and the expertise of these pathogens to work on,” he said. “But what I’m more concerned about are the producers and end users that may suffer from crop loss.”

He noted that the USDA lab scientists do important work across the country, scouting for rust infections, which can spread easily.

Jim Anderson, a professor in the U of M’s department of agronomy and plant genetics, said many of the wheat varieties are created in the public sector in university breeding programs. The work that the USDA Cereal Disease Lab scientists does with breeding disease resistant wheat varieties and screening for pathogens, Anderson added, is “unique.”

“There’s really no equivalent work being done in the private sector,” he said. “So what we lost with the firings of these positions and what they were doing is irreplaceable, especially that service component. Nobody’s going to be able to replace that service component … because those positions are lost, the expertise is lost and now, how do we get it back? How do we kind of backfill that? I don’t really see a viable path to do that without these positions being restored.”

For the Minnesota Wheat Research and Promotion Council, these cuts are shocking. Executive director Brian Sorenson says he can’t stress enough how important ongoing research is for the agricultural industry. If crops fail, that can mean higher prices for those commodities. That can ultimately affect the consumer. 

“The wheats would be more expensive, or we might have to import wheat, if we’re not able to produce the wheat here and there’s that potential for increasing the cost of brand new wheat-based products going forward,” he said.

Meanwhile, the USDA is attempting to rehire employees it fired in “error.” But, scientists at the lab say they haven’t heard updates as to whether they’ll return to work. 

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A team at the U.S Department of Agriculture’s Cereal Disease Lab in St. Paul got notice last week that some of their jobs were getting cut. Experts warn that cutting jobs in this area will harm research and potentially affect the prices of wheat, barley and oats.

Experts foresee negative ripple effects in termination of USDA scientists in St. Paul lab

Wheat harvest is in full swing near Patterson, Wash.

Experts foresee negative ripple effects in termination of USDA scientists in St. Paul lab

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