Fact-check: Does Goldman Sachs oversee the Texas grid?
Chelsey Cox
Austin American-Statesman

A Facebook post: "DO YOU KNOW Heidi Cruz, Ted's wife, is managing director of Goldman Sachs. They oversee the Texas utilities."

Ruling: Partly False

Here's why: The state of Texas is still reeling from a historic mid-February snowstorm that overtaxed its power grid. More than 4 million people waited several days in frigid temperatures for power to be restored, USA TODAY reported.

Heidi Cruz, a high-ranking executive at investment banking company Goldman Sachs and wife of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, shares part of the blame for the outages, claims a Feb. 21 Facebook post.

"DO YOU KNOW Heidi Cruz, Ted's wife, is managing director of Goldman Sachs. They over see the Texas utilities," the post states.

USA TODAY reached out to the poster for comment.

Back from Cancun:Ted Cruz returned home from Mexico to a surprise mariachi band and more #CanCruz-inspired TikToks

The Cruz family made headlines in the aftermath of the Texas snowstorm for traveling to Mexico on Feb. 17, according to USA TODAY. Millions of Texans were still without power on the day of their departure.

Cruz faced criticism from his Democratic counterparts and the media and returned to Texas a day after landing in Cancun. The senator called the trip "a mistake," USA TODAY reported.

Heidi Cruz works for Goldman Sachs

Heidi Cruz began working as a vice president at the global investment conglomerate Goldman, Sachs & Co. in 2005, according to her LinkedIn page. She was promoted to managing director in 2012, according to a profile in Greater Houston Partnership.

Cruz was described as the "family breadwinner" in a 2018 profile in The Atlantic. She took unpaid leave from her job in 2015 to campaign for Ted Cruz when he ran for the 2016 Republican nomination for president, according to the story.

Does Goldman Sachs oversee Texas utilities?

Suspected ties between the investment banking firm and Texas energy surfaced on Twitter this month. A Feb. 20 tweet claimed Goldman Sachs, and by extension Heidi Cruz, has a "controlling interest in several Texas energy utilities."

TXU Corp., a Dallas-based energy company, was acquired for $45 billion in 2007 by Goldman Sachs and private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Texas Pacific Group, according to a company press release published on wsj.com.

The energy company was renamed Energy Future Holdings after the acquisition. The falling price of natural gas, as well as the cost of taking the company private, soon took a toll on EFC. The company collapsed seven years later after subsidiary Texas Competitive Electric Holdings filed for bankruptcy, The Motley Fool reported in 2015

.

The EFH website provides no further updates.

A representative from Goldman Sachs told Newsweek that the investment bank does not have a controlling stake in any U.S. energy company.

USA TODAY reached out to Goldman Sachs for comment.

About 90% of the state's power is managed by the nonprofit Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Your stories live here.

The claim that Goldman Sachs executive Heidi Cruz, wife of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, works for a company that oversees Texas' utilities is Partly False. It is true that Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, but the company has no present ties to Texas utility companies. Goldman Sachs was one of three investors that acquired a Texas energy company in 2007, but the company went bankrupt seven years later. 

Sources

Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 17, "'An electrical island': Texas has dodged federal regulation for years by having its own power grid"

USA TODAY, Feb. 19, "Ted Cruz's trip to Mexico earned him widespread criticism. Will it matter for his political future?"

USA TODAY, Feb. 19, "Another winter storm slams Northeast, Mid-Atlantic; 224K still without power in Texas; Little Rock, Arkansas, ties 1918 snow record"

USA TODAY, Feb. 19, "Ted Cruz escaped to Cancun during a crippling Texas storm in a pandemic, and travelers have so many questions"

Energy Future Holdings, accessed Feb. 23, "Energy Future Holdings"

The Motley Fool, May 23, 2015, "Energy Future Holdings: How the Biggest Leveraged Buyout In History Became a Disaster"

The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 26, 2007, "Full Text of TXU Press Release On Firm Being Taken Private"

Greater Houston Partnership, accessed Feb. 23, "Heidi Cruz, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs & Co."

LinkedIn, accessed Feb. 23, "Heidi Cruz"

The Atlantic, Oct. 18, 2018, "Heidi Cruz Didn’t Plan for This"

Newsweek, Feb. 23: "Fact Check: Does Heidi Cruz's Employer, Goldman Sachs, Control Texas Energy Utilities?"

Fact Check: Does Heidi Cruz's Employer, Goldman Sachs, Control Texas Energy Utilities?

Lauren Giella  2/23/2021 NEWSWEEK

©Rick Wilking/Reuters Heidi Cruz introduces her husband, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, at a campaign event at in Davenport, Iowa, on January 31. 

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and family faced criticism over their trip to Cancun amid the power failure in the state. Now some people have turned their attention toward Cruz's wife, Heidi

The Claim

Heidi Cruz, who has an MBA from Harvard Business School, is a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

Some people on Twitter made the connection between Goldman Sachs and a merger agreement involving TXU Corp., the former parent company of Texas electricity provider TXU Energy.

Users claimed that Goldman Sachs has "controlling interest" in several Texas energy utility companies.

Guess who is managing director at Goldman Sachs which has controlling interest in several Texas energy utilities?

HEIDI CRUZ.— Jeras Ikehorn (@JerasIkehorn) February 20, 2021

The Facts

The Alternative Investments unit of Goldman Sachs was involved in the original TXU investment. Currently, the unit has no controlling stake in this or any other Texas utility company.

"A Goldman Sachs fund was part of a private equity consortium that bought TXU in 2007, but following the company's bankruptcy years ago we no longer had a stake," a Goldman Sachs spokesperson told Newsweek on Monday. "We do not have any controlling stake in any U.S. energy company."

In 2007, TXU Corp was purchased in a private equity acquisition by Texas Energy Future Holdings Limited Partnership, a group led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. TXU Corp was then known as Energy Future Holdings Corp (EFH).

As part of the deal, TXU's main entities were maintained. TXU Energy retained its name and was the retail provider of electricity, while TXU Power, the wholesale electricity generation, was renamed Luminant, and TXU Electric Delivery, the transmission and distribution utility, was renamed Oncor.

In 2014, Energy Future Holdings (EFH) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because of unsustainable debt and persistently low wholesale power prices.

In October 2016, certain subsidiaries of EFH, including TXU Energy and Luminant, announced they had emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy through a tax-free spinoff from Energy Future Holding Corp under the new parent company Texas Competitive Electric Holding (TCEH).

TCEH was later renamed and rebranded as Vistra Energy Corp, now known as Vistra Corp. According to Reuters, through its subsidiaries, Vistra is engaged in electricity market activities, including electricity generation, wholesale energy sales and purchases, commodity risk management and retail sales of electricity to end users.

"Goldman Sachs does not have a controlling interest in Vistra," a Vistra spokesperson told Newsweek on Monday. "Vistra is a publicly-traded company with only three shareholders holding more than 5% of Vistra's shares outstanding, none of which are Goldman Sachs."

A "controlling interest" means a shareholder owns a majority (50.01 percent or higher) of the outstanding shares of a given company.

Records from Fintel show Goldman Sachs Group Inc. filed a 13F-HR form disclosing ownership of 1,375,718 shares of Vistra Energy Corp., with total holdings valued at $27,046,000 USD as of December 31, 2020.

The shares are held on behalf of individual brokerage clients of Goldman Sachs and do not represent a position that Goldman Sachs itself has taken.

The Ruling

False.

Goldman Sachs does not have a controlling interest in any Texas energy utility company.

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Goldman Sachs Could Earn $200 Million From Polar Vortex Energy Trading

Actually collecting its haul could prove difficult in reality, however.

Rhian Hunt
(TMFRhianHunt)

MOTLEY FOOL
Mar 5, 2021 

During the polar vortex which brought searing cold to much of the U.S. and disastrous conditions to Texas, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and other big investment banks racked up hundreds of millions of dollars -- on paper -- through energy trading. Goldman is currently sitting on a potential $200 million gold mine thanks to the massive, prolonged intrusion of Arctic air, according to Bloomberg. But collecting its jackpot could prove tricky.

The bank earned the theoretical windfall both through financial hedges as well as by selling electricity and natural gas directly. A Goldman spokesperson, Maeve DuVally, said "as a market-maker and liquidity provider, we were positioned to help our clients manage their risks in that challenging environment," though the assistance also proved very lucrative, at least nominally.

IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.

Anonymous sources with an inside view on the situation reported to Bloomberg that Goldman's executives believe they will only be able to collect approximately around 50% of the sum, or $100 million. This is due to the major fallout from the polar vortex, including government reactions, litigation, and the bankruptcy or potential bankruptcy of energy companies in the frigid meteorological event's wake.

Goldman Sachs wasn't the only bank to cash in on the deep freeze. Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) allegedly earned several hundred million dollars when Texas wholesale electricity prices skyrocketed 10,000%, the Financial Times reports, despite the bank having smaller energy investments than other institutions. The bank said its winnings are "offset by losses and reduced revenues related to investments in wind and other alternate power suppliers" but declined to provide actual figures.

TEXAS

Nearly three dozen power facilities that failed in the 2011 winter storm failed again in 2021, according to an analysis by ABC13.


Records show dozens of power plants repeat failures

Sat, March 6, 2021

Video Transcript

KEATON FOX: Hi there. I'm ABC 13's data analyst, Keaton Fox. We've been taking a look at power plants that went offline in 2021 versus the power plants that went offline in the 2011 winter storm. 10 years ago where that was the last time before 2021 that we had to see those rolling blackouts. Let me actually show you some of the data here.

All of the red counties are where power plants went offline in 2021. And as you can see, Harris County, very much a bright red county because we had quite a few power generation units go offline. 71 units at 11 different facilities across our area that went offline. We're

Getting this data, by the way, coming to us from ERCOT, who has released some of that data, but not all of the data. Only power plants that agreed to have their names released in this data set actually got released. And we know that there are at least three dozen of those power generation units that were offline in 2011 that went offline again in 2021.

Which would signify that if they would have done some of the things that had been suggested in a 2011 federal report-- There was a FERC Commission, a Federal Energy Commission that went over everything that happened in 2011 when we lost power, including winterization. They said if you go and you winterize these plants, it is a good possibility that we're not going to see this thing happen again. Well as we know, many of those plants, if not all of the plants, did little to nothing to actually winterize.

And then 2021 rolls around and we see everything happening once again. In fact, one of those CEOs, the CEO of Energy Energy, that many of you are very familiar with, admitted that they did nothing. That at least two of their plants were not prepared for the cold and that they had not taken the appropriate steps to make sure that things should have happened. I said it was Energy. It's actually Calpine Energy.

That's their CEO who said that they weren't prepared for that. We heard a lot of that testimony over the last year, but certainly, just again looking sort of at this data that we've gotten our hands on here at ABC 13, and then been able to analyze, we can see the impact. Again, across the state here, looking at all of the counties where there were power plants offline, the widespread nature of the problem. And winterization is at the heart of it, knowing that the cold actually knocked a lot of those pipes offline.

The water pipes froze that supplied those power plants as well. So a lot more on this, obviously. There's an interactive map below this video, if you're looking on ABC13.com.

If you're watching on one of our streaming devices, you can head over to ABC13.com and see all of the different plants that went offline. We're, of course, keeping our eye on all the data here at ABC 13. For now, I'm Keaton Fox, 13 Eyewitness News.

10 years after Fukushima, safety is still nuclear power's greatest challenge


Najmedin Meshkati,

 Professor of Engineering and International Relations, 

University of Southern California

 Kiyoshi Kurokawa,

 Professor Emeritus, University of Tokyo

Fri, March 5, 2021

An International Atomic Energy Agency investigator examines Reactor Unit 3 at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant, May 27, 2011. Greg Webb, IAEA/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Ten years ago, on March 11, 2011, the biggest recorded earthquake in Japanese history hit the country’s northeast coast. It was followed by a tsunami that traveled up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) inland, reaching heights of over 140 feet (43.3 meters) in some areas and sweeping entire towns away in seconds.

This disaster left nearly 20,000 people dead or missing. It also destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and released radioactive materials over a large area. The accident triggered widespread evacuations, large economic losses and the eventual shutdown of all nuclear power plants in Japan. A decade later, the nuclear industry has yet to fully to address safety concerns that Fukushima exposed.

We are scholars specializing in engineering and medicine and public policy, and have advised our respective governments on nuclear power safety. Kiyoshi Kurokawa chaired an independent national commission, known as the NAIIC, created by the Diet of Japan to investigate the root causes of the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Najmedin Meshkati served as a member and technical adviser to a committee appointed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to identify lessons from this event for making U.S. nuclear plants safer and more secure.

Those reviews and many others concluded that Fukushima was a man-made accident, triggered by natural hazards, that could and should have been avoided. Experts widely agreed that the root causes were lax regulatory oversight in Japan and an ineffective safety culture at the utility that operated the plant.

These problems are far from unique to Japan. As long as commercial nuclear power plants operate anywhere in the world, we believe it is critical for all nations to learn from what happened at Fukushima and continue doubling down on nuclear safety.

Failing to anticipate and plan

The 2011 disaster delivered a devastating one-two punch to the Fukushima plant. First, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake knocked out off-site electric power. Next, the tsunami breached the plant’s protective sea wall and swamped portions of the site.

Flooding disabled monitoring, control and cooling functions in multiple units of the six-reactor complex. Despite heroic efforts by plant workers, three reactors sustained severe damage to their radioactive cores and three reactor buildings were damaged by hydrogen explosions.

Off-site releases of radioactive materials contaminated land in Fukushima and several neighboring prefectures. Some 165,000 people left the area, and the Japanese government established an exclusion zone around the plant that extended over 311 square miles (807 kilometers) in its largest phase.

For the first time in the history of constitutional democratic Japan, the Japanese Parliament passed a law creating an independent national commission to investigate the root causes of this disaster. In its report, the commission concluded that Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission had never been independent from the industry, nor from the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, which promotes nuclear power.

For its part, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, had a history of disregard for safety. The company had recently released an error-prone assessment of tsunami hazards at Fukushima that significantly underestimated the risks.


Events at the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station, located 39 miles (64 kilometers) from Fukushima, told a contrasting story. Onogawa, which was owned and operated by the Tohoku Electric Power Company, was closer to the earthquake’s epicenter and was hit by an even larger tsunami. Its three operating reactors were the same type and vintage as those at Fukushima, and were under the same weak regulatory oversight.

But Onogawa shut down safely and was remarkably undamaged. In our view, this was because the Tohoku utility had a deep-seated, proactive safety culture. The company learned from earthquakes and tsunamis elsewhere – including a major disaster in Chile in 2010 – and continuously improved its countermeasures, while TEPCO overlooked and ignored these warnings.
Regulatory capture and safety culture

When a regulated industry manages to cajole, control or manipulate agencies that oversee it, rendering them feckless and subservient, the result is known as regulatory capture. As the NAIIC report concluded, Fukushima was a textbook example. Japanese regulators “did not monitor or supervise nuclear safety….They avoided their direct responsibilities by letting operators apply regulations on a voluntary basis,” the report observed.

Effective regulation is necessary for nuclear safety. Utilities also need to create internal safety cultures – a set of characteristics and attitudes that make safety issues an overriding priority. For an industry, safety culture functions like the human body’s immune system, protecting it against pathogens and fending off diseases.

A plant that fosters a positive safety culture encourages employees to ask questions and to apply a rigorous and prudent approach to all aspects of their jobs. It also fosters open communications between line workers and management. But TEPCO’s culture reflected a Japanese mindset that emphasizes hierarchy and acquiescence and discourages asking questions.

There is ample evidence that human factors such as operator errors and poor safety culture played an instrumental key role in all three major accidents that have occurred at nuclear power plants: Three Mile Island in the U.S. in 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011. Unless nuclear nations do better on both counts, this list is likely to grow.
Global nuclear safety grade: Incomplete

Today there are some 440 nuclear power reactors operating around the world, with about 50 under construction in countries including China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Many advocates argue that in light of the threat of climate change and the increasing need for carbon-free baseload electricity generation, nuclear power should play a role in the world’s future energy mix. Others call for abolishing nuclear power. But that may not be feasible in the foreseeable future.

In our view, the most urgent priority is developing tough, system-oriented nuclear safety standards, strong safety cultures and much closer cooperation between countries and their independent regulators. We see worrisome indications in the U.S. that independent nuclear regulation is eroding, and that nuclear utilities are resisting pressure to learn and delaying adoption of internationally accepted safety practices, such as adding filters to prevent radioactive releases from reactor containment buildings with the same characteristics as Fukushima Daiichi.

Man in protective radiation suit and respirator.

The most crucial lesson we see is the need to counteract nuclear nationalism and isolationism. Ensuring close cooperation between countries developing nuclear projects is essential today as the forces of populism, nationalism and anti-globalism spread.

We also believe the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose mission is promoting safe, secure and peaceful uses of nuclear energy, should urge its member states to find a balance between national sovereignty and international responsibility when it comes to operating nuclear power reactors in their territories. As Chernobyl and Fukushima taught the world, radiation fallout does not stop at national boundaries.


As a start, Persian Gulf countries should set aside political wrangling and recognize that with the startup of a nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates and others planned in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, they have a common interest in nuclear safety and collective emergency response. The entire region is vulnerable to radiation fallout and water contamination from a nuclear accident anywhere in the Gulf.

We believe the world remains at the same juncture it faced in 1989, when then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. made this perceptive argument:

“A decade ago, Three Mile Island was the spark that ignited the funeral pyre for a once-promising energy source. As the nuclear industry asks the nation for a second look in the context of global warming, it is fair to watch how its advocates respond to strengthened safety oversight. That will be the measure of whether nuclear energy becomes a phoenix or an extinct species.”

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Kiyoshi Kurokawa, University of Tokyo and Najmedin Meshkati, University of Southern California.

Read more:

The demise of US nuclear power in 4 charts


A decade after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, offshore drilling is still unsafe

Kiyoshi Kurokawa, MD, MACP, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo and Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo. He served as Chairman of the National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, which released its official report in July 2012. The English translation of his book, Regulatory Capture: Will Japan Change? is expected to be released in 2021.

Najmedin Meshkati, Ph.D., CPE, is a Professor of Civil/Environmental, Industrial & Systems Engineering, and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). He teaches and conducts research on technological systems safety and has visited many nuclear power stations around the world, including Chernobyl (1997), Mihama (1999), and Fukushima Daiichi and Daini (2012). He served as a member and technical advisor on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Committee on Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety and Security of U.S. Nuclear Plants.

Germany gives nuke plant operators $2.9B for early shutdown


FILE - In this March 18, 2011 file photo, a traffic sign stands next to the nuclear power plant of Biblis, Germany. The German government said Friday it has agreed with four utility companies that they will receive a combined 2.4 billion euros ($2.9 billion) in compensation for the early shutdown of their nuclear power plants. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, file)

Fri, March 5, 2021

BERLIN (AP) — The German government said Friday it has agreed with four utility companies that they will receive a combined 2.4 billion euros ($2.9 billion) in compensation for the early shutdown of their nuclear power plants.

Germany is on course to phase out the use of nuclear power by the end of 2022. Six nuclear power plants that are still in use will need to be shut down before the end of their original operating life.

Some utility companies have sued the German government, arguing they should receive significant compensation for lost investments and the electricity they can't generate from the plants due to the early shutdown .

In a joint statement the environment and economy ministries said that Swedish utility company Vattenfall will receive 1.425 billion euros. The German companies RWE, EnBW and E.ON/PreussenElektra will share the remaining 1 billion euros.

In return, the companies will have to drop all lawsuits, including a case that Vattenfall brought before a Washington-based international arbitration panel.

The deal needs to be finally approved by the companies' boards and is subject to scrutiny from the European Union's competition authority, which recently launched a probe into a similar agreement between Germany and coal-fired power plant operators.

According figures released Friday by the Federal Statistical Office, wind power became the top source of electricity in Germany in 2020. It accounted for 25.6% of the 502.6 terawatt-hours of electricity generated in the country last year, followed by coal with a share of 24.8%. Nuclear power accounted for 12.1% of the electricity generated in Germany in 2020.

Pfizer's Plant For Boosting COVID-19 Vaccine Production Has Been Rebuked For Repeat Quality Offenses: Bloomberg

Vandana Singh
Fri, March 5, 2021



Pfizer Inc’s (NYSE: PFE) McPherson, Kansas plant used to accelerate production of its COVID-19 vaccine was cited by federal inspectors last year for repeated quality-control violations, reports Bloomberg.


The FDA inspectors visited the plant at the end of 2019 into January 2020 and found that the company released medications for sale after failing to review quality issues thoroughly that arose in routine testing.


Additionally, the report cited bacteria and mold in supposedly sterile areas, an issue seen in previous visits to the facility.


The plant failed to properly sample drug products to ensure they didn’t have excessive levels of certain toxins.


The McPherson plant has previously been rebuked for drug-quality problems and received a warning letter in 2017 for issues similar to those found in 2020. The FDA concluded that Pfizer had addressed the violations in June 2018, a month before it returned to the facility, and found more problems.


Pfizer said that following the January 2020 inspection, it immediately developed and implemented a “robust corrective and preventive action plan” to address the concerns.


Pfizer’s increase in vaccine production capacity was acclaimed last month when President Joe Biden visited its Michigan plant.


CEO Albert Bourla said then he expected the drugmaker to double its manufacturing capacity. The company plans to supply the U.S. with 200 million doses of its two-shot vaccine regimen by the end of May.


Pfizer will conduct the final stage of vaccine production at the Kansas factory, in which the shot is put into vials, packaged, and shipped for distribution.

USDA relocations curtail ag research, farmer confidence

“Best I can tell, they were putting out information that Trump really did not like hearing, like global climate change and things like that,” Ehmke said. “And here in the United States, what we do with groups like that — we can’t send them to Siberia, so we send them to Kansas City.”

TRUMP & AG BOSS SSONNY PERDUE WANTED TO FIRE THE USDA SCIENTISTS THEY COULDN'T SO THEY MOVED THEIR OFFICES

 



USDA Agency Relocations Adrian Polansky, a farmer and former executive director of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency office in Kansas during the Obama administration, stops for a photo while touring his seed processing plant near Belleville, Kan., Friday, March 5, 2021. More than a year after two U.S. Department of Agriculture research agencies were moved from the nation’s capital to Kansas City, they remain critically understaffed and some farmers are less confident in the work they produce. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)Less


ROXANA HEGEMAN
Sat, March 6, 2021


BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — More than a year after two U.S. Department of Agriculture research agencies were moved from the nation's capital to Kansas City, Missouri, forcing a mass exodus of employees who couldn't or didn't want to move halfway across the country, they remain critically understaffed and some farmers are less confident in the work they produce.

The decision to move the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture in September 2019 was pitched as putting them closer to farmers in the nation's breadbasket, though much of their work involves advising members of Congress back in Washington. After the relocation was announced, President Donald Trump's chief of staff at the time, Mick Mulvaney, joked that moving the jobs to Kansas City was also “a wonderful way to streamline government.”

Tom Vilsack inherited a demoralized workforce at the two agencies when he took over as secretary of agriculture under President Joe Biden. With 235 vacancies between them, the agencies continued to hire during the pandemic and administration change, but they are putting out work that is smaller in scope and less frequent, causing some farmers to look elsewhere for data they rely on to run their operations.

Among them is Vance Ehmke, who said that since the USDA relocations occurred, he has been paying a lot more attention to private market analysis and what private grain companies are doing. The information feeds his decisions on everything from whether to buy more land or a new tractor to whether to build more grain bins.

“Here, when we need really good, hard information, you are really starting to question groups like USDA, which before that had a sterling reputation,” Ehmke said recently. “But out in the country, people are worried about how good the information is now because those groups are operating at half capacity.”

The relocation hollowed out years of specialized experience and delayed or scuttled some of the agencies' research and other work. Hiring at the Kansas City site remains well below the roughly 550 high-paying jobs local leaders had anticipated.

Farmers rely on the research to make decisions on a wide range of topics, from rural community planning to farming with climate change and volatile weather conditions, said Aaron Lehman, a farmer who is president of the Iowa Farmers Union.

The ERS examines issues including the rural economy, international trade, food safety and programs that provide food assistance to poor Americans. NIFA, meanwhile, provides grants for agricultural research and other farm services.

“It has gone in the wrong direction in general in terms of accuracy now," said Adrian Polansky, a farmer and former executive director of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency office in Kansas during the Obama administration. "Whether that was for sure based on that transition or whether it was the leadership in the department in terms of what the political goals may have been, I am not exactly sure. But it seems like there was less reliability.”

Polansky said he looks to commercial sources of agricultural information to corroborate USDA data more often now than he did in the past. He said that even after the agencies fill their openings, it will take time to “become fully impactful” because research is a long-term endeavor.

"When you lose significant staff and significant institutional knowledge, there is just not a way that can't impact the product and information from USDA," he said.

Dan O’Brien, a grain market specialist at Kansas State University Research and Extension, acknowledged that farmers have increasingly been questioning the reliability of the government’s agricultural data over the past few years. However, he said those frustrations have dealt more with reports published by other USDA agencies, and that some farmers may be confusing them.

Laura Dodson, the union representative for ERS employees, said the relocation will affect the agency for another five years. It hasn't affected the accuracy of its reports, but it has reduced their scope and frequency.

Dozens of ERS reports have either come out late or not at all, including reports on the organic food sector, antibiotic use in animal production, and hired farm workers and labor markets, among others, Dodson said. For example, a two-year research project on pollinators such as honeybees was shelved because the entire team working on it left the agency rather than move to Kansas City.

ERS published 37 reports in 2018, compared to 11 last year, Dodson said. Those figures don't include its monthly crop price and analysis reports, which have remained fairly steady despite the relocation and the pandemic. Agency employees also published 100 articles in academic journals related to their fields of study in 2018, but just 64 in 2020.

“We help make sure that food is produced safely, timely and responds to changes in the marketplace and changes to environmental sector,” she said. "And so if those become less effective because they are not being informed by good data and research, that will translate directly to how Americans receive their food.”

Matt Herrick, a USDA spokesman, said in an email that he couldn't speak to the volume and variety of ERS reports and research under the Trump administration. “However, when you lose more than half of your expert workforce, there is bound to be a noticeable effect,” he added, noting that the USDA is focused on restoring employee confidence and morale.

When former Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Purdue toured the new Kansas City headquarters in November 2019, he predicted the agencies would be fully staffed by the first quarter of 2020. That didn't happen.

In October 2016 — before Trump's first year in office — ERS had 318 permanent employees, according to USDA data. By October 2019 — just a month after the move — its workforce had shrunk to 164. As of late January 2021, it had 219 employees, including 67 still based in Washington.

The same trend played out at NIFA, which had 320 employees in October 2016. In October 2019, it was down to 112 workers, though it rebounded somewhat to 218 by late January, including 16 based in Washington.

“Best I can tell, they were putting out information that Trump really did not like hearing, like global climate change and things like that,” Ehmke said. “And here in the United States, what we do with groups like that — we can’t send them to Siberia, so we send them to Kansas City.”

Snakes on the Plains: How Texas Snake Zoos Beat the Freeze


Dave Thomas
Fri, March 5, 2021


Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos Getty

On the coldest night of the deep freeze that hit Texas in mid-February, the Serpentarium at the Texas Reptile Zoo was crowded with the cold-blooded—lizards from Madagascar, tortoises from the Sahara, sizable crocodiles and, of course, snakes by the score.

Then the water pipe in the ceiling burst.

Zoo owner Tim Caglarcan walked in to check on his reptiles and found water spraying from the ceiling and pooling on the floor.

“At the time it was a disaster,” he said. “You can imagine walking into your building and it’s raining. It’s freezing outside, and I had to kill the power because we have all the heaters on the ground.”

The week of arctic cold was a statewide disaster, no doubt. People died of cold in their homes when their power went out. Others huddled together in their dark homes for days. Some people didn’t have water. Some couldn’t find food. There’s no discounting that tragedy and trouble.

For those Texans who make a living running the scores of reptile zoos, rattlesnake museums, and snake farms that dot Lone Star highways, the cold was an imminent threat to their critters and their livelihoods. They survived through preparation and dedication.

Texas Rattlesnake Fest May Bite the Dust

At the Texas Reptile Zoo in Bastrop, about 35 miles east of Austin, Tim and Julie Caglarcan had a serious mess on their hands after they killed the power and shut off the water.

“My wife ran over with every towel we had, and we got buckets to soak up the water by hand,” Tim said. “And we had a big hole in the ceiling—we still have it.”

The zoo, housed in a former plant nursery, has about 220 reptiles and about 100 fish. Two of the old greenhouses were converted into herpetariums, but much of the zoo is outdoor space meant to mimic the reptiles’ natural habitat. The zoo is closed during the winter when many of the species brumate (akin to hibernation) underground.

“At the Texas Reptile Zoo, the way we have the animals is as natural as possible,” Caglarcan said. “So we like it when they do things like they're supposed to do.”

But when record low temperatures were forecast, Caglarcan knew he had to step in. Heaters were installed in some burrows. Tarps covered the ground where he knew some animals had dug in for winter.

As the weather worsened, he used a temperature gun to measure ground and burrow temps, and knew he had to do more. Caglarcan brought most of his animals inside the main building—the serpentarium. That meant literally digging up some of them from the earth.

“Basically, we had to evacuate everybody,” he said. For Caglarcan, that meant doing it himself. “I run the whole place right now. I’m always busy around the clock.”

Caglarcan is pretty optimistic that the animals he couldn’t dig up and bring inside survived the winter storm, but he wasn’t so lucky with his plants.

“We lost a lot of our food,” he said. “Our bananas died in the greenhouse. We lost all our cactus—we use our cactus to feed our herbivores like tortoises. We lost a whole crop of winter radishes.”

These struggles on top of last year’s COVID-19 struggles have hit the Texas Reptile Zoo pretty hard.

“I’ve rarely asked for much,” Caglarcan said. “I kind of think this year is gonna be a fundraising year for the place to get us back on track.”

About 450 miles to the west, in remote Fort Davis, the Rattlers and Reptiles rattlesnake museum lost power for four days as temperatures sank as low as 3 degrees. Yet there’s a reason every one of the 200-odd snakes survived.

“I’m a Kansas boy,” proprietor Scott Teppe said. “I’ve lived out on the tundra. So a couple years ago, I redid all the water lines and ran gas lines in… and that’s how I kept it warm.”

There weren't any fans or space heaters or lights, but the ambient temperature stayed high enough to keep the snakes healthy. He keeps the museum at about 60 degrees in winter so that the snakes can brumate.

“They’re fairly dormant,” Teppe said. “They don’t go into a torpor, like a bear does, where they actually go to sleep, but they get lethargic.

“They’re kind of like people—when there’s a warm day in the winter, they’ll sit on the porch and enjoy their coffee, but they’re not going out foraging or looking for a mate or anything.”

Last year, bit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Rattlers and Reptiles had just over 2,000 visitors. The year before, it had been about 5,500.

“It’s not like the Snake Farm over in New Braunfels,” Teppe said. “We are a small facility, and we get incidental tourism from people that are getting off the highway going to Big Bend [National Park].”

The museum has more than 30 species of venomous snakes but keeps a few local non-venomous species so people headed to the nearby national park can be prepared for what they might find in the wild.

Teppe is all about being prepared. He compared it to “The Ant and The Grasshopper” fable. “People in Texas just don’t expect it to get that cold that long. But a week without power isn’t too much where I’m from.”

So he was ready, with a generator, 500 gallons of water, a wood-burning stove, and propane heaters.

If there was one thing he wasn’t ready for, it was being the owner of the museum in the first place.

“When I was in college, I helped the guy that owned it build all the cages and set it all up,” Teppe said. “He passed away a few years ago and left it to me. It’s not where I saw my retirement happening, but…”

He trails off and then starts laughing.

“The Snake Farm in New Braunfels” is the most famous in Texas. Technically the Ray Wylie Hubbard song “Snake Farm” isn’t necessarily about any specific snake farm, but there’s only one place along Interstate 35 with a giant sign saying “Snake Farm Zoo” in red and black letters.

Officially the Animal World & Snake Farm Zoo, the place is about 50 miles south of Austin.

Jarrod Forthman, a director at the zoo, said that even though they did lose power on and off for a few days, they kept the generators running and kept the building “nice and warm” for their couple hundred snakes.

Which is good, because there’s more to displaying snakes than just keeping kids’ hands out of the cobra cage.

“Each species has its own temperature range that we have to keep them at,” Forthman said. “Each individual enclosure is set up for that particular species. Some of our more tropical species, [if the temperature] gets below 70, you can potentially get them sick.”

Many of the smaller animals that make up the outdoor portion of the zoo, such as the birds and primates, were brought indoors to heated buildings. Others, such as the large cats, had additional heat in their winter housing.

“Some of our carnivore housing, they already are able to go inside and get warm,” Forthman said. “But we’re able to add additional heat and additional bedding, just to help out with the colder temperatures than we’re used to facing.”

The zoo’s website shows the alligators submerged in their frozen-over pond, snouts sticking through the ice. “Icing” occurs naturally and allows the gators to survive freezing weather for a while.

Forthman credits protocols and people for helping the zoo get through the winter storm.

“We have emergency response protocols in place that help us in case of disasters like tornadoes or hurricanes, anything that causes power outages, or loss of water,” Forthman said. “And while we weren’t expecting the record-breaking freezes or anything like that, our other protocols acted in their place. We were pretty fortunate.”

Also key was the ability to get employees to the zoo—not a given considering iced-over roads can be shut down in Texas. Ten to 15 employees worked up to 12-hour shifts day and night.

“If we were unable to get staff on site during this time, and if we didn’t have staff willing to work literally around the clock, things could have been different, or a whole lot harder on the folks that did make it.

“But a lot of our staff was available. We do have housing on site that our staff was able to stay in during this time. So that that pretty well saved us.”

One thing that kept staff busy for a while was when a boil-water advisory was issued for the area. Though they had water in storage, they did have to boil water for their 500 animals—including bison and zebras, which can drink quite a bit.

“I’ll tell you what, had that gone on too much longer, things could have gotten bad for sure,” Forthman said.

A lot of fans of the Animal World & Snake Farm Zoo reached out to help during this time and sent in donations, but the zoo wasn’t hurting. In fact, they reached out to their local community and were able to donate firewood to those in need.

Preparation is key, and the zoo is already making improvements to make sure the next time won’t be as tough.

“Our biggest issue that affected us, believe it or not, was our above-ground plumbing,” Forthman said. “We had broken water lines all over the place that we’re still working on now. So that’s going to change before we have another huge freeze like this, that’s for sure.”

Lynx and wolves could return to England as rewilding task force set up by PM
Helena Horton
Fri, March 5, 2021

The Lynx could be returned to Britain

Boris Johnson has asked officials to set up a rewilding "task force" to gauge appetite for returning lynx and wolves to England, the Telegraph can reveal.

In the latest boost for rewilders, a group of stakeholders is already being brought together by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The group will contain farmers and anglers among ecologists and other experts, and it is hoped that by bringing those who may oppose reintroductions of predators into the conversation, minds may be changed and proposed schemes can go ahead.

Stakeholders in the taskforce will help draw up plans to bring back lost species, and discuss any issues landowners may have that need to be mitigated before any scheme goes ahead. Animals under consideration include lynx and wolves, as it is hoped they can keep England's rocketing deer population under control.

A consultation into the widespread release of beavers in England is also coming up this summer, the Telegraph can exclusively reveal, and it is hoped by ministers this will result in a blueprint for reintroduction strategies for other species.


Beavers can currently be released under licence in England, but only if they are kept fenced in. Applications have soared in recent years, as landowners have seen the revenue they can bring in from wildlife watchers and glampers. However, others have said that this strategy is nothing better than creating "wildlife zoos" and they need to be released properly.

Boris Johnson and a powerful group of cabinet ministers, including Lord Goldsmith and Michael Gove, are enthusiastic about the idea of reintroducing animals which went extinct in this country hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Carrie Symonds is also a fan of the idea, and now works for The Aspinall Foundation, which reintroduces rare animals to the wild in other countries.

However, there is opposition to the plans from some anglers, who worry that uncontrolled beaver populations could impact fish numbers, and farmers who are concerned large predators including sea eagles, lynx and wolves could snatch their livestock.

Senior sources inside Natural England, which is responsible for the licensing of beaver releases, hit back at angler groups and said the evidence shows the rodents actually improve fish numbers, as they boost biodiversity, and that dams are built to allow for the migration of river creatures.

An official told the Telegraph: "The anglers are quite rightly seen as a really important constituency for conservation who have actively been campaigning for it for years but they are losing sight of the bigger picture and that's a shame from my point of view.

"We need to get our wildlife into a decent state, it's a shame that anglers don't feel the same.

"They think beaver dams stop fish migrating but from the Ice Age to 400 years ago the salmon and sea trout populations were doing extremely well because beavers create habitat."

There has also been push back from farmers over recent reintroductions of sea eagles in Scotland and the Isle of Wight. They complain that the birds of prey like to snatch lambs and chickens, and could threaten farmland birds.

A new scheme to reintroduce the white-tailed eagle is being proposed in Norfolk, next to the Sandringham Estate, which is understood to be tentatively supporting plans.