A department spokesperson reiterated that point, claiming the secretary “has emphasized the importance of ensuring USDA is facts-based and data-driven, especially when creating and developing policies. To achieve this, the department not only relies on data and science from within our agencies … but has also worked to improve data integration so we can measure decisions and outcomes against clear performance standards.”

But longtime agriculture policy watchers say USDA’s actions under Trump don’t match its rhetoric.

“If this administration wants to be transparent and use evidence-based policy, then what we’re seeing at USDA seems not to be in line with that stance,” said Susan Offutt, who led the department’s Economic Research Service for a decade under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

Jobs on the chopping block

Perdue’s short-lived plan to end the longstanding Forest Service job training program left lawmakers on both sides scratching their heads about how the decision was made.

The centers train low-income youth to respond to natural disasters, maintain national forests and work on rural infrastructure projects. Perdue wanted to hand them over to the Labor Department, which already oversees a much larger number of job training sites.

But the move entailed shuttering nine facilities in rural districts across the country and potentially laying off some 1,100 workers — a deal-breaker even for normally supportive members of Congress.

USDA’s hasty rollout didn’t help, either. Lawmakers said they weren’t briefed in advance of the May announcement, and the chief of the Forest Service told her staff she was given just four days’ notice .

After the rocky launch, Perdue’s attempts to justify the changes to Congress fell flat, as Republicans from Newhouse to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lobbied the administration to back down.

In an interview earlier this month, Newhouse praised Perdue for listening to lawmakers and changing course. “They wanted to make sure that taxpayer dollars were being used as efficiently as possible,” he said. “On paper, it probably looked like the right thing to do to consolidate these centers.”

But the episode points to data problems behind the decision.

In the official regulatory notice last May, the Labor Department defended the plan to shut down the Forest Service job centers by claiming they “suffer from a variety of problems, including operating under-capacity, not achieving long-term student outcomes, and operating in an inefficient manner.” However, no data was provided by either department to support that statement.

The Trump administration has also asserted in budget documents that the USDA-run sites on average were more costly and less effective than other centers managed by the Labor Department — even though their own performance data shows that most of the Forest Service centers scored in the top 25 percent of all job training centers, meaning they significantly outperformed the other sites.

A USDA spokesperson said it’s the Labor Department’s decision to shutter any of the job training centers. But the closures were a central piece of the plan from the day it was initiated by Perdue and announced to startled lawmakers and federal workers.

The spokesperson said officials are now searching for “a pathway that will maximize opportunity and results for students, minimize disruptions and improve overall performance and integrity,” citing the need for the Forest Service to focus on its “core natural resource mission to improve the condition and resilience of our nation’s forests.”

A slaughterhouse overhaul invites safety questions

In certain cases, questions about USDA’s use of data have exposed its policies to bureaucratic and legal hurdles. That includes lawsuits and an inspector general investigation into whether food safety officials relied on faulty data to justify their recent overhaul of pork slaughterhouse inspections.

The final rule released in October removes federal limits on pork processing line speeds — allowing meatpackers to move more carcasses per hour and maximize profits. But labor advocates have long warned that ratcheting up the pace of operations in messy, humid slaughterhouses will further endanger plant workers, who already face higher rates of injury than those in other industries.

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service maintains that worker safety is under the Labor Department’s jurisdiction, so it wasn’t a factor in shaping the final rule.

However, in a February 2018 regulatory notice , FSIS wrote that any evaluation of changing the processing line speeds “should include the effects of line speed on establishment employee safety.” Officials went on to claim that their “preliminary analysis” showed that plants with faster line speeds under a pilot program actually recorded lower worker injury rates than other facilities.