News

Doing the Right Thing

Remarks by Bruce I. Knight, Chief, Natural Resources Conservation Service, at the Federal Grants & Agreements Training Conference

New Orleans, LA
April 27, 2004

Thank you, Ed. Good morning, everyone. It is good to be here to kick off our Federal Grants and Agreements Training Conference.

It is awfully early in the morning to start talking about something as complex as Federal grants and agreements. But grants and agreements are an important part of how we do business.

From the beginning of our agency, we have always used our broad authority to enter into agreements with conservation partners, nongovernmental organizations, colleges and universities, State agencies, and American Indian Nations to legally put lots of voluntary conservation on the private lands across America. But, today, there are enough challenges with our Grants and Agreements process that we really do have to start early and work long to make things right.

I urge caution and prudent behavior during the evenings this week, so you will get the maximum benefit from the training.

We are getting pretty close to the second anniversary of the 2002 Farm Bill. The President signed the bill on May 13, 2002. All of us in the conservation partnership are in a period of change and challenges as we gear up to help producers capitalize on this opportunity to meet their conservation goals.

The future of conservation on private lands – a new era – requires not only a continued commitment of resources, but new approaches to getting the job done. And many of these new approaches involve grants and agreements.

More Partners

One new way of doing business is to bring in more partners – often through grants and agreements.

We are already working with more and different groups than ever before – and this trend will continue. America’s investment in conservation over the next ten years is monumental. There is simply too much work for NRCS, conservation districts, RC&D councils, and States to get the job done. We need many other groups to take an active role in making conservation happen.

Most of us here this week are NRCS employees, but some of you come from traditional partner organizations and new partner organizations. We are not entering into this period of change because something is wrong with the way we deliver conservation. I have often said that we already have in this country a world-class system for conservation on private lands. We simply have the best system for voluntary conservation in the World today, a system based on a unique public/private partnership, conservation done on a voluntary basis by landowners, and local leadership.

But the farm bill means that the world’s premier approach to private land conservation is about to get better through greater accountability and increased transparency. And our unique combination of public and private partnerships and voluntary conservation are the reason.

But part of getting better is putting in place a better system for administering our grants and agreements. We need to make sure that we can stand up to any and all scrutiny.

Market-Based Approaches

Another new way of doing business is to emphasize market-based approaches.

The farm bill makes an additional investment of $17 billion for conservation over a ten-year period. But the demand for conservation, both in society and in the agricultural community, is much greater than that. We can come a lot closer to meeting this demand if we use market-based approaches to leverage Federal dollars.

We have been administering our programs in ways that provide incentives in a more market-based way – using incentives to stimulate conservation, rather than treating them as entitlements.

We have created a market-based approach to technical services through the new technical service provider process. This approach has led more than 1,700 people to become Technical Service Providers, with more than 1,100 more in the certification process.

We help farmers and ranchers purchase the services of the Providers. And the providers are playing an important role in planning and implementing conservation on private lands. Last year, this market-based approach put nearly $23 million into local economies and helped us get the job of conservation done.

Agreements play a role in the technical service provider process. We have agreements with several organizations to recognize their certification programs for service providers. We have other agreements in place with organizations that provide training for service providers.

We have been working for the last couple of years to put our agreements with partners on a more businesslike footing. We are looking for fair prices for work done, for clearly defined deliverables, and for definite delivery schedules.

The agreement process was not as smooth last year as it has been in the past, if looked at only from business-as-usual eyes. But it was important for us to come up with agreements that met today’s standards.

Gone are the days when Cooperative Agreements could be fairly general, confined to outlining broad areas of cooperation. Today, Cooperative Agreements must include specific deliverables – part of our seeps toward a new era of conservation. Moreover, we need to have output measures that go beyond simply listing the deliverables by type.

We have new legal authority – dating from 2001 – to enter into agreements noncompetitively. These are called contribution agreements. But contribution agreements still need to spell out the deliverables and the schedule.

We are in a period of adjustment for both NRCS and our partners. Our partners are having to adapt to the new philosophy behind Cooperative Agreements. There is more “back and forth” between NRCS and the partners. That takes time.

Last year, we tried to make our expectations clear in meetings with partners and in other ways. I have to admit that it would have been better to have revised our directive system to more clearly outline what we want in a Cooperative Agreement. Beyond that, it would have helped to have updated instructional materials for our partners to use in coming up with their proposals.

The good news is that these materials are ready for our training conference this week.

Accountability

A third new way of doing business can be summed up in one word: Accountability.

Enactment of the farm bill demonstrates the commitment of the Administration, Congress, and
the American people to the cause of conservation on working agricultural lands. The investment in conservation represented by this farm bill is unprecedented in the history of farm bills. But along with that investment comes an even greater expectation of accountability.

The Department of Agriculture is charged with investing the farm bill money wisely. We will have to demonstrate to the Administration, Congress, and, ultimately, to the people that we are getting measurable results from their investment.

All of our existing partners, and many new partners, will have a role to play. Each partner will assume a portion of the burden of accountability. Ultimately, the resources represented by the farm bill will flow through those partners who can best demonstrate results.

The trend toward increased accountability in government is not new, but it is growing. We in conservation are not singled out.

Increasingly, NRCS is called on to document and prove what we accomplish with the resources we receive – whether we are doing the work ourselves or through partners or, now, technical service providers. We will not shirk this responsibility.

We, and all of our partners, including conservation districts, will increasingly be judged by our accomplishments. We have to be able to bear up under this scrutiny.

Our role in conservation will grow or shrink in proportion to our ability to demonstrate results. Anything less than 100 percent is not acceptable.

Changing Standards

We are here this week because it is time to face up to changes in the requirements for Federal grants and agreements.

In the distant past, it was acceptable – even desirable – to keep things pretty informal. An agreement was like a handshake between friends. Most of our agreements were with people we knew. We shared many, if not all of the same values. In fact, the distinction between employees and partners was not always clear. We just decided what we wanted to accomplish and agreed to do it.

That system worked well for the first 50 years. But it hasn’t been working as well for the last couple of decades – starting with the Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreements Act of 1977.

The Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreements Act required Federal agencies to award these agreements primarily through competitive processes. However, for the next 20 years and more, NRCS continued to award agreements without using these procedures.

We did not fare too well in a USDA audit conducted in 1998. As an outcome of that audit, NRCS held its first Grants and Agreements Training Conference in 2000 in Reno, Nevada.

The training was a success; however, our practices failed to follow our policy. Our culture struggled to do what we knew to be right. Our own Oversight and Evaluation Report of 2003 still showed too little change. We were still awarding 97 percent of our agreements noncompetitively.

Conclusion

My message today is simple. Standards of accountability in the Federal Government have been changing for years, and it is finally time for us to catch up.
We need to change. We need to change quickly. And we need to change now.

The fact that our grants and agreements procedures have not been up to snuff for a number of years is not front page news. Failure to follow the right steps in administering federal grants and agreements probably won’t land us in jail or on the front page. But failure to follow the rules is serious business, and we must take it seriously. The credibility of our Agency and of our conservation programs is at stake.

We have a long history of high integrity, and we need to keep that reputation bright. We should be always about doing the right thing. Our programs are right for the land, and our agreements must follow.

We must react to the critical reports we have received. Those of us in NRCS and in our partner organizations need to know the current procedures for grants and agreements and follow them to the best of our ability. That is why we are here this week.

I am going to stick around for as long as I can this week and attend the sessions. That is a measure of how important I think this training is.

Thank You.