May 19 (Reuters) – Three employees of the largest
agricultural research facility in the U.S. have filed federal
whistleblower complaints alleging that the facility’s conditions
are hazardous to workers and undermine their research, even as
farmers are facing pressing issues like climate change,
according to documents reviewed by Reuters and interviews with
staff.
The Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) near
Washington D.C. is the largest research facility owned by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and has long been the
flagship of U.S. farm research. Yet conditions at the facility
have been worsening for years due to staff cuts and deferred
maintenance that have left its basic systems in disrepair,
according to the documents and interviews.
Reuters spoke with five current and one former employee of
the facility who said that fume ventilation hoods in labs fail
to meet code, fire alarms are left broken for months, wild
temperature swings make work uncomfortable and undermine
experiments, and even toilets and running water are often not
functioning. The news agency reviewed hundreds of documents,
photographs and videos the employees shared to support their
claims.
The employee grievances filed Tuesday with the U.S. Office
of the Special Counsel (OSC), which protects federal
whistleblowers, cited years of mismanagement and unsafe work
conditions in a dossier whose details have not previously been
made public.
The OSC is in the process of scheduling interviews with the
employees who filed complaints, said Ward Morrow, Assistant
General Counsel at the American Federation of Government
Employees (AFGE).
“Our employees’ health and well-being is our top priority,”
a spokesperson at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS),
which oversees BARC, told Reuters. “We remain committed to the
ongoing effort to modernize our research facilities so they have
workspaces that can support the critical research they carry
out.”
Ashaki “Teddi” Mitchell, vice president of AFGE Local 3147 –
which represents BARC workers – and a biological science
laboratory technician at the facility, said the core issue is
“normalized apathy” from management.
Mitchell, who has worked for BARC for 34 years and is one of
the staff who filed complaints, called the condition of the
facility “heartbreaking.”
“We can do so much here,” she said of research into pressing
agricultural issues like climate change and food security.
“We’re just not doing it.”
Years of staff complaints came to a head on Christmas Day of
2022, when a blast of cold weather burst the plumbing inside a
research building at BARC. Water, ceiling tiles and drywall
cascaded into offices, laboratories and storage rooms, wrecking
equipment, records and data.
After the December flood, USDA managers asked employees to
return to the building to begin the cleanup process even as the
space – which houses labs that research pests, invasive species
and water resources – remained littered with debris that
independent testing showed contained asbestos and mold,
according to internal emails and reports from outside
contractors.
The ARS spokesperson said the agency has committed $925,000
to the initial work of restoring the flooded building and
replacing damaged equipment, and that it has conducted mold
remediation.
The USDA said that only essential staff are working in
the affected building as repairs are underway.
“ARS has taken immediate actions to remediate damage and
continues to work closely with Occupational Safety and Health
and facilities staff to ensure our facility complies with
environmental and safety standards,” it said.
The issues at BARC illustrate the declining state of U.S.
public agriculture research, which experts say threatens the
country’s position as a leading agricultural innovator, even as
farmers face unprecedented challenges from a changing climate.
The USDA spokesperson confirmed that reduced funding was
impacting scientific research.
Government-owned and -funded labs have historically helped
the U.S. become a leading agricultural economy by developing
higher-yield and pest-resilient crops and animals. But spending
on public research has dropped a third over the past 20 years,
according to the USDA, even as China, the EU, and Brazil have
grown their spending.
Most agriculture research in the U.S. has shifted to the
private sector, whose innovations are available to farmers
mainly through buying products from companies.
“We have to understand there’s a cost associated with that,
and farmers end up bearing that cost,” Agriculture Secretary Tom
Vilsack told Congress in March, speaking to the consequences of
this trend.
Public research also tends to emphasize issues of social
value, like climate change, said Phil Pardey, an applied
economics professor at the University of Minnesota. Without more
public research, U.S. farmers could become less resilient to
changing farm conditions and fall further behind international
competitors, he said.
STAFF CUTS
Founded in 1910, the BARC facility spans nearly 7,000 acres
in Prince George’s County, Maryland, near the nation’s capital.
The property is dotted with stately brick laboratory and
administrative buildings and dozens of greenhouses, livestock
barns and research fields.
The issues documented by workers and reported here affect
primarily the research buildings on the campus, whose labs
conduct experiments on invasive insects, animal genomics,
sustainable crop practices and more.
BARC churned out important findings for decades. Its
researchers bred the turkey most Americans eat on Thanksgiving
in the 1940s and the Roma tomato in the 1950s.
But today, staff cuts and vacancies are hindering research
scientists and their staff.
The number of employees at BARC has fallen from 600 in 2017
to 550 today, according to an ARS spokesperson. The facilities
staff has shrunk from 121 in 2012 to 87 in 2023, and as of May,
the facilities department had 30 vacancies, the spokesperson
said.
At eight BARC buildings, the fire alarm systems are
inoperable, according to documentation provided by the workers.
To compensate, staff have been asked to conduct a fire watch, in
which monitors patrol an area and alert others to any sign of
fires, according to internal staff advisories from management
seen by Reuters.
Temperature regulation is another issue. One recent spring
day, an employee’s office reached 93 degrees, they told Reuters.
On December 26, 2022, the day after the major flood, it was 47
degrees inside that building, and staff had been using space
heaters for offices and labs, according to photos taken on the
26th and seen by Reuters.
The unreliable conditions are affecting research outcomes,
making it at times impossible to complete experiments or
replicate their findings, said two research employees.
Claudette Joyner, president of AFGE Local 3147 and a realty
specialist at BARC who has worked there for 37 years, said
ongoing vacancies raise existential questions.
“I can’t leave this place for the next generation to worry
about basic needs,” said Joyner, who is another of the staff who
filed complaints. “That’s where it’s at: can we perform the
basic job here at the facility?”
The ARS spokesperson told Reuters that “declining investment
in agricultural research means that we are missing critical
opportunities to capitalize on the powerful potential of our
world-class scientists.”
WE’RE EXPOSED’
The deficiencies at BARC also pose significant health risks,
employees say.
At the building that flooded in December, the laboratory
chemical fume hoods, which are meant to ventilate research
areas, are nearly all out of compliance with USDA code,
according to data from annual inspections in 2020, 2021, and
2022 collated by BARC staff and seen by Reuters.
Hoods must draw air at an average of 60 to 100 feet per
minute, a measurement called the “face velocity,” to ensure
proper ventilation, according to USDA standards.
All but one of the 28 fume hoods in the BARC building had
face velocities outside the recommended range at some point in
the three years, with 18 hoods out of compliance for all three
years, according to the data.
This spring, Mitchell was overwhelmed by an unidentified
chemical smell at the building, fainted, and hit her head,
requiring emergency medical services, according to her account
and documents seen by Reuters. Since the incident, she has had
increased headaches and is still not sure what caused it.
“Employees are exposed to chemicals, biologicals, fumes,
construction hazards, physical hazards – we’re exposed to a
number of things at a facility this big,” Mitchell said.
The USDA did not comment on specific allegations of health
risks.
After the December flood, a firm brought in by USDA to
assess the damage, Environmental Health Consultants LLC, found
asbestos in flooring and ceiling material that had fallen into
offices and labs, and mold in some areas of the building,
according to reports prepared on January 3 and 4 by the firm for
USDA and seen by Reuters.
After receiving the reports and a contractor’s cleanup
quote, BARC’s director, Howard Zhang, told employees in a
January 9 email seen by Reuters to enter the building to
retrieve items they wanted to save to lower the cleanup cost.
While the mold report included a recommendation that cleanup
workers wear respirators and full-body coveralls, Zhang’s email
only recommended that staff wear masks.
Zhang did not respond to a request to comment and USDA did
not provide any comment on the timeline or conditions of workers
returning to the flooded building. The ARS spokesperson told
Reuters weekly mold air sampling is ongoing in the building.
USDA management has been made aware of these issues. On
February 22, several BARC employees met with Thomas Shanower,
the director of USDA’s Northeast Area, a division that oversees
15 research centers, including BARC. They showed him a
slideshow, seen by Reuters, that documented building and safety
issues.
Conditions at the facility have not changed since the
meeting, said Mitchell, who attended.
The issues with chemical fumes, fire protection and other
conditions could violate Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) standards, said Milly Rodriguez, health
and safety specialist with the AFGE.
“Some of those could have longer-term health
effects,” Rodriguez said.
Employees at BARC have also not received mandatory OSHA
training in several years, according to the slideshow prepared
by staff for the February meeting with BARC management.
(Reporting by Leah Douglas; editing by Richard Valdmanis and
Claudia Parsons)
