EDITORIAL: Mission creep

Tom Vilsack was in Las Vegas last week to promote a new program designed to help opioid addicts get their lives back together. Mr. Vilsack, the U.S. secretary of agriculture, said the initiative involves expanding “transitional housing” facilities to provide shelter for users working to get clean while under court supervision.

“The journey from having a substance-use disorder to recovery requires understanding, treatment and support,” the secretary said. “But too often that journey is not completed because of a lack of safe, affordable housing options for those on their way back to being healthy, contributing members of our communities.”

The new measure will provide financing for the construction, expansion and improvement of half-way houses. It will also encourage nonprofits to purchase USDA-owned homes for conversion to transitional housing while providing subsidies to landlords of USDA rental properties who offer vacancies to recovering addicts.

No doubt this is all well-intentioned and in response to a growing and troubling issue, particularly in rural areas. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 14,000 Americans died in 2014 from overdoses involving prescription opioids, up almost four-fold since 1999. About 2 million people in the country are addicted to such pain pills, Mr. Vilsack said.

But would it be impertinent to ask why the federal Department of Agriculture is in the real estate business?

The answer speaks volumes about our government on the Potomac.

The agency has, in fact, issued loans to qualified farmers since 1949, and eventually expanded that effort to make all rural residents and even some in suburbia eligible for assistance. Today, under the Rural Development program, the USDA offers a variety of mortgage loans and grants as an effort to “improve the economy and quality of rural life in America.” This fiscal year, the department will administer $38 billion in such aid.

Not surprisingly, the housing crash left the agency with plenty of delinquent properties on its hands. The Wall Street Journal reported that at the end of fiscal year 2011, the USDA had $79.2 million on the books from delinquent mortgage debt.

All this sure seems a bit far afield for an agency that dates back to 1839 when Congress created a division in the Patent Office and funded it with $1,000 for “the collection of agricultural statistics and other agricultural purposes.” The division eventually morphed into the Department of Agriculture in 1862 and reached Cabinet status in 1889.

In the mid 1800s, more than 60 percent of Americans lived on ranches or farms. The number today is 2 percent. Yet the department continues to balloon, spreading taxpayer cash around on hundreds of endeavors only tangentially related to farmers. Included in the agency’s 2015 budget of $140 billion are renewable energy initiatives, mortgage and rental assistance programs, school lunch and telecom ventures, business grants and, now, drug rehab activities.

The bureaucratic instinct for self preservation runs wide and deep. The Department of Agriculture is hardly alone among federal agencies when it comes to broadening its reach and range. But as a microcosm, the agency’s mission creep goes a long way toward explaining a national debt racing toward $20 trillion and offers a real-world consequence of a federal government that recognizes fewer and fewer constitutional restrictions.