'Flawed' Report Encourages Spending

May 11, 2000

A Heritage Foundation paper says problems from a "flawed" USDA land use survey are encouraging unnecessary federal spending. USDA admitted a "problem" had been discovered in a land use report. The report, says Heritage, caused "dozens of elected officials (to rush) forward with a variety of costly land preservation schemes based on the survey. s erroneous data."

On April 19, USDA announced that the 1997 National Resources Inventory issued in December 1999 was being revised. "NRI results announced in December ... should be used only as preliminary data until revisions are complete," USDA said. "The revisions will correct an error identified in Iowa State University. s computer program used to process NRCS (Natural Resources and Conservation Service) survey data from more than 800,000 sample points throughout the nation. The error will mainly affect results on the changes in land use. Revised data will be available in June..."

In announcing the study Dec. 7, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said it showed U.S. conservation efforts were "falling short." He called for a renewed national commitment to preserving private land.

The Heritage "backgrounder" was authored by Wendell Cox, principal of the Wendell Cox Consultancy, St. Louis, MO, and a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and Ronald D. Utt, senior research fellow at the Thomas A. Rose Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. A USDA spokesperson declined to comment on the paper.

Congress is considering spending $3 billion per year to buy up environmentally sensitive land and to fund other conservation programs, at least partially because of the report, say Cox and Utt. "Potential victims of this needless spending will include more than just the federal taxpayer," they write. "The NRI report claimed that the amount of land lost to development in Pennsylvania was extraordinarily high, and it ranked that state second in the nation for land lost to development"

That may have led the Pennsylvania legislature to enact and Gov. Tom Ridge to sign into law a $650 million, five-year land preservation program within two weeks of the survey. s release, they add. "Had officials at the USDA taken any time to review the NRI findings in advance of the report. s release, they most likely would have found that some, if not all, of the data were of questionable accuracy," according to Cox and Utt.

A U.S. Bureau of the Census report had said that between 1990 and 1998, Pennsylvania had one of the slowest rates of population growth of any state; population grew by only 1% during the period compared with 8.7% for the entire country, Cox and Utt say. Only Connecticut, North Dakota and Rhode Island had slower population growth rates.

"Because housing production and other forms of development closely track demographic trends, it seemed highly unlikely that one of the slowest growing states could have one of the fastest rates of land converted to real estate development," say Cox and Utt.

The NRI survey claimed Pennsylvania had lost 901,200 acres of farmland between 1992 and 1997, while the Census reported that only 21,600 acres of farmland had been lost. For Texas, say Cox and Utt, the differences are "more extreme."

Where the NRI survey found that Texas had lost 2.1 million acres of farmland between 1992 and 1997, the Census of Agriculture reported that Texas had gained 421,600 acres during the same period. "Because USDA announced that the NRI results were subject to possible error but made no mention of any similar problems associated with the Census of Agriculture, it must be assumed that Texas mostly likely did experience a gain in farmland, not the massive loss claimed by the NRI survey," Cox and Utt say.

"Mistakes, of course, can be made when dealing with large volumes of data, but errors of this magnitude are hard to explain, given the many opportunities to cross-check the results with other federal data and surveys," the authors add.

The Heritage background report is available on the Internet at http://www.heritage.org/library/backgrounder/bg1368.html