Ed Loyd Quotations

Securing farmers' and ranchers' viability is always a top priority for the USDA. We'd need to find budget offsets.

Just as we ask our trading partners to follow scientific guidelines for the safe trade of beef products, we do the same. We've gone through extensive risk analysis to determine how to safely trade beef products with Japan.

Japan has taken a number of positive steps, but they've been small tentative steps and they've been painfully slow.

Our budget is reallocating earmarks to reflect our higher-priority needs.

Testing is not a food safety tool. We are very confident the prevalence of the disease in our herd is very low.

I think overall there has been a very measured reaction to the announcement.

The assessment here is that the EU has not put forward anything near the level of ambitiousness or seriousness that having a successful round would necessitate. They are continuing to be protectionist,

We're certainly keeping them informed of the situation and will relay all the information we have. When we have further test results, we will share that with our trading partners.

We have some folks who have a suitcase with them, and they have lost their homes, and they are still working.

We believe this is an isolated incident. We hope Taiwan consumers can understand that there is not an issue of food safety.

We have a very friendly relationship with Japan and we've wanted to resolve this through the negotiation process rather than retaliation.

We don't know whether there is need for additional rule making or for guidance to the industry.

We all sense the urgency of coming to a positive result by the time we get to Hong Kong, and certainly that's what the two will be discussing -- how we can achieve that. We all want this objective here.

We certainly recognize that there does need to be an established tolerance for bone fragments that do not pose a food safety concern.

We're very much part of the team of reducing the deficit in half by 2009.

Are we really serving people when we have some offices that are only open a few hours a day, or that don't have full-time employees? That's a good question to ask, when we have offices where it's costing us $2 for every dollar of benefits that we're delivering.

There isn't any nation in the world that requires 100 percent testing.

They're going to be talking about the U.S.-EU approach and proposals in the World Trade Organization. We're trying to find a lot of common ground so we can move the process forward,

It's going to be a long process to get (the finance center) back up and running again. We are prepared to operate elsewhere for the first couple of months.

The integrity of these programs is very important to us. And we will continue to strengthen the safeguards we have to ensure that these farm loans are made only to those eligible to participate in the farm loan programs.

Clearly, the processing of payroll for our federal workers is critical to enable government workers to do their jobs. And we're very impressed with what the National Finance Center workers accomplished. Before the hurricane struck, they worked hard to ensure that the next payroll was ready to go. And then many of them, with just a single suitcase, knowing that their homes had been destroyed, went to work in Philadelphia and Dallas to handle the payroll. We appreciate their commitment. It was truly remarkable.

All of this was done without any prior notice or consultation.