Ed Loyd Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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