Nominee denies he cheated government of subsidies

WASHINGTON -- A top Agriculture Department nominee denies he cheated the government of farm subsidies in the 1990s, saying he was using the same loopholes in federal payment rules as other farmers.

But Thomas Dorr, President Bush's pick to become the department's undersecretary for rural development, told a Senate committee Wednesday he regretted tape-recorded comments where he told a family member the government could "raise hell with us."

He said his family did "nothing out of the ordinary relative to how many family farms are operated."

But Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, told Dorr, "We have a real problem here."

Under fire

Dorr was already under fire for comments critics have viewed as disparaging to minorities and small-scale agriculture when The Des Moines Register on Wednesday published a transcript of the taped conversation.

On the tape, Dorr was asked if the financial arrangement he used to avoid a $50,000 limit on payments to individual farms was legal. Dorr replied: "I have no idea if it's legal. Nobody's ever called me on it."

In order to stay in business, farmers must structure their farms in ways that make them eligible for as much government money as possible, Dorr told the senators.

The job Dorr is seeking is a relatively low-profile one, overseeing various loan and grant programs for businesses, housing and utilities.

But his nomination has highlighted sharp divisions in Congress, farm groups and rural communities about the future of agriculture and the merits of large-scale, highly mechanized farming.

Comments explained

Dorr once suggested 225,000 acres as the optimum size for farms.

He said Wednesday that he wasn't proposing the creation of such mammoth farm cooperatives but was instead suggesting that as the best size farm for minimizing production costs and maximizing bargaining power with suppliers and shippers.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., told Dorr his ideas were "antithetical to rural America" and that the main beneficiaries of such large cooperatives would be "people like you" who would manage them.

Dorr also has been criticized for comments he made at a 1999 conference in which he observed that some of the most prosperous rural areas of Iowa lacked ethnic and religious diversity.

The White House has said the remark was taken out of context, and a University of Maryland administrator who attended the Iowa State University conference agreed.

Thomas Fretz, dean of Maryland's College of Agriculture, said Dorr was stating the obvious, "that there are communities that are not ethnically diverse that are economically viable."

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On the Net: USDA rural development site: http://www.rurdev.usda.gov

Senate Agriculture Committee: http://agriculture.senate.gov