FSA offices in Minden and around Nebraska have been squeezed between staffing cutbacks and an increased workload. Treffer said that without dedicated employees who are willing to work overtime, the office would be unable to function. Since summer 1998, the federal government has poured almost a billion dollars in cash and hundreds of millions of dollars in loans into the state's faltering agriculture economy. That is almost double the money expended for the same period in late 1997 and early 1998. The packages include loan deficiency payments, market loss payments and weather disaster payments.
Somebody has to do the paperwork.
That falls on the offices of the Farm Service Agency. The workload has increased just as FSA staff are being cut in a period of reorganization and consolidation. Statewide, the FSA staff has shrunk from 629 to 435 since fiscal year 1993. It is not an encouraging outlook for a Nebraska workforce that put in 8,000 hours of overtime through mid February and lost most of its 90 temporary workers because of 1999 budget pressures. New programs and new deadlines arrive with old deadlines still unmet.