Outstanding in their fields - six feet under

Maybe you can’t take it with you, but evidently you can keep taking it to the bank. The U.S. Department of Agriculture paid out $1.1 billion in farm subsidies to 172,801 dead people between 1999 and 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported this week. That’s a lot of pennies to heaven. Or wherever.

Apparently, the USDA has been outsourcing its payments operation to the Chicago Board of Elections. Who knew?

As the report shows (PDF file), this is more than payment checks simply not catching up with the obit page. Part of it is typical bureaucratic inefficiency and nonsensical rule-making – evidently, the payments are legit as long as the farmer’s estate hasn’t been settled. And part of it could be outright fraud – survivors failing to notify the feds for years after a farmer’s death. About 40 percent of payments went to people who had been dead three years or more, and 19 percent went to people dead seven years or more.

The GAO’s expose comes at a good time for those hoping to reform the nation’s creaky, Depression Era-mentality farm subsidy system. House Democratic leaders are under pressure from big farm interests to retain the traditional payment system for several major crops. Reformers want to bar anyone earning more than $200,000 from getting federal farm payments, and they want some of those funds rerouted to conservation and nutrition programs. Then again, sending more checks to dead farmers might be seen as logical and efficient, in a perverse sort of way. Think about it: For decades, the federal government has been paying farmers not to plant crops. Who better to rely on for that purpose than people who are themselves, uh, planted?