Where did they go? All those departments they'd been feuding with for decades. Interior, USDA, Met Service (where there was too much support of "global warming deniers"), EPA of course. Anything that had to do with keeping the "environment" in that pristine state of pre-Columbian U.S. You know, where the Indians wiped out the mammoths and horses and used to run giant herds of buffalo off cliffs to get a few cuts of meat and a really cool blanket.
Logging had gotten to the point of "well we're shut down," CO2, which is produced by every living thing on earth and the oceans and volcanoes, was a "pollutant" and under strict regulation. Taxes had been imposed for "excess carbon generation" and things were already starting to get hard in industrial farming before the Emergency Powers Act.
But before the Act there was only so much they could do. Congress knew that the farmers were a massive lobby and huge income, tax and jobs generator. Hell, about the only major export you could put your hands on from the U.S. anymore was food.
They hadn't thought the Bitch would use the Act to screw up the one thing that was sort of working post-Plague. But she did.
USDA cannot produce food. What it's supposed to do is create a favorable environment to produce food.
What it can do, easily, is create an unfavorable environment to produce food. It had detailed knowledge of the American farming industry. It knew where all the levers were.
The long-service people in USDA fought back, passive aggressively, as hard as they could. They, I'm told, tried like hell to keep the damage to a minimum. But they couldn't stop it.
And USDA had been being infiltrated, if you will, for years by the tofu-eaters. Why?
Most things that county agents used to be used for were pretty much gone by the 1980s. Back in the 1930s, say, county agents conducted classes in things like proper tillage to reduce soil erosion, better crops for the local soils, how to use modern fertilizers, soil chemistry, etc.
By the 1980s, you'd better have had classes on those and lots of experience before you were making decisions on a real productive farm. Or you were going to go out of business.
But you couldn't get rid of county agents. They were county agents! Besides, they were the eyes and ears of the USDA. They were the guys who compiled all the local crop reports.
But as the need for county agents to be expert in real farming decreased, there was an upswing in their need as "alternative farming" experts. Tofu-eaters were moving away from the cities because their "little brown brothers" were making them harder and harder to live in. Rich tofu-eaters would move out to the country, buy a small farm that was going under anyway and then not know what to do with it. (See Green Acres and multiply by hundreds of thousands and both members Eva Gabor. But crossed with Karen Carpenter and take away all shreds of common sense.)
Well, the tofu-eaters wanted to grow grapes or broccoli or whatever, but not using those icky and "should be illegal" methods. They wanted to be "all natural."
My dad didn't talk much but when he did get to talking he could tell a hell of a story. I recall one time he'd come back from a convention (yes, farmers have conventions) and was talking about a group of "old time" county agents, old guys who were actual experts in mass production of huge quantities of food using every method that was currently available, talking about the "Green" invaders they were encountering more and more. Very heavy along both coasts, less so in the Midwest but still some. But the tofu-eaters invading in Virginia were a particular source of amusement. And the old guys were just shaking their heads. Whatever. "They're not real farmers."
But they were, increasingly, the county agent's main customers.
So the old guys got out as fast as possible. They didn't want to deal with the airheads who couldn't understand why their corn was getting eaten by grasshoppers and worms and fields that had been pretty clear when they got them were cropping up with weeds.
Enter the new generation of county agents. Their mainstay was helping out the tofu-eaters. The "urban immigrants." They'd conduct seminars on organic methods and quite happily explain "alternative methods" that were "fully organic." Didn't stop the pests and weeds but it made the tofu-eaters happy that someone from the government, which was Good, was there treating them like adults. Actually, they were being treated like children but they had been their whole lives and didn't know the difference.
Treating like an adult: You're fucking up. Here's how to fix it. Now fix it.
Treating like a child: You're trying really hard! Good job! It's not the result that matters, it's just that you try!
(That's actually a functional way to deal with children up to a point. In most cases they can't do a real job. But when they get to the point they can, when they're ready to learn to be adults with adult responsibilities, "it's a good try" should never cut it.)
The old guys treated them like adults and it "hurt their feelings." The new guys treated them like children and they were happy little tofu-eaters.
So by the time of the Big Freeze, the stage was set. Most county agents couldn't explain industrial farming methods or modern farming tech if they were held over a fire and interrogated. That's the ground troop level. The "generals" and "colonels" were people so dead set against modern farming techniques they'd rather the country starve to death than support them. And the guys in the middle were just getting squeezed out. If they opened their mouths, well, there were the bread lines. Go get in them.
Farming depends on weather. The Met Service, which should have been beating the drum and sounding the alarm about the upcoming weather cycles, was also in a bind. Lower level employees had grown up on a constant drumbeat of "global warming, global warming." One of the big environmentalists sounding the drumbeat had actually said once: "Global warming, global cooling, it's all the same thing." And it was all caused by man.
Various bad hypotheses had been advanced over the years about what drove long-term fluctuations. They'd all been debunked, one by one, but the New Breed of meteorologists knew that they were True and they were Right no matter what the science said.
Look up (during the daytime). See that big burning ball in the sky?
That's what drives temperature. Always has, always will. Eventually it will cool down then expand and we'll be absorbed into its arms and the Earth will become more iron in its dying furnace. It won't be as hot then, but it will be very big. And then it will either explode, not too violently all things considered, or die down to go to a long slow bake until it's not much more than a big, fairly hot, metal planet.
Guys and gals further up the chain knew better. They knew that things were cooling off, fast, and that it was old Sol driving it and that things were going to a very hell in cold handbasket.
But their bosses knew better than they did. They knew it was all "global warming." This was just a temporary fluctuation then things will get hotter and hotter again until we all burn up! Seas will rise! Dogs and cats will be living together!
So the forecasts for weather conditions, which were based on "climate models" that ignored solar activity, were all for a long-term warming trend. It's cold right now, but it will be hot next spring. Expect droughts and hurricanes and terrible tornadoes! (Well, we had those but for all the wrong reasons.)