Dusty Johnson isn’t the only Republican candidate for governor inviting charges that he wants bigger government. In Monday’s debate on public TV, Jon Hansen, of all people, says he wants to split the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources back into two agencies:
House Speaker Jon Hansen, for example, told South Dakota Public Broadcasting viewers that, on day one, he would split the state Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources and return them to separate stand-alone departments, as they had been before [Bob Mercer, “GOP Governor Candidates Engage in 2nd TV Debate,” KELO-TV, updated 2026.04.14].
Governor Kristi Noem buried the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in the pro-business Department of Agriculture in 2021 to cut inspections of factory farms and cramp conservation. The 2021 Senate tried to stop that merger but fell one vote short. Jon Hansen was in the 2021 House but took no action to stop the Ag/Enviro merger then.
Hansen cleverly avoids any appearance of enviro-leftism by saying he wants to re-separate DANR because agriculture “deserves its own department.” I support his proposal because the environment deserves its own department, separate from the diametrically opposed exploitationist cravings of the ag-industrialists who control the Department of Agriculture.
But here Jon Hansen and I are agreeing again on a nice liberal idea. That’s not going to win Hansen any Republican primaries!
By the way, in Fiscal Year 2021, the last year the Department of Ag and DENR stood apart, the Legislature appropriated $47,558,714 for Ag and $25,977,065 for DENR, a total of $73,535,779. In FY 2022, the first year of the merger, the Legislature gave DANR $71,722,731. Merging the two departments saved only 2.5%, less than $2 million, from their combined budgets. For Fiscal Year 2027, DANR is getting $98,407,404, 33.8% more than the combined FY2021 pre-merger appropriation. That’s an average of 5.0% budget increases on ag and ENR functions each year since the merger.
I completely agree Corey: Environmental concerns are many times at odds with ag and have little to do with ag. The departments should be separate.
Combining these departments was one of the dumbest things the Noem admin did and always seemed a bit sketch to me.
If South Dakota wants the benefits of a little more efficiency they could consider merging Game, Fish and Parks with DENR. I don’t know how the hook and bullet folks would like that because they have a little bit different purpose, but most states have the environmental regulatory functions (clean air, clean water, water rights, mining, landfills, radiological issues) in with the ecological functions (wildlife, fisheries and public land management} but in separate divisions within the same department.
I don’t think these issues are a matter of liberal or conservative ideology. It’s more what works best. I never understood why DENR moved in Ag. It just didn’t make sense.