Richard E Lyng

American business executive and government employee, named the 22nd U.S. secretary of agriculture by President Ronald Reagan in January 1986. He took over his duties of chief administrator of the government’s farm policy at a time when American farmers faced their severest test since the Depression. Richard Edmund Lyng is the older of the two children and the only son of Edmund John and Sarah Cecilia (McGrath) Lyng. After attending public school in Modesto, California, he attended the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He graduated summa cum laude in 1940 with a Ph.D. Upon his return to Modesto, Lyng became a field representative for his father’s agricultural products firm, the Ed J. Lyng Company. In 1941 he entered the U.S. Army as a private and was sent to the South Pacific. He was discharged in 1945 as a second lieutenant and returned to the family business. As president of the company from 1949 to 1967, he more than doubled its earnings. Lyng was president of the California Seed Association in 1953 and of the Modesto Chamber of Commerce in 1958. In 1966 he ran as the Republican candidate for a state senate seat, but lost to the Democratic incumbent. He never sought elected office again. About a year later, California Governor Ronald Reagan asked Lyng to serve as director of the state’s department of agriculture and he agreed. After two successful years as the director of the largest state agriculture department, President Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Clifford Hardin, offered Lyng the post of assistant secretary for marketing and consumer services. The Senate confirmed his appointment on 2/28/1969. Concurrently, from 1969 to 1973, Lyng served as a director on the board of the Commodity Credit Corporation, an agency within the agriculture department. In July 1971 Lyng announced new food stamp regulations that established a national eligibility standard. A new allocation program for the school lunch program introduced in August 1971 brought immediate criticism. Lyng claimed the program would enable schools to bring many more needy children into the program, but that it depended on funding from the Congress. In October 1971, Congress voted to increase the federal reimbursement for the school lunch program by drawing on funds from the agriculture department’s import duty fund. In 1972 he faced the Senate committee on nutrition and human needs to explain why the Nixon administration would spend $400 million less than the $2.3 million allocated the previous year on the food stamp program. In December 1972 there was a reorganization in the agriculture department and Lyng was reassigned to a less public post. He left the following year to take charge of the American Meat Institute, a powerful Washington lobbying association. During his six years as a lobbyist, he represented the interests of an industry he had once policed. When he left the American Meat Institute in 1979, he continued to serve as a part-time consultant while also working for several other organizations including the Queensland Graziers of Australia. When his old friend Ronald Reagan entered the presidential race, Lyng served the campaign as co-director of its farm and food division. When Reagan was elected, he chose Lyng to head the transition team to examine personnel and policies for the agriculture department. Even though Lyng was Reagan’s first choice for secretary of agriculture, influential Senate majority leader Bob Dole insisted that a tr Read less