The Department of Agriculture under President Donald Trump has charted a new course — the full-scale reduction of federal funding and staffing throughout the agency. A set of the president’s early executive orders targeted climate action, environmental justice, and diversity, equity, and inclusion; the USDA has since complied with those by eliminating DEI-focused programs and grants and revoking a longstanding provision that ensured producers confronting historical discrimination have equitable access to federal support.
So, on June 17, when the USDA announced the end of $148.6 million in funding awarded by prior administrations to projects geared toward DEI, the move appeared in lockstep with the president’s priorities. The notice itself, for example, was titled “Secretary Rollins Takes Bold Action to Put American Farmers First, Cuts Millions in Woke DEI Funding.”
The press release said that “more than 145” awards would be cancelled, and it gave three anonymized examples of such projects. There was a $575,251 project “educating and engaging socially disadvantaged farmers on conservation practices”; a $192,246 project for “creating a new model for urban forestry to lead to environmental justice through more equitably distributed green spaces”; and a $2.5 million award for a project “expanding equitable access to land, capital, and market opportunities for underserved producers in the Bay Area.”
It all seemed like standard fare under the new administration — except that the USDA neither specified what awards it was scrubbing, nor did it follow the news with direct notifications to those affected.
More than a month later, no one yet seems to know whether, or to what extent, the $148 million in grants has actually been cancelled. The scraps of information provided in the release have since been mined many times over by everyone from grantees to lawmakers. This fiscal year, the USDA had a total budget of $493.9 billion, of which $144.4 billion funded award obligations. That means the $148 million represents roughly 0.001 percent of what the agency planned to spend on awards. And yet, experts say, the missing money mystery indicates a new chapter in the USDA’s playbook — and it’s harming farmers and ranchers, and those that support them, across the country.
“I just continue to think that they are motivated by the politics of saying that they cancelled a DEI-related program, and they’re not motivated by conducting thoughtful policy changes or updates, and they don’t seem to really be concerned about who’s on the other end of that policy change, and what the impact would be,” said Michael Amato, who was the USDA Communications Director during the Biden administration.
For those organizations that suspect their projects could be on the chopping block, the move is perplexing. When the team at the California-based organization Agroecology Commons saw the USDA press release, they presumed that the $2.5 million grant had to be theirs. Roughly two years beforehand, they had been awarded that very same amount through the USDA’s Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program to identify, purchase, and help develop land for up to ten “BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and landless farmers” in the Bay Area.
The nonprofit had already come to feel targeted under the new administration. They had confronted the elimination of another USDA award back in March. In June, less than two weeks before the $148 million cancellation news was shared, the organization joined two other plaintiffs in filing a lawsuit against the USDA for what they believe were unlawful grant terminations. And, according to director of partnerships Leah Atwood, they were “put on blast on the Secretary of Ag’s Instagram,” when Brooke Rollins announced the end of the group’s Community Food Projects grant in a social media video.
“All signs pointed to ‘that’s gonna be us,’” said Atwood. The revelation was nonetheless “a big blow” to her team. In response to the USDA’s announcement, they started to halt the work they were doing that was supported by the federal funds, in case they wouldn’t be able to invoice for reimbursements later. As the days and weeks passed, the team got more and more bewildered when no official termination notice hit their inbox.
Until last Tuesday, when a cancellation notice finally dropped — just not the one that they were expecting.
On July 22, more than a month following the agency’s initial termination announcement, the team finally received an email from the USDA, shared with Grist, which informed them of the end of their Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program grant, or BFRDP, amounting to nearly $600,000 that they were awarded back in 2021. First authorized by the farm bill more than two decades ago, the program provides grants to organizations in support of education, mentoring, and technical assistance for new agricultural producers. The letter stated that “the Secretary of Agriculture has determined, per the Department’s obligations to the Constitution and laws of the United States, that priority includes ensuring that the Department’s awards do not support programs that promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) initiatives, or any other initiatives that discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics.”
Though she isn’t sure, Atwood believes that Agroecology Commons’ BFRDP grant cancellation must be one of the 145 or so that the USDA says it has identified for elimination. She also believes that the notice for the bigger grant is still on the horizon, and has expressed concern over two other USDA grants of theirs that have an explicit DEI-focus. As of the time of this article’s publication, the Agroecology Commons team still has not received an official cancellation notice for the $2.5 million from the federal agency.
“We’ve been in this constant state of evaluation and reevaluation and downsizing and streamlining and consolidating, and it’s impossible to do that in a clear, straightforward way when we don’t know what’s happening,” she said. “It’s just a juggling act of, like, plugging leaks and dodging waves.”
The USDA has not responded to multiple inquiries from Grist sent over the last month requesting clarity on the full list of awards included in last month’s press release, why those affected had not been issued official notices, and the criteria being used in these funding eliminations. What’s more, it isn’t clear whether the recent rescission of BFRDP grants account for any part of the $148 million, or belong to an entirely new crop of cancellations.
Grist reporting has revealed that at least three other recipients of BFRDP grants were also issued official USDA termination notices in the last week. They are the only series of DEI-adjacent grants from the USDA that have been confirmed as cancelled since the agency’s June announcement. Like Atwood, those other grantees believe the dissolution of their federal support falls within the 145 or so awards that the USDA declared. One such group is the Rhode Island Food Policy Council.
The end of the BFRDP grant didn’t come as much of a surprise to its executive director Nessa Richman. In fact, when she saw the USDA’s announcement about the $148 million funding pot, Richman had a “sinking feeling” that her group’s grant was over. Right before the USDA made the announcement, Richman noticed that their BFRDP money was suddenly unfrozen — an experience that the Food Policy Council went through when the Trump administration pulled another of their grants — before it was terminated.
When it finally arrived, the USDA’s letter singled out the Food Policy Council’s focus on DEI as the rationale for the cancellation. “Specifically, the project is targeted at beginning farmers and ranchers from Rhode Island communities defined by their immutable characteristics,” the letter said. “The award is therefore inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, Department priorities.”
But what surprised Richman was the way the USDA presented the news. “Normally, in a USDA announcement like that, when it’s about grant awards, in the past there’s been a link to a list of all of the grantees,” said Richman. “And it was confusing that there wasn’t one.” So she called around to see if anyone in her network had been able to find a list buried on a federal website somewhere. No one had. No one knew what programs were on that list of “more than 145.”
“My guess was that the work had been done internally at USDA to identify the grants, because it was a very specific number, but that they hadn’t done the administrative work to move forward and send out notices of termination,” said Richman. “At this point, it probably took them longer than they thought to get all of the administrative pieces in place. Why else would it take them longer?”
A Grist analysis of a USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture reporting portal shows that since 2009, roughly 13 percent of all BFRDP awards have been DEI-related, and just 21 are active projects. If the USDA terminates all of the BFRDP awards with equity-associated keywords, that leaves at least 124 other grants facing potentially imminent elimination following the agency’s effort to cut “Woke DEI Funding.”
Vanessa García Polanco, government relations director at National Young Farmers Coalition, is worried about the future of the other equity-related awards. “So how are they picking and choosing these grants? Is it just the ones that have equity in the title? Do they have some equity outcomes? Or is it just literally strategic? Is there an equation, an algorithm behind it? We really don’t know,” said García Polanco. “Everything feels extremely haphazard and inconsistent.”
The federal agency’s silence has prompted urgent calls for transparency from some members of Congress. Last Tuesday, on the same day that BFRDP letters began landing in inboxes, a cohort of nine Democratic senators sent an official congressional oversight letter to Rollins, urging her to provide the missing information, including “a complete list of awards that USDA intends to terminate, including information about awardees, programs, funding amounts, and locations.” The letter also asked for further details “on why these awards intend to be cancelled, as well as the legal basis for cancelling the awards, and if the funds are being repurposed, for what they will be repurposed.”
“It’s created more uncertainty, in a sea of uncertainty,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “I don’t know how it wouldn’t have a chilling effect.”
According to a former senior USDA official, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the precedents of how the agency chooses to operate — and communicate — are changing so quickly and radically that it’s creating an environment of fear for the nation’s farmers and ranchers who could rely on federal government funds before Trump took office.
“People are just scared right now because they keep hearing the threat of these things, and they haven’t been notified. So ‘Do I continue to do work? Do I not continue to do work?’ The uncertainty is what’s getting people right now,” the official said. “You hear that from these grantees, as well as [USDA] employees, it’s hard to get people to talk about it, because they don’t know, from day to day, whether they’re going to be targeted.
If they say anything, I think most folks are going on record anonymously because they’re in fear, because you really don’t know what’s next. And if you get out there on a limb, it might get sawed off behind you.”
Clayton Aldern contributed data reporting.
