Nearly Sixty Farm, Farmworker, Environmental, Health, and Community Groups Tell OMB: Don’t Play Politics with Federal Funding

Nearly sixty organizations from across the country representing farmers, farmworkers, rural communities, and researchers, as well as health, climate, and environmental interests just told the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in strongly worded comments to leave politics and gamesmanship out of federal financial assistance for farming and nutrition.  

These comments were in response to a Proposed Rule from OMB that significantly and detrimentally modifies the terms and conditions governing the over $1.1 trillion in federal financial assistance awarded each year. This includes more than $100 billion annually in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs such as food and nutrition, farm conservation, agricultural research, forest management, and wildfire response. The Proposed Rule takes what should be a level playing field for applicants and awardees and dramatically shifts the rules of the game, injecting political ideology into every step of the grant process, from application, to execution, to termination.  

For example, it requires a political appointee to sign off on every discretionary grant and confirm it “demonstrably advance[s] the President’s policy priorities,” screening for “anti-American values,” “gender ideology,” and “illegal immigration.” How is an applicant supposed to address this?  What are “anti-American values”? and whatever they are today, recent history suggests that they can change quickly. And given the realities of the US agriculture force, steering entirely away from immigration issues may be close to impossible.  

Equally bad, the proposed rule would let USDA cancel a farmer’s, university’s, or nonprofit’s grant mid-project for nothing more than a shift in “agency priorities,” while stripping away any right to appeal that decision. Agriculture by its nature is a multi-year effort, with many plants taking time to mature and conservation and other practices needing several seasons to show an impact; this risk of arbitrary mid-grant review could wreak havoc on farm production. 

Put simply, the proposed rule allows government agencies to base award and termination decisions on their political preferences rather than following congressional mandates or evaluating the merits of the applications or performance of the grants. For decades, USDA grant making has been bipartisan and objectively based. It has not been perfect, but this proposal would make it far far worse, not better. 

This isn’t hypothetical or hyperbolic. USDA already imposed similar terms on its own grants last December, and a coalition of state attorneys general immediately challenged them as unlawful.  In June, a federal court agreed and blocked them from going into effect against the states. A separate court has now ruled (twice) that USDA can’t terminate a grant “for the very reason that the grant furthers the aims Congress explicitly instructed [it] to pursue.”  

Our comments — joined by farmer groups, farmworker organizations, tribal agricultural organizations, and community and environmental groups spanning the country — lay out why the rule is unconstitutionally vague, arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law, and detail the real harm it would do: farmers who have sunk years and dollars into conservation contracts that could vanish overnight, with no hearing and no guarantee they’ll ever be repaid; the hard and serious work of growing our food and feeding the country subject to political whim; the critical need for agricultural research kneecapped. 

Federal financial assistance should not be subject to political maneuvering and gamesmanship, yet OMB’s proposed rule will do just that, unlawfully subjecting funding applicants and recipients to vague and politically infused terms and conditions. (The OMB rule would apply to many other agencies – and Earthjustice submitted comments challenging these as well – magnifying the harms outlined here.) OMB should not finalize such a scheme and instead should withdraw this proposal.