The Department of Agriculture has reportedly canceled much of a program that awarded roughly $300 million to projects around the country aimed at supporting farmers from underserved communities.
The cuts hit the Biden-era Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program, which awarded the funding across roughly 50 projects since kicking off in 2023, unnamed sources familiar with the move told Politico.
The program “involved discriminatory preferences based on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” as well as “wasteful spending,” according to a cancellation letter sent to one participant, obtained by Politico.
The Independent has contacted the Department of Agriculture for comment.
The program, known as LCMAP, was designed to support farmers from historically underserved groups, including Black, immigrant and Indigenous people.
As The Independent has reported, farmers of color have historically faced discrimination and poor access to government programs.
Previous awards under LCMAP supported the formation of Indigenous farming collectives and land access in the South’s agricultural “Black Belt” regions in states like Arkansas and Mississippi, according to the USDA.
Critics of the president slammed the move.
“Once again, the Trump administration has turned its back on America’s farmers,” Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, wrote in a statement. “Instead of focusing on lowering input costs for farm families by ending Trump’s inflationary tariffs and the war in Iran – which has sent prices for fertilizer and fuel skyrocketing – the Trump administration thinks it is more important to rescind funding for a program passed by Congress that helps farmers buy and retain farmland.”
This week, a coalition of 20 Democratic states and the District of Columbia sued the administration, challenging what it said were “ideological” and “vague” mandates surrounding access to new government agriculture funding.
The conditions include demands related to Trump administration priorities, including ending the promotion of “gender ideology” and allowing “illegal aliens to obtain taxpayer-funded benefits,” according to the suit.
“The federal government cannot hold critical funding hostage to force states to comply with vague, ideological directives,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release Monday. “These new conditions put essential programs at risk and cause chaos for states that rely on this funding to feed families, support farmers and keep communities safe.”
The USDA has been one of the largest targets of the Trump administration’s campaign to end government diversity-related programs.
Last year, it canceled roughly 600 grants worth $3 billion to comply with White House mandates ending DEI programs.
Staffers reportedly searched through grants for phrases mentioning diversity or climate change to identify what programs to cut.
The agency has suffered some of the largest staff losses under the administration.
More than 24,000 people left the USDA or were fired since Trump took office, according to federal data.
The losses have reportedly slowed operations at USDA, a sprawling agency that helps oversee everything from farm policy to food benefits for the poor.
“If you don’t have the folks that are there to do the work that’s needed to be done – whether that’s paperwork or following up with farmers on a project that they are wanting to do – then where do those farmers go for those services?” Nick Levendofsky, executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union, told public radio station KCUR last month.
The administration’s agriculture has at times cut against the White House’s anti-immigration, anti-diversity agenda.
This month, the USDA signed partnership agreements with a group of historically Black land-grant universities, and the administration has taken steps to make it easier for farms to hire temporary migrant laborers, as farm owners face a labor shortage in part driven by fear over Trump’s immigration raids.
