On July 10, the USDA passed a final rule titled, “Removal of Unconstitutional Preferences Based on Race and Sex in Response to Court Ruling.” This rule removes all clauses from USDA policies created during the Biden administration that gave special benefits to “socially disadvantaged” groups.
“We are taking this aggressive, unprecedented action to eliminate discrimination in any form at USDA,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in a July 10 press release. “It is simply wrong and contrary to the fundamental principle that all persons should be treated equally.”
The contested clauses were originally justified as a counterbalance to historically discriminatory USDA practices which denied loans to certain demographic groups—especially low-income Black farmers—or charged them higher interest rates, a practice that continued in some areas up through the 1990s.
USDA has faced numerous lawsuits over these discriminatory lending practices and has paid several billion dollars in settlements to farmers who were discriminated against. The most recent round of payments, which totaled $2 billion to 43,000 farmers, required farmers to “detail their experiences of discrimination by USDA personnel and the consequences they experienced as a result.”
The now-defunct clauses in USDA policy were unprecedented because they singled out white males as the only group who were not considered “socially disadvantaged.” For example, the “Pandemic Assistance Revenue Program” of January 11, 2023 required the USDA to pay most people, lumped into the category of “underserved farmers and ranchers,” 10 percent more than white male non-veteran farmers who had farmed for more than ten years and had a gross income of more than $180,300.
“Moving forward, USDA will no longer apply race- or sex-based criteria in its decision-making processes, ensuring that its programs are administered in a manner that upholds the principles of meritocracy, fairness, and equal opportunity for all participants,” the new regulation states.
Predictably, this move has received backlash from Democrats like Representative Shontel Brown from Ohio, who called this removal of discriminatory language “a deliberate and disgraceful step backward on the path to attempt to right the historic wrongs.”
What nobody on either side talks about—probably because they don’t know about it—is that Black farmers weren’t the only group discriminated against by USDA loan policies in the 1970s and 1980s. Farmers practicing or transitioning to organic methods during that time were also refused USDA loans. If the true extent of who was discriminated against and why were fully documented, it might not fit well into anybody’s narrative.
