‘It became clear that the majority of these projects had sky-high administration fees,’ the agency says.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced on April 15 that it terminated a $3.1 billion climate-related farming program after finding that it didn’t align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
An archived USDA dashboard on its website had said that the agency had invested billions in the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, which the agency previously said funded priorities such as planting cover crops to prevent erosion, managing soil nutrients, and other initiatives.
The funding was allocated to 135 projects in every state that also encourage carbon sequestration, reduced methane emissions, and other climate-related practices, according to a project dashboard on the USDA website. The Biden administration had projected that the climate program would reach about 60,000 farms and cut millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide.
But the USDA said that managing that project was pricey and that it was canceled after a “thorough line by line review of each of these Biden-era partnerships.”
The USDA said the decision was to slash what it called bureaucratic red tape for farmers. The agency added that most of the projects provided too little money to farmers and incurred too much in administrative costs.
“It became clear that the majority of these projects had sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers,” the USDA said in a statement.
Some projects under the initiative may continue if the USDA determines that the funding will go to farmers, according to the agency, which noted that it wants to support farmers in ways that are aligned with the Trump administration’s policies.
“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement, adding that farmers’ concerns “took a backseat” to climate interests.
Rollins said that during her time as the head of the USDA, farmers told her that they’re “overburdened by red tape” and that they need to submit “complex reporting” to access those programs.
