Nobody knew the real reason why the USDA funding was frozen...until the
Washington Post released this story yesterday.
This is about as absurd as it gets, it belongs in a Saturday Night Live skit. You read some of the bumbling idiocy in this article and it is just really hard to believe. Trump is
truly a deranged mental midget.
Heaven forbid if a few black farmers receive USDA grants in the name of diversity and inclusion!!
The irony is that Trump's war on "DEI" and "underserved communities" is actually hurting thousands of farmers who voted for Trump who desperately need this funding.
From the
Washington Post. --
In recent weeks, farmers across the country have sounded the alarm that payments on USDA grants they were expecting were not coming through, but the extent of the disruption to payments was not clear. An email sent to leaders across the department and obtained by The Post shows how, starting in late January, the USDA enacted a sweeping freeze that affected all grants funded through two signature pieces of Biden-era legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as well as any other program that could violate Trump’s executive orders.
In the Transportation and Marketing office at the sprawling Agriculture Department, Trump’s executive order ending federal support for diversity, equity and inclusion had the greatest impact, The Post found.
Staff were instructed by USDA leadership to freeze payments to all grantees for any activity carried out since Trump took office — without exception — as managers combed through each recipient’s paperwork, searching for words including “underserved communities” and “underrepresented producers.” They were told funding would eventually be reinstated on a case-by-case basis at the direction of political appointees at the top of USDA.
Written guidance instructed staffers not to “proactively” provide information to grant recipients or answer questions about the legal status of the order from Trump’s budget office that had initially prompted the freeze.
The effort inside Transportation and Marketing to determine which programs might violate Trump’s DEI ban evolved over weeks, according to records and employees. At first, programs were flagged for descriptions that included keywords that appeared in Trump’s executive order, such as “DEI,” Kovacs told staff at one meeting. That search turned up only 29 programs, she said — a tiny fraction of the grants administered by their agency.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/02/24/usda-trump-dei-executive-orders/