The National Young Farmers Coalition says the USDA has terminated nearly 50 federal projects designed to remove barriers to young, beginning and underserved farmers.

The Coalition says the USDA issued termination notices for 49 of 50 Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access (ILCMA) projects, which the group describes as “innovative, community-based and locally-led projects” designed to address barriers for those groups. The terminations were effective today and totaled nearly $300 million across 40 states and territories.

Termination letters claim that, according to NYFC, “most of the awards did little to improve land access” and there was “excessive spending on outreach and technical assistance.”

But the Coalition alleges USDA leadership spent over a year, “systematically undermining the program – freezing funding, cutting off communication with awardees and withholding the approvals grantees needed to move forward with land acquisitions, farmland down payment assistance, low-interest loans, and other core project activities.”

However, the USDA told No-Till Farmer the agency’s review of the ILA programs from the Biden administration found “egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars. 

“Under the guise of increasing land access for producers, the ILA program included no minimum requirement for direct producer support. Instead, the program permitted the abuse of federal funds, including expenditures on the purchasing of a barbeque smoker, construction of a gazebo, massages, and for one awardee, a $20,000 budget for ink pens alone.” 

According to the USDA, examples of inappropriate spending under the ILA program included: 

• $20,000 for a barbeque smoker 
• $20,000 allocated for massages for farmers 
• $110,000 for a camper/RV 
• $27,000 for drones
• $112,500 for refreshments
• $130,355 for office supplies, including $20,000 for pens 
• $10,000 for a camera to livestream cooking videos
• Funding for gazebo construction
• Multi-million-dollar budgets with vague justifications such as “travel” and “supplies” 

The USDA said it, “remains committed to restoring fiscal discipline and ensuring that programs serve the farmers and ranchers we are mandated to support. Under this administration, USDA programs will uphold market principles, engage in fiscal discipline, and provide adequate funding to the farmers it exists to support.”

Amanda Koehler, manager of the Land, Capital and Market Access Network, strongly disputed the USDA’s characterizations of the program, saying the agency is responsible for the very problem it’s now citing. 

“The agency never approved land acquisitions, beneficiary mini-grants, low-interest loans or other core project activities that awardees were ready to execute,” Koehler says. “Funds didn’t reach farmers at the scale they should have because USDA created that bottleneck. The department cannot manufacture a problem through its own inaction and then use it as justification for termination.

“The timeline also doesn’t add up,” she adds, asserting ILCMA contracts were finalized in the third and fourth quarters of last year and the majority of reimbursements were processed under the Trump administration.

“If USDA had genuine concerns about inappropriate spending, why were those reimbursements approved? You can't sign off on expenditures and then retroactively call them wasteful,” Koehler says. 

According to Koehler, awardees spent that time, “building partnerships, hiring staff and laying the groundwork these projects required — work that will now go unrealized, just before many grantees expected final clearance to begin their core activities.”

Michelle Hughes, co-executive director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, says ILCMA is USDA’s only program designed to address the land access crisis through investment in young and beginning farmers and ranchers. 

“Terminating these contracts is irresponsible and short-sighted, and doing so at a time of record land costs, limited markets, and rising operating expenses will cause irreparable harm to the security and resilience of our nation’s farm and food systems,” she says.

Still, since last year USDA and other federal agencies have been uncovering massive fraud and mismanagement across numerous federal programs. 

Last May, the USDA’s Special Investigations Unit, Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations and the El Camino Real Financial Crime Task Force surveilled over 100 locations in southern California, including multiple SNAP retailers. Numerous arrests and the collection of high value evidence were collected during the operation.

Last month USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins revealed the agency was making big changes to its much-maligned computer network to make it easier for farmers to apply for grants and disaster funding, update acreage and participate in other farm-related programs.

Prior modernization efforts over the last 2 decades were “absolute stunning failures,” Rollins said. A Government Accountability Office audit found barely 15% of planned IT system upgrades were ever delivered. Taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars for “ancient” technical architecture with 500 different custom-built system and databases managed by over 1,000 different contractors that cost more than $1 billion.