By Julie Tomascik
Editor

A lawsuit was filed last month against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for discrimination in the agency’s methodology of the 2022 Emergency Relief Program (ERP).

The Southeastern Legal Foundation and Mountain States Legal Foundation are suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on behalf of four Texas farmers.

The legal entities say USDA “unconstitutionally and unlawfully” funneled the relief payments to certain farmers based on race and sex.

Farmers and agricultural groups have challenged USDA on the progressive factoring approach used in the 2022 ERP, because it disregarded the legislative intent of how the disaster relief should be distributed. The agency used a different payment formula for underserved and non-underserved farmers and ranchers—allowing higher payments for beginning, female and minority producers.

Under the 2022 ERP program, farmers with some of the heaviest losses received the least amount of aid if they did not qualify as a socially disadvantaged producer or entity.

“But rather than help farmers like plaintiffs Alan and Amy West, Bryan Baker and Rusty Strickland—who have owned their family farms for decades and have suffered from the effects of droughts and the COVID-19 pandemic—USDA is harming them by favoring other producers at their expense based on factors including race and sex that were not authorized by Congress,” the legal groups said in a statement.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack claims Congress did not provide adequate funding for the 2022 program.

“When we advised Congress that there was a $10-$12 billion bill due to assist producers across the board for disasters in 2022, Congress appropriated $3 billion,” Vilsack said during a U.S. House Ag Committee hearing in February. “You gave us 30% of what we needed. We had a choice of basically doing it the way we did before when we had all the money and the resources to be able to cover all the producers or provide an opportunity for 80% of the producers to receive slightly more.”

The groups are suing USDA for violating the Fifth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and Administrative Procedure Act.

“USDA is just one of several agencies under the Biden administration acting as though it can act independently of Congress. The American people, through Congress, trusted USDA to help victimized farmers with disaster relief, not hurt them further by discriminating based on race and sex,” Southeastern Legal Foundation Vice President of Litigation Braden Boucek said. “The Constitution exists to curb the power of runaway bureaucracies. We are holding USDA accountable in court and will not rest until constitutional balance is restored.”

The case was filed in the U.S. District Court–Northern District of Texas in Amarillo.