While payments to many USDA grant recipients remain paused, on February 14, USDA sent official cancellation letters to many nonprofits with contracts across multiple programs. The cancellations were based on President Trump’s executive order on eliminating DEI, and the letter stated that the contract was “terminated as of the date of this notice” because “it no longer effectuates agency priorities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and activities.”
In Colorado, Mancos Conservation District received a letter canceling a $630,000 Equity in Conservation Outreach Program grant intended to support beginning farmers and ranchers, small farms that were grossing less than $170,000 a year, and the local tribal community, the Ute Mountain Ute. In a Facebook post, president Michael Nolan explained that his team had planned to distribute a rural living guidebook, host an educational water festival, and produce 12 land-stewardship workshops.
“I’m sad about not being able to support this outreach,” he wrote, “but I’m most pissed about the fact that I spent hours today going over staff positions that we thought were secure for a few years and starting to make a plan for who will be let go,” in addition to other cuts to staff time.
In Kansas City, local community organization the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council received a letter canceling its $165,000 Farmers Market Promotion Program (FMPP) grant. (Ivanhoe was required to come up with 25 percent of the grant, so the government portion totaled about $133,000.) Director Alana Henry said Ivanhoe had contributed to a “boom in urban farming” in the area and her team planned to expand their farmers’ market to offer low-income residents more options. Henry had just finished the interview process for an assistant market manager position the grant would help fund and had been working on other planning.
After the cancellation, she stopped the hiring process and is now figuring out how her small staff can take on the extra labor of expanding the market. She is also trying not to cancel farmer trainings on expanding production that were planned, but she said she’ll have to see if she can get volunteer growers to do the trainings without compensation. “Ultimately what we want to do is help get healthy food on the plate and help small business owners here in our agroeconomy flourish,” Henry said. “Our program, I thought, really spoke to the beauty of both of those things working in tandem.”
The USDA also canceled an FMPP grant to the Fairshare CSA Coalition that enabled them to develop a national CSA Innovation Network to expand community-supported agriculture around the country.
On its website, DOGE lists various USDA agreements with private contractors it has canceled (for things like DEI trainings at the agency) but does not list cancelled grant projects. The letters came from a USDA administrator, not DOGE. It’s unclear if cuts to grant funding will be added to DOGE’s list or shared separately or at all. The USDA did not respond to an inquiry from Civil Eats. (Link to this post.)
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