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Federal Court Says USDA Disaster Relief Program Can’t Discriminate Against White Farmers

Federal Court Says USDA Disaster Relief Program Can’t Discriminate Against White Farmers

Plaintiffs each received only a tenth of what they otherwise would have received had they been of a different race or sex.

The federal government may not discriminate against white farmers when it awards disaster aid, a federal court has ruled. Earlier this month, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas temporarily blocked the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) from making payments to farmers based on their race and sex under its 2022 Emergency Relief Program (ERP).

I thought I had seen the last of these lawsuits over the USDA’s blatantly discriminatory relief programs when the courts shot them down, one after another, during Covid three years ago. I wrote about one of those cases, Holman v. Vilsack, here.

In Holman, a white farmer sued the federal government over its program offering loan relief to “socially disadvantaged” applicants—i.e., Blacks and other minorities—while expressly denying it to similarly situated white farmers. That practice, he argued, violated his right to be treated equally under the law, and the court agreed.

Holman was then the latest in a line of lawsuits brought by non-minority plaintiffs who challenged the USDA’s race-based pandemic relief programs.  Its outcome reflected a judicial consensus that the government cannot rely on mere assertions of past “systemic racism” to justify present discrimination against Americans based on race.

But that didn’t stop them from trying again. In this month’s case, Strickland v. Vilsack, the USDA set up a disaster relief program to favor “socially disadvantaged” applicants under its 2022 ERP. Here, though, you have to drill down a bit to see how the agency awarded aid in a discriminatory way.

The devil is in the details. To carry out a policy of distributing less money, but to more farmers, the USDA set up a system called “progressive factoring” for calculating relief payments. The court explained:

Under a progressive-factoring model … farmers losing more recover less, while farmers losing less recover more. So, a farmer claiming losses of up to $2,000 may recover 100 percent of that loss, while a farmer claiming losses over $10,000 may recover only 10 percent of that loss.

Put simply, the more a claimant loses, the less he receives, while the less he loses, the more he receives.

In and of itself, progressive factoring was race-neutral, the court held. So far, so good—sort of.

The problem is that the USDA was not implementing the progressive-factoring calculus in a race-neutral way. So-called “socially disadvantaged” farmers were exempt from its adverse consequences. These included

(l) American Indians or Alaskan Natives;

(2) Asians or AsianAmericans;

(3) blacks or African-Americans;

(4) Hispanics or Hispanic-Americans;

(5) Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders; and

(6) women.

Compounding the calculus further, the USDA also exempted insurance premiums from progressive factoring based on race and sex.

The bottom line for the white male farmers in this case was a ten-to-one disparity in the amount of financial aid awarded them: The plaintiffs each received only a tenth of what they otherwise would have received had they been of a different race or sex, the court observed.

The farmers claimed that Congress never authorized the USDA to base the amount of financial assistance provided by its programs on race and sex. That violated their Fifth Amendment rights to equal protection under the Constitution, and they asked the court to block the agency from implementing the program that discriminated against them for being born white men.

The court agreed, noting that “race-based classifications are presumptively unconstitutional,” a presumption the USDA failed to overcome when subject to strict scrutiny.

There was “little question,” the court held, that

ERP 2022, which is an ongoing program, is racially discriminatory. First, ERP 2022 applies progressive factoring, hurting farmers claiming large losses, and then exempts certain races from the adverse consequences. Second, ERP 2022 refunds insurance premiums and fees for certain races because the USDA believes that those races, qua race, are “more likely to lack financial reserves and access to capital.”

In fact, the USDA admitted that its program benefited women and minority farmers to the detriment of white male farmers. But it argued it had a compelling interest in remediating the effects of past discrimination—just as it had argued in the pandemic relief cases mentioned above.

Those arguments for “socially disadvantaged” benefits programs failed when challenged in the courts three years ago, and they failed again this month before Judge Kacsmaryk, who stopped the agency from awarding relief based on race and sex under the 2022 ERP while the farmers’ lawsuit plays out in court.

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Comments

nordic prince | June 18, 2024 at 7:32 am

If you’re white, the American government actively hates you.

    AF_Chief_Master_Sgt in reply to nordic prince. | June 18, 2024 at 9:04 am

    If you are a white male, the American government actively hates you even more.

    FIFY

    MontanaMilitant in reply to nordic prince. | June 19, 2024 at 10:01 am

    The Biden- Obama marxist movement is for sure.

    These bureaucrats can’t be fired by a future conservative president because they are civil servants. Makes me think the old ways of local citizens tarring and feathering such people may be the correct solution.

That litigation is still required to vindicate the rights of victims of the vile Dhimmi-crats’ lawless, obnoxious and persistent racism in administering federal programs and in their policy-making, demonstrates how corrupted our country has become.

    AF_Chief_Master_Sgt in reply to guyjones. | June 18, 2024 at 9:07 am

    It was only a matter of time. Bribes and corruption are the hallmarks of all Marxist-Democrat government. The more insulated from punishment, the worse it gets.

    I am surprised we aren’t required to pay “a gift” to government employees to receive a service.

E Howard Hunt | June 18, 2024 at 7:45 am

If you’re white you are criminally disadvantaged.

“… i.e., Blacks and other minorities—while expressly denying it to similarly situated white farmers.”

“Black” is capitalized, “white” Is not. Don’t do that.

While it may be breaking news to some people those of us who have been for decades on the receiving end of being disadvantaged from these sorts of objectively verifiable programs of systemic discrimination on the part of gov’t and major corporations are not surprised. I suspect that nearly every straight white male, especially those who hold an ideological worldview opposed to leftists, could provide at least one example where it happened or likely happened to them.

    Dathurtz in reply to CommoChief. | June 18, 2024 at 3:01 pm

    A while back I was given the extra work of being my school’s teacher of the year. It’s funny because we have about 30 teachers total and we don’t take it seriously. When I also was awarded district it got more serious and my principal got me a consultant to help. The consultant helped me do some video stuff and some tweaks here and there. Then, he told me “Be realistic. You’re a straight, white, male. You aren’t going to win this competition.”

    I already knew that, but it was shocking to hear it spoken.

      CommoChief in reply to Dathurtz. | June 19, 2024 at 10:12 am

      In the early ’90s I was being recruited (or so I thought) for big jump in pay/responsibility with a.financial firm. They had wined and dined me A couple times locally, had an interview. Then they flew me halfway across the Country, put me up in nice hotel for two days to do the final interview. First thing on day one the headhunter who I had been dealing with told me straight up that they had decided they had to hire a female. That I was there as window dressing to make it appear like a genuinely competitive search and assessment process.

      Post 9/11 when I went back on AD it happened at least twice more where I was objectively more qualified and in fact the Army regs required my selection due to seniority…. but the Army was on a diversity for women in leadership roles push. Wrong place, wrong time was what I got told when I raised it as an issue. That’s the day I stopped over achieving or tolerating eff ups by leadership. Want it done? Put it on the training calendar and training schedule. Didn’t put it there? Tough cookies, boss your eff up is on you not me and certainly not on my Troops and I was more than happy to explain to them and their chain of command what was going on and quote Army Regs and their policy memos back to them all day.

Tom Vilsack is the worst Sec of Ag we have had and we keep bringing him back with each Democrat Administration. This is a direct result of his work to spread DEI throughout the organization. He made a point to shut down items he didn’t have to during the govt shutdowns of the Obama era just to make a point and now he is rerouting money away from data collection and into DEI committees. NASS had to stop publishing reports and collecting yield data used extensively by the Ag community because money was directed at the equivalent of communist struggle sessions.

“The federal government may not discriminate against white farmers when it awards disaster aid, a federal court has ruled.”

The fact that the concept of equal access to disaster aid had to be litigated is yet another sign that we are in the end stages of this Constitutional republic.
Sorry Ben… we couldn’t keep it.

    AF_Chief_Master_Sgt in reply to steves59. | June 18, 2024 at 11:51 am

    The fact that we have any aid to anyone paid out of the federal government is a sign that we have long been on the end stages of the republic.

    The problems to farmers were created by the government picking winners and losers by telling farmers what they should or shouldn’t grow through $$$$.

    If farmers were free to grow what they wanted, they could then charge prices commensurate with the value of their product.

    There are more than 6 billion people on this planet. There should be no excess crop that requires destruction.

    I can see where a tornado could white out a crop, or a drought. Most of those should be resolved at the state level, with minimal federal intervention.

    But this is an issue in many industries, not just farming.

      “But this is an issue in many industries, not just farming.”

      Correct. Once the Feds insert themselves into disaster relief efforts, things go sideways quickly.
      I lived in the area devastated by Hurricane Michael. Ask me how I know about FedGov involvement.

        CommoChief in reply to steves59. | June 19, 2024 at 10:16 am

        Or people choose to take the bribe of federal taxpayer funds ….Do that and it is like going back to live with your Parents; their house, their rules.

    MontanaMilitant in reply to steves59. | June 19, 2024 at 10:08 am

    When in the course of human events……

    The current tyranny of the bloated federal government can only be stopped by refreshing the tree of freedom. It’s time.

stephenwinburn | June 18, 2024 at 10:06 am

The amazing thing is that the federal government uses the absurd standard of “disparate impact” when it levies fines and punishments on financial institutions regardless of whether it is incidental or intended, and without recourse, but none of their ideas would survive their own standards for those they regulate.

    Ironclaw in reply to stephenwinburn. | June 18, 2024 at 10:50 am

    That sounds to me rather like the social security system. Any private financial institution that ran a retirement program like that would end up with its officers in prison.

Nice court decision! Unfortunately, as long as the people responsible are not fined, fired, or imprisoned, they’ll just do it again.

destroycommunism | June 18, 2024 at 11:39 am

why not?

white farmers KNOWINGLY produce food only for white people

destroycommunism | June 18, 2024 at 11:40 am

the fact that the fjb admin is doing this

is the issue that should be put in front of the voters

This is important.

Why is LI adhering to leftist language redtrictions?

In Holman, a white farmer sued the federal government over its program offering loan relief to “socially disadvantaged” applicants—i.e., Blacks and other minorities—while expressly denying it to similarly situated white farmers.

We HAVE to not do this. Not even accidently.

EVERY slip is used to gain more power, more influence.

And it is the mountain of tiny ones, not the big flashy one-offs, that change our country for the

This is important.

Why is LI adhering to leftist language redtrictions?

In Holman, a white farmer sued the federal government over its program offering loan relief to “socially disadvantaged” applicants—i.e., Blacks and other minorities—while expressly denying it to similarly situated white farmers.

We HAVE to not do this. Not even accidently.

EVERY slip is used to gain more power, more influence.

And it is the mountain of tiny ones, not the big flashy one-offs, that change our country for the

henrybowman | June 18, 2024 at 3:20 pm

“The plaintiffs each received only a tenth of what they otherwise would have received had they been of a different race or sex, the court observed.”
Wow.
That makes being three-fifths of a person look pretty damn good in comparison.

destroycommunism | June 18, 2024 at 5:20 pm

At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.

Subotai Bahadur | June 18, 2024 at 5:50 pm

I rather suspect that the Federal government has filed a request for an expedited appeal of the decision in order to preserve the sacrament of the right of the government to discriminate at will.

Subotai Bahadur

“That violated their Fifth Amendment rights to equal protection under the Constitution.”

Was this supposed to say “Fifteenth”?

Or is equal protection somehow being seen as incorporated under due process?

nancyinOregon | June 19, 2024 at 5:18 pm

I wonder if this ruling will extend to federal grants to farmers. Since the beginning of the Biden administration, all of the requests for proposals for farming grants I’ve seen specify all of the races and genders that will be given preference. Of course whites do not even make the list. I imagine it will take a whole other lawsuit. It’s like whack-a-mole.