USDA and Democrats Spar Over Disaster Aid Distribution to Farmers

Lawmakers say the agency is distributing funds in a way that disadvantages small farms and is not in line with the legislation they passed.

By Lisa Held

June 10, 2025

June 10, 2025 – Since January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been rolling out funding Congress allocated last December to assist farmers and ranchers who’ve lost crops and animals during recent droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.

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In March, the agency introduced the first $10 billion program for commodity growers of corn, soybeans, and other crops and has already distributed close to $8 billion to those farmers. A $1 billion bucket of funding for livestock producers followed in May.

A group of Congressional Democrats is now focused on the USDA’s handling of a $220 million fund intended for small and mid-sized diversified farms in states with smaller agricultural footprints. These lawmakers say the way the USDA is structuring the Farm Recovery and Support Block Grant program violates Congressional intent.

“This block grant was created specifically to bridge the gap between traditional disaster relief programs and uncovered losses experienced by small farmers who cannot access traditional crop insurance,” the 28 members of Congress wrote in a statement released this week. “USDA is demanding states either accept traditional disaster relief, which has failed most of our small farmers for years, or gamble on an unknown amount of repayment with little to no guidance from USDA. Once again, this choice would leave so many small farms to fend for themselves after a disaster.”

The lawmakers argue that the way the agency set up the program will hurt farmers in their states because the agency told the states that if they choose to cover farmers’ crop losses with the Block Grant money, farmers in those states will then not be eligible to apply for the Supplemental Disaster Relief Program (SDRP), a different program with significantly more funding. Billy Hackett, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said the text of the legislation clearly presents the Block Grant program as separate funding that is in addition to the SDRP, so making states choose one or the other does not seem to be in line with the law.

Lawmakers and state representatives also said some states were presented with the options and given only about a week to decide. “Instead of following the law, [Agriculture] Secretary [Brooke] Rollins is forcing states to make a rushed decision, without all the necessary information or parameters, that pits one essential relief program against another with no regard for how it impacts our farmers,” Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who spearheaded getting the Block Grant funding into the legislation, said in a statement.

Having to decide quickly is particularly challenging, because the details of how the SDRP will be implemented are not yet available, Hackett said. “USDA has given no guidance about what that option will look like.”

In the past, however, Hackett said the USDA has given out money through SDRP primarily by automatically enrolling farmers who already receive commodity or crop insurance payments. By design, that means larger, commodity farms have gotten the bulk of the money. Under President Joe Biden, the USDA added an option that calculated losses based solely on farm revenue records, which helped give small, diversified farms access to the money, he said, but the approach has gotten a lot of pushback, primarily from Republicans. So, it’s unclear which path the current USDA will take.

In response to questions from Civil Eats, a USDA spokesperson noted that they had extended the Block Grant deadline for one state, Connecticut, that objected to the tight turnaround. The spokesperson then referred Civil Eats to an agency statement stating that Rollins has been working to deliver disaster aid to farmers “quickly and responsibly” and that the agency is offering flexible options and “clear guidance to avoid duplicating existing federal programs.”

“Congressional Democrats are playing politics with disaster aid, withholding critical funding from farmers to manufacture controversy and blame the Trump Administration—when in reality, they’re pushing to misuse taxpayer dollars,” USDA director of communications Seth W. Christensen said in the statement. (Link to this post.)

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Lisa Held is Civil Eats’ senior staff reporter and contributing editor. Read more >