USDA cancels $3B program for climate-related farming  (2025)

By Jack Phillips
Contributing Writer

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on Tuesday that it terminated a $3.1 billion climate-related farming program after finding that it didn’t align with the Trump administration’s priorities.

An archived USDA dashboard on its website had said that the agency had invested billions in the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, which the agency previously said funded priorities such as planting cover crops to prevent erosion, managing soil nutrients, and other initiatives.

The funding was allocated to 135 projects in every state that also encourage carbon sequestration, reduced methane emissions, and other climate-related practices, according to a project dashboard on the USDA website. The Biden administration had projected that the climate program would reach about 60,000 farms and cut millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide.

But the USDA said that managing that project was pricey and that it was canceled after a “thorough line by line review of each of these Biden-era partnerships.”

The USDA said the decision was to slash what it called bureaucratic red tape for farmers. The agency added that most of the projects provided too little money to farmers and incurred too much in administrative costs.

“It became clear that the majority of these projects had sky-high administration fees which in many instances provided less than half of the federal funding directly to farmers,” the USDA said in a statement.

Some projects under the initiative may continue if the USDA determines that the funding will go to farmers, according to the agency, which noted that it wants to support farmers in ways that are aligned with the Trump administration’s policies.

“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement, adding that farmers’ concerns “took a backseat” to climate interests.

Rollins said that during her time as the head of the USDA, farmers told her that they’re “overburdened by red tape” and that they need to submit “complex reporting” to access those programs.

Some projects may be allowed to continue, or grantees can reapply to a reformed version of the program if they prove that a minimum of 65%of their funds will go to farmers and if they had distributed a payment to a farmer by Dec. 31, 2024, the statement said.

Monday’s announcement comes in the midst of a wider effort by the Trump administration to cut funding to climate-related programs across the federal government. On the day he took office, President Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency” to boost production and said that the Biden administration’s policies had a deleterious effect on the national grid.

Last month, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would take dozens of actions to deregulate in a bid to increase U.S. energy production and auto production and allow states to make decisions.

Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order to bolster U.S. energy production and invest more in oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy, describing the decision as a means to guard against “state overreach.”

“American energy dominance is threatened when state and local governments seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authorities,” Trump’s order said.