Why Are We Giving the Department of Agriculture $2.2 Billion for Being Racist?

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, joined by Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese, speaks on rising food prices at a press briefing at the White House in Washington on Sept. 8, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Commentary

​The Biden administration is starting to get a distinctive look to it, combining all the vast unlimited powers of the FDR-style New Deal governance with today’s divisive fixation on identity politics that consumes the modern left, all with a sort of incompetence to its gait that’s all Joe.

No agency typifies this worst-of-both-eras look more than the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA is a bureaucracy that should play no role in the lives of any American who doesn’t farm or ranch (and, debatably, none in their lives either; those who do have little good to say about where the USDA lands on the competency spectrum). Yet the USDA had decided to branch out into solving, let’s say, more ... global problems.

No, not soil erosion. Not world hunger even. No, instead, the USDA is mobilizing all the power at its (surprisingly considerable) disposal to root out “systemic racism.” Crops don’t care about anything other than the weather, yet somehow the USDA is equipped to finish the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

​As is usually the case when we suddenly notice an agency out of control, this is Congress’s fault. Congress somehow managed to perform below expectations when it enacted the grievously misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Buried on page 206 of a 273-page law (pdf) (future generations will marvel that such laws were passed by a body that wasn’t embarrassed to claim to act on behalf of a republic), the IRA awards $2.2 billion dollars for USDA to spend on farmers and ranchers who were victims of discrimination in the USDA’s farm loan lending program.

No one seems to be talking much about it. I guess that makes sense. Spending money and fixating on race is, sadly, quite ordinary for this administration. Still, a little-noticed part of Section 22007 really did raise an eyebrow. Perhaps to show that the American people still retain some capacity for astonishment, Congress didn’t directly authorize the USDA to spend the $2.2 billion. No, instead, Congress authorized the USDA to choose one or more “nongovernmental entities,” that is, private, outside groups, to administer the funds.

This must be one of the strangest provisions ever enacted by Congress. Congress loves to delegate responsibility to other parts of government when it comes time to do actual work. That part isn’t strange at all. But when has the government ever given away its ability to spend other people’s money? That’s its favorite thing to do. And why would the USDA do this? Spending money seems to be the only thing that this administration is actually competent at.

And can you imagine the beauty contest the USDA is going to hold to decide which lucky, left-wing group gets a rose worth—say it again—billions of dollars? They really should make a tell-all episode after the public fleecing is done. It would certainly be the most-watched program in the history of C-Span.

It’s actually crystal clear why Congress is doing this: cronyism. Elected officials love rewarding political allies by spreading public wealth around. It’s much easier than legislating for the common good. This is what you do when you have no idea how to address inflation, and no one was impressed after you dressed up Independence Hall like the throne room of a Sith Lord while warning that the other guys were the real threats to democracy. It’s highly irresponsible, but does anyone believe good governance is a trendy political commodity these days?

Using the USDA as a passthrough ensures that the Biden administration can secure the loyalty of the bureaucracy before then rewarding allied, outside interest groups who will then rain money on potential voters. I would call it genius if it wasn’t so genuinely gross. By giving the key to the public vault to whoever looks “woke” enough to turn the USDA’s eye, the Biden administration will scratch the backs of three levels of political constituencies. And as to whom will get the final rose, the mind reels with the possibilities.

No one is saying the USDA is above racial discrimination. I consider it to have been a certainty having personally been part of a successful lawsuit against the USDA for doing exactly that. One of the very first moves of the Biden administration was to try to do across-the-board farm loan forgiveness, which met with predictable failure. The lawsuit was useful in one respect. It forced the USDA to put up or shut up about its history of discriminating against farmers in its farm lending programs. There have been some very real problems in the past. But America didn’t just wake up and notice. This isn’t year zero for racial reckoning. In fact, the USDA has been trying to make it right for more than 25 years. Those efforts are extensively detailed in an order (pdf) in our case. According to the USDA, it has already paid out more than $2.4 billion to victims, as well as taking other extraordinary steps, such as suspending statutes of limitations and creating new offices of compliance.

What’s left? After we sued the USDA, the court wanted to know if the USDA still has lingering problems to address. As far as evidence, the USDA’s most recent actual study was from 2011. So, has the USDA been continuing to discriminate since then? If so, I hope it has held its own racist employees accountable. After all, discriminating against someone in a government program is pretty illegal and has been for some time. Yet my brief and largely unmotivated internet search couldn’t find evidence that any USDA employee had been indicted for a civil rights violation. And something tells me the personnel files of the USDA wouldn’t paint a picture of departmental-wide racism worth $2.2 billion.

If it did, then maybe the last thing we should do is reward the USDA with $2.2 billion. On top of the $2.4 billion that the USDA has already put taxpayers on the hook for, I wouldn’t see any choice but to regard the USDA as a career offender. I would much rather direct that money to federal law enforcement to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of a governmental entity this chronically committed to civil rights deprivations. But of course, that’s only if you really believe Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack when he says the $2.2 billion is necessary to “provide justice to those that have been discriminated against [by the department that reports directly to him].”

This is undoubtedly not the last we'll hear of this from the USDA. Under its newly released Equity Action Plan, the USDA recognizes “the damaging effects of systemic racism and discrimination that persist to this day” and pledges to “take aggressive action to advance racial justice and equity.” I would call it mission creep for the Department of Agriculture to turn its attention to solving racism, but this is the mission under President Joe Biden, who has mobilized the whole of government to reckoning with (his words) “the unbearable human cost of systemic racism.”

It’s a mystery why groceries cost so much.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.