Trump's USDA resurrects one climate grant program, kills another

Farmers who were left in limbo after the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze renewable energy grants are finally starting to get paid.
At the same time, however, farmers have been hit with the cancellation of another USDA grant program: the $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, designed to promote farming and forestry practices to improve soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Dale Westphal is among the farmers who recently got long-awaited grant money for a clean energy project. After learning last year that he'd been approved for a $20,000 grant under the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP), he put up about $46,500 to install solar panels on his corn and soybean farm in southern Minnesota last year. He viewed it as a smart way to protect himself from rising electrical rates.
Earlier this year, the USDA told him — and thousands of other farmers nationwide — that his grant funding had been put on hold because of an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on the first day of his second term in office. That order froze billions of dollars for renewable energy under President Joe Biden's signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
In April, Westphal got his grant money — a welcome development that he says has made his solar investment worthwhile.
'I don't think I would have done it without the grant, because the payback would have been so much longer that it wouldn't have made sense,' he said. In an email to Floodlight, a USDA spokesperson said that between March 25 and May 9, the agency issued nearly $126 million in reimbursements to more than 1,000 grantees under the REAP program.
As of May 9, more than $960 million in awards to nearly 5,000 grant recipients had not yet been sent out, the spokesperson said. That money remained undistributed because the grant recipients had not yet completed work on their projects, or had not yet submitted paperwork to show that the projects have been completed and paid for, according to the USDA.
The release of funds comes after legal pressure and complaints from farmers who had already put money on the line.
A federal lawsuit filed against the USDA in March sought a court order to compel the Trump administration to honor the government's grant commitments to farmers and nonprofits. That complaint, filed by the Earthjustice environmental law group, is still pending.
And in April, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the USDA and five other federal agencies to release frozen IRA funds.
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