The Justice Department will no longer defend some farm program benefits targeted to “socially disadvantaged” producers, Solicitor General John Sauer says in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
In the letter, Sauer wrote that “various programs” overseen by USDA “give preferential treatment to ‘socially disadvantaged’ farmers or ranchers, and said his agency will stop defending those aspects of the programs in court. He said DOJ has determined that they are “unconstitutional to the extent that they include preferences based on race or sex."
The solicitor general's letter specifically mentioned parts of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program identifying socially disadvantaged producers. Both programs consider certain racial or ethnic groups as socially disadvantaged, and NCDAP also includes women in the definition as well. Sauer argued that “in giving preferential treatment to ‘socially disadvantaged’ farmers or ranchers, the programs discriminate based on race or sex.”
The letter cited a Supreme Court decision in a court case against Harvard over race-based recruitment as a basis for the decision. It said preferences included in the USDA programs “rely on arbitrary, over broad, and under inclusive categories and lack any logical end point."
“For those reasons, the Department of Justice will no longer defend the constitutionality of race- or sex-based preferences in those programs,” Sauer wrote. “The Department of Justice, however, continues to defend other aspects of the programs that employ race- and sex-neutral criteria."
Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Vaden shared the letter in an X post on Friday, in which he alleged the previous administration “willfully engaged in racial discrimination across USDA farm programs.”
"America's farmers will never again be subjected to such heinous prejudice,” Vaden wrote.
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