Citing discrimination against nonminorities in farming assistance programs, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has filed an amicus brief in support of plaintiff Robert Holman’s litigation against the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
He’s a corn and soybean farmer.
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The deadline to replace Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for recipients whose benefits were electronically stolen or skimmed is fast approaching.
A September 30, 2024, deadline looms for those who had their benefits stolen between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2024, to replace their lost benefits. This comes after Congress passed a law in December 2022, hoping to reduce SNAP benefit theft; the law set this deadline to replace benefits. People must file their claims within 30 days of the theft occurring to ensure they receive payment.
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Reputation associated with his military record already shattered, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz now faces a reckoning tied to a signature education accomplishment – feeding schoolchildren – from a congressional committee chaired by a North Carolina congresswoman.
Called the “largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the nation,” U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., on Wednesday sent a letter and subpoena to Walz and his state administration associated with the federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, and to the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Office of Inspector General.
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The cost of food assistance in the U.S. has dropped from its peak during the pandemic, but is still 23% higher than it was during pre-pandemic times, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what used to be called food stamps, peaked in costs December 2022 at $11.07 billion that month. That monthly cost dropped to $7.51 billion as of April 2024. There were about 41.6 million people collecting SNAP benefits as of April 2024.
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Over the past two years, nearly half the states in America acted to scrutinize purchases of land linked to China and other foreign adversaries. Concerns focus primarily on national security threats from China, and they’re well-founded.
The federal government has no idea how much real estate Chinese entities own in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture legally is required to track foreign ownership of agricultural land, but underestimates Chinese ownership by at least 50 percent.
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A group of white farmers in Texas is asking a federal judge to block the U.S. Department of Agriculture from using race, gender or other “socially disadvantaged” traits to determine who gets disaster and pandemic farm aid and how much, arguing the agency’s current administration of eight emergency funding programs is unconstitutionally discriminatory.
“When natural disasters strike, they don’t discriminate based on race and sex. Neither should the Department of Agriculture,” the group of farmers wrote in a court filing made public Monday.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is working with a left-wing advocacy group to boost voter turnout as part of President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to get involved in elections.
The USDA worked directly with Demos, a New York-based group that helped draft Biden’s Executive Order 14019, according to records obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture intends to cultivate the transgender ideology on a global scale using international farm-aid programs.
That could mean attaching strings to international grants that the USDA doles out to support the Biden administration’s LGBTQ agenda, which President Joe Biden ordered in a presidential memorandum.
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Recently released federal pricing analysis from the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that food prices will continue to rise through 2024.
The USDA pointed to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index released earlier this month, which showed consumer prices overall rose 3.2 percent in the previous twelve months. Food prices, though rose more quickly at 4.9 percent during the same time.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday over $800 million in federal funds to improve electric infrastructure and water systems in rural communities, of which Virginia is set to receive nearly $6 million in loans and over $3.8 million in grants.
The Wise County Public Service Authority will receive the lion’s share of Virginia’s USDA dollars in this round of funding. A loan of $1.2 million and a grant of more than $3.5 million will be used to replace more than 29,000 linear feet of water line, install 12 gate valves, and assemble 10 fire hydrants, among other things, to address a current health hazard.
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Three health care entities in western Virginia will receive a total of nearly $11 million in federal funding from a program established by the American Rescue Plan Act.
The 2021 stimulus package included the creation of a temporary grant program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture called the Emergency Rural Health Care Grant Program. The bill allotted up to $500 million for the expansion of health care services to eligible public bodies, community-based nonprofits and federally-recognized tribes – some specific to COVID-19 – like testing and vaccines, and also for projects dedicated to “the long-term sustainability of rural health care.”
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For the first time since the COVID pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released the fiscal year 2022 national payment error rate for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The PER measures how accurately SNAP agencies determine benefit amounts and eligibility. A payment error means the agency either underpaid or overpaid the recipient, which can result from an error by the agency or a recipient or fraud.
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Several states have already banned or are considering banning foreign ownership of farmland from U.S. adversaries such as China, a trend that has its recent roots in North Dakota.
Chinese food manufacturer Fufeng Group purchased 370 acres of land for a corn milling plant in Grand Forks in November 2021.
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The Biden administration asked several departments and federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Interior, to support border authorities ahead of the end of Title 42, the Trump-era migrant expulsion order, on May 11, according to an internal memo exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In addition to deploying Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense Department (DOD) personnel to the southern border, the Biden administration also requested the deployment of Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Commerce and Department of Interior personnel, according to the Friday memo, which Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Acting Executive Associate Director Katrina Berger sent internally.
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Nationwide, electronic benefits transfer fraud is estimated to cost taxpayers up to $4.7 billion annually, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In 2022, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program distributed over $113.7 billion to nearly 22 million households.
The federal government entrusts states to reduce fraud in safety net programs. In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told all 50 states to plan to fight EBT skimmer fraud, which happens when bad actors install a card reader on top of a legitimate point of sale at a retail store.
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A new government report reveals that the total amount of American soil owned by Chinese investors is nearly twice as large as the entirety of New York City.
As the New York Post reports, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) revealed in last month’s report on foreign-held land that Chinese buyers currently own at least 384,235 of American land. By contrast, the full expanse of New York City covers just 193,700 acres. Even Bill Gates’ total land ownership is dwarfed by China’s, with just 270,000 acres.
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Foreign investment in U.S. farmland has tripled in the past 10 years, reporters at a non-profit investigative journalism group found.
Investigate Midwest used U.S. Department of Agriculture data to call attention to this trend. Farmer Joe Maxwell, co-founder of the group Farm Action, told The Center Square that control of U.S. farmland by foreign investors is worrisome on a number of fronts.
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Food prices in the U.S. may get worse in the coming months as European Union countries predict a dismal wheat harvest on top of the loss in Ukraine’s wheat exports, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The EU may produce 5% less wheat than 2021 because of dry weather, agriculture consulting firm Strategie Grains told the WSJ.
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The Biden Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced that all state and local agencies that receive federal funding for meals, a category that includes schools, must not discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In a press release dated May 5, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) announced it would now interpret the ban on discrimination based on sex included in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and food-related legislation and programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp program, to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture expects U.S. food prices to increase by at least another 5% on average this year as the majority of Americans surveyed in a new poll cite cost of living increases as a top concern and lack of confidence in President Joe Biden’s ability to do anything about it.
Rising prices are due to inflation, the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates, and consequences of Russia invading Ukraine, the USDA states in its most recent monthly Food Price Outlook, which forecasts retail food inflation.
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There’s an old saying that we should invest in land because there’s a limited amount of it, so it won’t lose its value.
But when it comes to farmland in the United States, there could be a more pressing reason to invest these days – national security.
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday failed to formally file an appeal in federal court against an injunction that was issued against one of the most controversial aspects of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill, leaving the future of planned reparations for non-White farmers in doubt, as reported by Politico.
Monday was the deadline for the DOJ to do so, 60 days after federal judges ultimately ruled that the $4 billion program, which would forgive the debts of exclusively non-White farmers, was unconstitutional and thus could not be implemented. The measure was one of many elements of the bill passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden in March.
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Congressman Rob Wittman (R-Virginia-01) was one of six Republicans last week who cosigned a bill that would create an Office of Intelligence in the Department of Agriculture. The bill was originally introduced by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Congressman Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas-02) last fall, but the current House version, HR 1625, has gradually gained Republican cosigners this spring.
“Two weeks ago, JBS, an international meat supplier, fell victim to a severe cyber attack,” Wittman explained in a Friday newsletter. “This marks the second attack targeting the production of American commodities, such as gasoline and food. This attack highlights the threat cyberattacks potentially pose to the American food supply chain.
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by Tim Pearce The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is moving two agencies and roughly 700 federal employees out of Washington, D.C., to save money and improve the department’s service to taxpayers. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced Thursday that the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and…
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