Amanda Koehler has spent the past decade working to help young and first-time farmers gain access to land—the single biggest obstacle for people who aspire to grow crops or raise animals but can’t afford the soaring cost of acreage.

Recently she and other advocates learned the Trump administration in late March quietly axed a little-known but nonetheless critical Biden-era program designed to boost opportunities for these farmers, determining the program had, in essence, failed. In fact, it was just gaining momentum.

“I wasn’t surprised it happened,” Koehler said. “But the timing was a shock.”

The program, called Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access, aimed to help underrepresented farmers, but also had the potential indirect effect of countering the growing consolidation and corporate control in the agriculture industry, which has made it nearly impossible for new farmers to break into the business. These larger, industrial-scale farms are typically responsible for agriculture’s sizable carbon impacts.

The cut to the program, which cost a relatively modest $300 million in total, is only the latest in a series of Trump administration moves targeting conservation programs and staff at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. During the Biden administration, USDA launched a number of climate and conservation initiatives to address agriculture’s role—as both culprit and victim—in the climate crisis.

During the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, many of those were slashed or altered in a way that either disadvantages small-scale farmers in favor of big operators or sidelines conservation efforts.

Overall, USDA lost 21 percent of its workforce—compared to a 12 percent cut across the entire federal government, according to an Inside Climate News analysis of data from the Office of Personnel Management covering the first year of the second Trump administration. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the agency’s primary department overseeing climate-related efforts, took one of the biggest blows, losing more than 23 percent of its staff, dropping from nearly 12,000 employees to just over 9,000.

“All federal agencies got hit hard, but USDA got hit really, really hard,” said Becky Schewe, a policy analyst for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition who extensively analyzed USDA staff cuts last year. “And NRCS got hit particularly hard. These are the people providing technical guidance and assistance and support for farmers; they’re the ones managing and paying out working lands conservation programs. … All of those staff losses have a direct conservation and climate impact.”

The vast majority of these cuts, Schewe noted, were staff who left the agency voluntarily, through the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred resignation program in which employees agreed to leave federal agencies in April of last year, but got paid through September.

“A large part of it has to do with morale,” Schewe noted. “They thought they were going to lose their jobs anyway.”

Most of the staff who left the agency served or lived in rural areas and were not based in or near Washington, D.C., even though the administration had said Washington-based employees were its primary target for termination. While the agency’s Washington headquarters lost 12 percent, and offices in suburban Maryland, home to major research and inspection wings of USDA, lost about 40 percent, some ag-heavy states, including Kansas and Illinois, lost as much as 30 percent.

“All of those staff losses have a direct conservation and climate impact.”

— Becky Schewe, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

“There’s this disconnect between the rhetoric that we’re, quote, moving service closer to farmers and the fact that they are, in fact, laying off or separating or moving staff who serve farmers directly and are already in the field,” Schewe said.

Many of the highly trained soil scientists and engineers who consult with farmers on how to implement and assess conservation practices are now gone, and those still serving these areas are often stretched thin over several counties rather than one or two.

The NRCS staff “work in extremely close partnership with farmers on a day-to-day basis,” said Rebecca Bartels, executive director of Invest in Our Land, a newly formed group focused on protecting conservation dollars for farmers. “We see a lot of concerns, both on the delivery of the programs and also for farmers’ ability to navigate how the conservation practices that the program facilitates can help them overcome very real day-to-day challenges like extreme weather.”

President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, provided about $19.5 billion to farmers for practices deemed to have a beneficial climate impact. Under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last July, $14 billion that had not yet been spent was instead rolled into USDA’s baseline spending for conservation programs.

Ultimately that provided more permanent funding for conservation programs over time. But in the process, the administration lifted rules that direct the funds to be spent specifically on programs with a climate benefit. The new legislation also raised income limits on conservation funding, meaning large farms with greater resources and technical support can qualify for conservation funding that doesn’t have a climate-specific goal.

“Where there’s real concern is how this is going to play out,” said Richa Patel, a policy specialist with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “With a lack of staff, it’ll just be easier to write contracts for the folks who are well resourced … and don’t need that more technical one-on-one help and support from their local field staff, because there’s just far less of them.”

The lack of field staff also means the administration’s own programs appear to be getting shortchanged. In December, USDA announced a new “Regenerative Pilot Program” intended to help farmers deploy more conservation practices, like growing soil-restoring cover crops or implementing grazing management techniques to control erosion. But farmers have reported that their local NRCS offices are unfamiliar with the program or how to help them carry it out.

Even among politically conservative farmers, who historically have questioned the causes of climate change, conservation and climate programs have become hugely popular. USDA’s largest conservation program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), pays farmers to achieve certain conservation benefits.

“EQIP is wildly oversubscribed and popular,” Bartels said. “How will farmers continue to trust that if they choose to enroll, a contract will be respected and staff will be there to support them?”

Koehler, who manages the Land, Capital, and Market Access Network, said she knows of many farmers who had to seek professional help to secure a grant in the past three years, at significant cost to them. “The farms that can access the program are farms that are able to find and pay for their own technical assistance,” she explained. “I know farmers who were unable to get a [Conservation Stewardship Program] or EQIP contract without hiring a grant writer. That’s not how these programs should work.”

USDA’s staff cuts have accompanied the agency’s announcements of major reorganizations. At the end of March, the agency announced it would move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from D.C. to Utah and “begin a sweeping restructuring of the agency to move leadership closer to the forests and communities it serves.”

USDA hasn’t yet disclosed the fate of the departments across the rest of the agency.

“We know very little in terms of formally confirmed and shared information there,” Schewe said. “I would say the department is very tight-lipped. They’re not even providing information to staff, much less to other stakeholders.”

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Schewe referenced public announcements from the agency about office lease terminations, suggesting it is indeed planning for staff relocations. “So it’s definitely moving forward,” she added. “But the status of what it is and what their plans are is very unclear.”

When asked for details, a USDA spokesperson responded by email: “Secretary [Brooke] Rollins understands the array of mission critical positions and programs at the Department, and she will ensure that those areas, including NRCS, have the resources and personnel they need to continue serving the American people,” they wrote. “Some aspects of the reorganization will be implemented over the coming months while other aspects will take more time to implement. As the reorganization progresses, employees and other relevant parties will be updated accordingly.”

Beyond staff shuffling and cuts, USDA has slashed individual conservation and diversity-focused grants.

FarmStand, a legal advocacy group, has sued the administration, demanding it provide a full record of how it chose the grants to cut. So far the USDA has not provided it, but what it has produced shows that the agency targeted any awarded grant that had an array of terms, including “equity,” “environmental justice,” “climate change” or “biodiversity.”

“They just typed words into a database, saw what hit and then listed those grants for termination,” said David Muraskin, managing director for litigation at FarmStand. “It was like: ‘Let’s find the people who you can point to as getting grants like this and terminate them regardless of reason.’”

“They withheld approvals that grantees were required to get to do the work, and so they essentially bottlenecked the program and then blamed awardees for not making progress.”

— Amanda Koehler, Land, Capital, and Market Access Network

The recent termination of 49 out of the 50 Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access projects, announced in late March, effectively killed the entire program and is just a continuation of that process, critics say.

“It’s clear we’re seeing the ripple effects of this blunderbuss approach,” Muraskin said, noting that the termination letters grantees received accused the grant program of fraud, abuse and waste, but didn’t cite specific allegations.

In fact, Koehler said, USDA froze the funding for the grants for months. “They withheld approvals that grantees were required to get to do the work, and so they essentially bottlenecked the program and then blamed awardees for not making progress,” she said.

The grants and low-interest loans for farmland, farm infrastructure and equipment were intended to provide practical support. “These are people who are trying to feed their communities and care for the land,” Koehler added. “And we all know that young and underserved producers are much more likely to participate in regenerative and climate-smart practices.”

A USDA spokesperson said that the agency terminated the grants because of an “egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars to the tune of $300 million,” saying that inappropriate spending under the program included $20,000 for a barbeque smoker, $110,000 for a camper and $20,000 for pens.

Like many critics of the current USDA, Koehler pointed to the rare progress the agency had finally made toward addressing climate change—long overdue, many advocates say—under the Biden administration.

“Under the last administration, climate became a clear priority for the first time,” Koehler said. “And it’s been very concerning to see the loss of these programs and the loss of this focus.”