The USDA canceled $300M in farm grants, citing fraud. Did it make up the evidence? | Grist
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Ayurella Horn-Muller
Staff Writer
Published<br>Jun 01, 2026
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Leah Atwood was rattled. It was the tail end of March, and for days she and her colleagues at Agroecology Commons had been fielding dozens of emails alerting them to grant terminations targeting a $300 million U.S. Department of Agriculture program. One after another, within a single week, 49 of the 50 grantees received notices from the USDA informing them that their grants were cancelled.
By the end of the month, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t gotten a notice from the USDA. While their peers were figuring out how to pick up the pieces, it seemed as though their $2.5 million grant, structured largely to help farmers of color acquire and sustain land, remained untouched. All they could do was wait. Resignation settled in — after all, they’d been in this position before.
Shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office last January, his administration launched a sweeping campaign to eliminate initiatives it has deemed wasteful or misaligned with its political agenda. At the USDA, that has meant slashing billions in grants and gutting a mix of newer and longstanding federal programs that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly framed as the administration’s attempt to "stop wasteful spending."
During the administration’s first year, Agroecology Commons lost multiple grants amidst the USDA’s funding purge. In response, the nonprofit filed a joint lawsuit against the agency, claiming that the grants were terminated unlawfully. In August, a judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction that restored their access to some of the money until the court makes its final determination based on the merits of the case.
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All 49 other recipients of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access grants received termination emails from the USDA during that week in March. In their written cancellations, which gave grantees two business days’ notice, Steven Peterson, the associate administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, explained to the grantees that their programming doesn’t align with the agency’s priorities and that its funding structure was not in keeping with the intent of Congress. He used the same language about cutting waste and discontinuing DEI efforts that had become routine for the administration. But whereas the administration tended to be vague about its claims of waste and fraud, Peterson’s letter was surprisingly specific.
“Instances of excessive or frivolous expenditures,” he wrote, “such as purchasing gazebos, massages, a camper/RV, and oversized office supply budgets (in one case, over $130,000) — instead of land are an affront to taxpayers.”
Through it all, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t heard a thing.
Questions swirled throughout the grantee network, but no one could explain why Agroecology Commons’ project alone was spared. Atwood’s team presumed their grant wasn’t terminated because of the ongoing litigation. Now, they continue to wait to see whether their funding will abruptly disappear, too.
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“We are trying to accomplish as much as we can in the time that we have, because we don’t know when it’s going to be canceled,” said Atwood. “It’s a strange reality.”
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Neither Agroecology Commons nor any of the other grant recipients that Grist spoke to seems to know who may have made those expenditures.
Kavita Koppa helps run RAFI, a farming organization based in North Carolina that was one of the 49 grants that was cancelled; they’d been awarded $8.5 million to help agricultural producers in North Carolina, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Koppa says RAFI was just about halfway through its five-year contract with USDA and had spent roughly $1.1 million when the termination notice came. From the beginning, almost $2.3 million of their total award had been set aside for grants to support...