A new bill will allow private donors to fund the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), creating a serious conflict of interest and potential undemocratic influence against American farmers and ranchers.
The goal is to bolster funds for conservation and climate programs. While its being marketed by House Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) as a “common sense bill” that will “encourage more private sector investment,” in reality, the SUSTAINS Act (HR 2606) opens the door for deep-pocketed donors to sway public policy related to managing agricultural lands.
Which is a better environmental steward: A jet-setting billionaire or a 5th generation cattle rancher? In the future, the answer may come down to who can write the bigger check, at least as far as the USDA is concerned.
The USDA is currently asking for public comment on how to implement the SUSTAINS Act. The comment period is open until Sept. 16, 2024.
Conflict of interest against everyday American farmers and ranchers
The USDA is not led by elected officials; voters have no ability to hire or fire the people who head this powerful agency. Creating an invitation for outside donor money, in a world where the largest American farmland owner is billionaire and fake meat investor Bill Gates, will absolutely create conflicts of interest in an agency that is already largely unaccountable and unregulated.
Americans have seen this pattern play out in other agencies. 75% of funding for the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) comes from pharmaceutical companies, not taxpayers. Small wonder why Big Pharma executives and lobbyists often wind up leading these government agencies. Creating an opportunity for similar backdoor influence in managing ag lands in rural America should alarm anyone who prefers a future with more transparency and less corporate influence in government.
The language of this 5-page bill is vague. For example:
“An easement funded pursuant to this subsection shall be subject to the requirements of the covered program for which the contributed funds were used, except that the Secretary may modify such requirements, as they apply to the easement, for the purpose of addressing climate change, as the Secretary determines appropriate.”
“It’s difficult to decipher what’s really behind these bills. It’s like solving a riddle. I don’t like riddles and the American people don’t like being lied to. To me this is a straight out attack on rural America,” Mindy Patterson, president of Cavalry Group, said in an interview with Tri-State Livestock News.
“Those private parties could be animal rights groups, they could be environmental extremist organizations, they could be China, they could be John Doe. Then this money goes to a bureaucracy (USDA) to be managed,” she said. “So you’ve got unelected bureaucrats basically running our country and running farmers and ranchers. And now they are taking money from private parties. This is basically private money influencing government. That’s what public-private partnerships are.”
SUSTAINS Act will allow donors to treat the USDA like an environmental services market
One provision in the 5-page bill reads:
(B) SALE OF ECOSYSTEM BENEFITS.—If an activity funded pursuant to this section may result in environmental services benefits to be sold through an environmental services market, the producer carrying out the activity and the entity that contributed the applicable funds shall negotiate a mutually beneficial sale of such benefits.
In other words, as a writer at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center suggests, the SUSTAINS Act will allow the USDA to become an aggregator of environmental services. Meaning funders will be able to fund projects that create environmental outcomes, and then receive some portion of the financial return.
For example, a donor gives money to fund an Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP)–an NRCS conservation program that gives financial assistance to ag producers and landowners who wish to accomplish some environmental goal such as improved water quality, soil health, or wildlife habitat. Then the environmental impact of the project is quantified, and the donor is able to keep some portion of the financial value the government designates for those environmental services.
While it is unclear how exactly a USDA-backed environmental services market would operate in practice, it is less difficult to imagine mega-money donors finding opportunities for return on their USDA “investments”–and swaying the agency’s priorities away from agricultural producers and American consumers toward the whims of large landowners and willing donors eager to pay-to-play on the environmental market, and more than happy to buy up acreage where they can facilitate the latest climate mitigation fad.
After all, when a multitude of environmental sins can be erased with a fat donation to the right bureaucrats, it pays more to have a big bank account than it does to be a conscientious, generational land steward. The emerging science around grazing as wildfire mitigator, rangeland restorer, and carbon sequester is undeniable and exciting–but it still can’t touch the power of a check in the right hands.
Most reps have never heard of the SUSTAINS Act
The SUSTAINS Act was not voted on independently; it was tacked onto the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023. When Ms. Patterson asked representatives about the bill, most didn’t know anything about it.
“I met with every GOP member of the House Ag Committee and several on the Senate Ag Committee recently,” she told Tri-State Livestock News. “I asked every single one if they’d heard of the SUSTAINS Act, and none but the House Ag Committee Chairman, Glenn Thompson (R-Pennsylvania), the sponsor of the bill, was familiar with it.”
The co-sponsors of the SUSTAINS Act are: Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa); Rep Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota); Rep. Jim Baird (R-Indiana); Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas); Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska).
Mixed response from cattle industry groups
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) is backing the bill, saying it will help “ease the creation of public-private partnerships that support practical conservation practices.”
Others, such as R-CALF USA private property rights committee chair Shad Sullivan, have expressed concern, writing that the bill “bypass[es] congressional rule-making authority by handing over sole discretion to agency secretaries and codifying the influence of private money on our governmental institutions.”
