USDA Had Obligated Just 15% of a $3 Billion Conservation Fund. Then Congress Rescinded What Was Left.

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program pays farmers to fence pastures for rotational grazing, plant cover crops, and fix the erosion nobody can afford to fix alone.▸ In fiscal 2024, boosted by Inflation Reduction Act money, it had its best year in over a decade: 43% of applicants got a contract, the highest share since 2018. Then, in January 2025, USDA paused spending that same IRA money. Congress fired a quarter of the agency's conservation staff. And in August 2025, the Government Accountability Office confirmed what the pause had done to the money itself: of the $3 billion appropriated for EQIP's 2025 tranche, USDA had obligated to farmers just $435 million — about 15% — six weeks before Congress rescinded whatever remained unobligated and folded it into the farm bill's permanent baseline.

Congress didn't cut EQIP's Inflation Reduction Act funding piecemeal.▸ It appropriated the whole multiyear pot up front — $250 million for FY2023, $1.75 billion for FY2024, $3 billion for FY2025 — and left USDA to obligate it to farmers year by year. For the first two years, USDA moved fast: by the time GAO examined the record, 89.6% of the FY2023 money and 89.4% of the FY2024 money had been obligated. Then, on January 21, 2025, state NRCS offices were told to pause IRA spending. When GAO checked again on May 23, 2025, the FY2025 tranche — three times the size of FY2024's — had reached just 14.5% obligated.

GAO's decision, issued at the request of the ranking members of the House and Senate Budget Committees, found the pause was a "permissible programmatic delay" and not an illegal impoundment.▸ That legal question became moot anyway: on July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the budget reconciliation law now known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rescinded whatever Inflation Reduction Act conservation money — for EQIP, the Conservation Stewardship Program, and two related programs — remained unobligated at enactment, and rolled it into the farm bill's ordinary baseline going forward. GAO's snapshot predates that rescission by six weeks, so the exact dollar figure Congress clawed back isn't independently confirmed here — only that, as of six weeks before the law passed, 85 cents of every FY2025 dollar Congress had set aside for farmers was still sitting unspent.

The freeze wasn't just administrative caution — it landed on an agency that had also lost the people who obligate conservation contracts.▸ Between January 2025 and January 2026, the Natural Resources Conservation Service lost 23% of its staff, according to an analysis of Office of Personnel Management federal workforce data by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Among the losses: 711 soil conservationists — the field staff who sit down with a landowner and plan a conservation contract — and 283 soil conservation technicians, who handle the site visits and measurements those contracts require. By January 2026, 141 counties that had NRCS staff a year earlier had none. Fifty-three percent of all U.S. counties saw some staff loss over that year.

The predictable result shows up in NRCS's own application records.▸ The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy obtained EQIP and CSP application and award data for fiscal 2025 through a Freedom of Information Act request — the same kind of federal disclosure request any citizen can file — and found that a record 118,377 farmers applied to EQIP that year, an 11% jump from FY2024's 106,794. But nationally only about 24% of them were awarded a contract, down from about 43% the year before. Every state that could be compared saw its EQIP contract count fall or hold flat from FY2024 to FY2025; not one increased. West Virginia funded the smallest share of its applicants of any state — just 241 of 1,864, according to IATP's analysis.

This piece covers EQIP and the federal staffing behind it; it does not attempt to price the on-the-ground cost of delayed conservation practices like cover crops or erosion control, which USDA does not track in dollar terms.