USDA Terminated 49 of 50 Farmland-Access Grants in One Week. A Judge Has Twice Ordered the Money Back.

In June 2023, USDA's Farm Service Agency picked fifty organizations to share roughly $300 million meant to help underserved and beginning farmers do something that gets structurally harder every year: buy land.▸ The Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access Program (ILCMAP) funded down-payment assistance, low-interest loans, land-access counseling, and heirs'-property fixes across 40 states and territories. On or around March 23, 2026, the agency terminated forty-nine of the fifty grants in a single week. The fiftieth had already been shielded — by the same federal judge, eight months earlier, in the same lawsuit, over a different USDA program awarded to the same plaintiff.

The letters USDA sent to ILCMAP grant holders were, per the court record, "nearly identical."▸ Each opened with the same finding: that "USDA has determined that awards under this program involved discriminatory preferences based on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and wasteful spending that did little to further agricultural land purchases," and that the grant "no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities." The letters pointed to Secretary Brooke Rollins' March 13, 2025 memorandum on departmental grant priorities and asserted the program carried "unacceptable risks of fraud, waste and abuse." When grantees tried to appeal, USDA's National Appeals Division ruled the terminations weren't even appealable, because they were "based on the general policy priorities of USDA" rather than anything specific to an individual grant — a finding laid out in the June 30, 2026 memorandum opinion in Urban Sustainability Directors Network v. USDA.

The $127 million figure is not stated anywhere in Judge Beryl Howell's own opinion — it's independent reporting's and plaintiffs' co-counsel Earthjustice's tally of the 24 individual award amounts at issue, including an $8.5 million grant to the Four Bands Community Fund and a $2.5 million grant to NDN Collective.▸ What the opinion does state, directly: the relief runs only to the twenty-four organizations that joined the suit. The other twenty-five terminated grant holders are not before the court and, as far as the public record shows, remain unfunded.

Grant terminations don't come with a layoff count attached.▸ What shows up instead, in the sworn declarations plaintiffs filed to win their money back, is a string of concrete decisions organizations made once the checks stopped. The Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey told the court it "may have to reduce the income of or lay off three to four of our employees." OurSpace World said it was "lay[ing] off the project manager for this project," halting a planned hiring round, converting "most of our existing staff... from employees to independent contractors," and cancelling its group health insurance contract. King County, Washington — whose ILCMAP grant had supported a Farmland Access program connecting new and beginning farmers to county-owned land — said it would have to cancel six contracts, with a community college, a community lender, and four nonprofit partners, "resulting in layoffs of staff both within King County and at some of our Contractors." HOPE for Small Farm Sustainability, a Texas nonprofit, told the court it "may not be able to stay operational beyond September 2026."

Relief in this case has come plaintiff by plaintiff, not program-wide.▸ That pattern was set in the first ruling, in August 2025, when the court reinstated grants for five original plaintiffs but declined to bless a broader claim that USDA was unlawfully terminating "hundreds of grants" as a matter of policy. Nothing in the June 30, 2026 order changes that structure — it simply adds twenty-four more names to the list of organizations a judge has individually protected. USDA is not accepting that outcome quietly: on July 8, 2026, the government filed a notice of appeal to the D.C. Circuit, transmitted to the appeals court on July 10.

The $127 million restoration figure is a secondary tally by independent reporting and plaintiffs' counsel of the 24 newly-reinstated grants' original award amounts; the court's own order does not state a single total. The count of "25 terminated, not part of any lawsuit" is arithmetic (50 awarded − 1 previously protected − 24 newly restored = 25), not a government-published list, and could shift if more grant holders join existing or new litigation. Both preliminary injunctions described here are preliminary rulings, not final judgments, and USDA's appeal of the June 30, 2026 order was pending as of this writing.