The U.S. Department of Agriculture is working with a left-wing advocacy group to boost voter turnout as part of President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to get involved in elections.
The USDA worked directly with Demos, a New York-based group that helped draft Biden’s Executive Order 14019, according to records obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
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Farms and families will pay significantly more under the Biden administration’s net-zero climate policies, a new report from an Ohio-based policy group says.
The Buckeye Institute’s Net-Zero Climate-Control Policies Will Fail the Farm shows farmers will see a 34% rise in operational costs under the policies and family grocery bills will increase 15% based on modeling.
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Amid mounting concerns over foreign land purchases within the United States, a report from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (DAG) Farm Service Agency has highlighted the alarming pace at which external entities have been gobbling up American forest and farm land.
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Recently released federal pricing analysis from the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that food prices will continue to rise through 2024.
The USDA pointed to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index released earlier this month, which showed consumer prices overall rose 3.2 percent in the previous twelve months. Food prices, though rose more quickly at 4.9 percent during the same time.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture will be cracking down on false claims on labeling of meat claiming it is “grass-fed,” “free-range,” “raised without antibiotics,” or “no antibiotics ever.”
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has received petitions, comments and letters asking the agency to boost oversight of marketing claims made by the meat and poultry industry, the agency said Wednesday in a news release. The agency will then determine if it needs to do more rulemaking on the industry’s claims.
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Several states have already banned or are considering banning foreign ownership of farmland from U.S. adversaries such as China, a trend that has its recent roots in North Dakota.
Chinese food manufacturer Fufeng Group purchased 370 acres of land for a corn milling plant in Grand Forks in November 2021.
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Nationwide, electronic benefits transfer fraud is estimated to cost taxpayers up to $4.7 billion annually, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In 2022, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program distributed over $113.7 billion to nearly 22 million households.
The federal government entrusts states to reduce fraud in safety net programs. In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told all 50 states to plan to fight EBT skimmer fraud, which happens when bad actors install a card reader on top of a legitimate point of sale at a retail store.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking the first steps in handing out $2.2 billion to farmers, ranchers or forest landowners who experienced discrimination with USDA farm lending programs.
The Inflation Reduction Act that was signed by President Joe Biden in August 2022 authorizes the spending.
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Determined to use their oversight authority to ensure election integrity, House Republicans are deploying dozens of trained observers to key races around the country while dispatching letters putting federal and state officials on notice to look for any shenanigans in the midterms.
The effort led by Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, includes investigating how federal agencies are implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order instructing the U.S. government to expand voter registration, along with the training and deployment of House staff as observers under the authority of Congress.
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The Biden administration has announced $500 million in grant money to stimulate American-made fertilizer production.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack unveiled the new grant program, called the Fertilizer Production Expansion Program, on Sept. 27.
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More than 100 House Republicans are asking a government watchdog to probe foreign investments in U.S. farmland, including those by China, which they say may present national and food security concerns.
Led by Reps. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania and James Comer of Kentucky, the lawmakers on Saturday called on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study foreign farmland ownership and how the U.S. government is monitoring acquisitions, a letter shows. There has been an uptick in foreign investments and ownership, which may be “underreported” due to the U.S. Agriculture Department’s (USDA) unreliable data, the Republicans say.
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Jerry Brown, director of public relations for St. Mary’s Food Bank, told The Arizona Sun Times that the number of families seeking food in Arizona has risen in recent months.
“To give you an example at St. Mary’s Food Bank,” Brown said Friday. “We’re still getting the final numbers in for August, but we’re going to come close to 150,000 families served just in the month of August. Something we didn’t do during the pandemic. The height of the pandemic. That’s not something we did during normal holiday years when we hand out a lot of turkeys. We do 18,000 turkeys for families around the holidays. Even those months didn’t result in 150,000 touches with families.”
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The Biden administration and Florida Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried approved the lunch money application for Grant Park Christian Academy in Tampa just days after the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Christian school.
The school was being denied children’s lunch funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program, which Fried administers. The program benefitted 56 low-income children at the Christian school by providing them with free meals.
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Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) recently sent a letter to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack, challenging woke gender policy changes that threaten school meal plan funding.
“In an effort to appease the Left’s woke gender agenda, the USDA is now attempting to hold American schools hostage,” Biggs said in a press release. “USDA’s definition changes of ‘sex discrimination’ would only harm American students. The department is coercing American schools to adopt the Biden Administration’s radical gender equality platform or else it will strip student benefits from these schools.”
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The number of commercial and backyard flocks with confirmed avian flu increased by 36% in the past week, according to data on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) website.
Three of the 57 new cases reported were in Missouri, bringing the state total to nine cases of Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu Influenza (HPAI) in seven counties—Bates, Dade, Gentry, Jasper, Lawrence, Ralls and Stoddard. Approximately 421,000 birds were in those flocks.
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A federal judge in Florida temporarily halted President Joe Biden’s $4 billion debt relief program exclusively for farmers of color, saying in a Wednesday order that the program was racially discriminatory.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard sided with Scott Wynn, a Florida-based white farmer who sued to block the program in May. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) program was originally passed in March as part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, with the intention of providing relief to “socially disadvantaged farmers.”
“Section 1005’s rigid, categorical, race-based qualification for relief is the antithesis of flexibility,” Howard wrote. “The debt relief provision applies strictly on racial grounds irrespective of any other factor.”
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United States District Judge William C. Griesbach sustained a motion last week for a temporary restraining order to block a program under the Department of Agriculture to forgive certain government loans for farmers belonging to at least one “socially disadvantaged group.” The Department of Agriculture identified groups eligible for this classification as “a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities . . . one or more of the following: Black/African American, American Indian, Alaskan native, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander.”
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