In rural Colorado, U.S. Department of Agriculture funding has long provided not only a safety net against disasters and shifting commodity prices but also the seed money for projects ranging from irrigation ditches to broadband expansion.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to remake and slim down the federal government are putting that support in question.
“We lost an NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) grant that totaled about $640,000 or $630,000,” said Michael Nolan, president of the Mancos Conservation District and a farmer himself. “We had spent down about 25 percent of that already implementing programs, paying staff time, and to have that rug just pulled out from underneath us means … potential furloughs, potential layoffs. It’s a big hit to our conservation district.”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said last week the USDA will release about $20 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding that had been frozen, but the rest was still under review. And other grant funding is expected to be canceled.
“Unfortunately, the Biden administration rushed out hundreds of millions of dollars of IRA funding that was supposed to be distributed over eight years. After careful review, it is clear that some of this funding went to programs that had nothing to do with agriculture—that is why we are still reviewing,” she said in a statement.
According to the USA Spending website, USDA awarded more than $4 billion in grants, awards, loans and direct payments in FY 2024 and FY 2025. But not all of that money is making it to the intended recipients.
The Conservation District signed a contract with USDA in February 2024 to do conservation education. It involved listening sessions, equipment demonstrations, field trainings and agricultural education on issues from soil moisture to crop management.
“At the end of the day, we believe the funding was pulled because of two phrases in it. One was ‘equity’ and one was ‘underserved communities’,” Nolan said.
Those two words are on a list of terms that the Trump administration has flagged for review when it comes to grants, part of a larger effort to root out funding for anything the administration deems related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, as well as issues surrounding climate change.
The way the district viewed it: equity was ensuring that every person in the watershed had equal access to the resources the district wanted to share with them, while ‘underserved community’ was drawn from the NRCS’s own language, “basically beginning farmers and ranchers (and) veteran farmers and ranchers making under $170,000 a year, which is near on everybody.”
Nolan said he understands contracts can be canceled or reduced, but it’s usually for cause, something egregious happening on the ground, “so to have hundreds of grants across the country be pulled at once is pretty unprecedented.”
One Western Slope ag producer said right now there’s no certainty over what will or will not be funded.
Like many farmers and ranchers, this producer has used USDA grant programs and is really worried about how this could impact farm infrastructure projects, “where federal funding is really critical, in particular water projects.” CPR News is granting him anonymity because he fears he could lose funding for speaking out.
When the producer reached out to his USDA representative on the ground, “there’s no definitive answer that we won’t receive (the funding). But there’s also no definitive answer that we will.”
Nolan experienced the same, joking that he felt like he’d been “ghosted.”
Nolan thinks the lack of communication could also be due to the layoffs USDA and other federal agencies are currently undergoing.
“Losing that capacity just means that programs won't get accessed. The applications that are there are going to take longer to process and the cost shares and implementing those cost shares across the board are less likely to happen,” he said. “It's not saving any money. In my personal point of view, it's just slowing the system down to a crawl.”
Many agricultural producers have long called for more support from the NRCS and other USDA specialists. But instead of having more staffers to work with, farmers will see less in the future.
“I got an email stating that I was being terminated for unsatisfactory performance when every single performance review I've ever gotten has been glowing. I've never gotten bad feedback from a supervisor, from a coworker, from a producer,” said one laid-off USDA employee in Colorado. After a year on the job, she got an email on Friday saying she was terminated, one of thousands of probationary employees let go. “So the fact that they're trying to act like this is somehow based on merit is ridiculous.”
She had always wanted to work in the conservation field and found fulfillment in being a public servant, a professional path that in the past had much more stability than the private sector. Her job involved working with farmers to meet the resource challenges their farms were facing. CPR News is not using her name out of concerns of retaliation.
“We are helping local people who don't have a lot of money make a living. This is their livelihood and it's not something that they are going to be able to continue doing without assistance. And they can call it fraud, they can call it waste, they can call it whatever they want, but at the end of the day, we are helping the American people make a living in this country,” she said.
CPR News reached out to Sen. Michael Bennet, who sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee, for his views on the administration’s actions, but did not receive a reply by deadline.
Republican Rep. Jeff Hurd represents the Western Slope. A spokesman said Hurd supports eliminating “any waste, fraud and abuse but wants to caution against these sweeping and imprecise layoffs.”
Republican Lauren Boebert, another representative with lots of agricultural interests in her district, said she has “full confidence” in Rollins and her team to “review every expenditure and separate important, productive investments into our ag community from projects that simply waste taxpayer dollars.”
That’s not what Lauren Kelso sees happening. Kelso works for Growing Gardens, an urban farm, and is the policy chair for the Flatirons Farmers Coalition.
“The thing that's happening right now, I feel like is broad sweeping motions without any concept of who they're going to impact and what they actually mean. I feel like it would be easy for people in the current administration to say, ‘Conservation programs? That must be some hippy-dippy nonsense,’” she said.
Instead, she said USDA programs from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) are federal grants that help farmers improve their businesses, which can benefit production for a long time.
“I think people misunderstand them as some sort of sustained crutch, but they're typically small amounts and for really specific projects that help us improve over time,” Kelso explained.
And she said some of what’s happening now, like the layoffs, are at cross-purposes with what lawmakers want, which is accountability for federal dollars.
“We have a choice. We could make these programs more simple and rely on less staff, but if they want to continue having the level of accountability and tracking and all those things that they currently demand, then we need the staff to help support it,” Kelso said.
She also worries about the long-term impact all this uncertainty around USDA funding could have on federal relationships with the ag community.
“Good luck rebuilding trust with these communities who have, you know, forever been pretty skeptical of the federal government anyways,” she said.
It’s not just individual producers that have been impacted by the USDA cuts. Six rural electric cooperatives in the state that received USDA grants funded through Biden’s signature climate and health bill have had their funding frozen, while the U.S. Forest Service, also under USDA, laid off more than 3,000 employees.
