The Biden administration’s secretive implementation of race-based farm loan forgiveness has now come under fierce scrutiny following new revelations from a USDA whistleblower, prompting comparisons to previous DEI overreach and sparking outrage from both the legal community and the broader public. What’s unfolding is a textbook case of policy driven not by merit or need, but by ideology — and it has now been condemned by a federal court as unconstitutional.
Buried deep in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), under Section 1005, was a provision that offered loan forgiveness specifically and exclusively to “socially disadvantaged” farmers — defined by race, not income or financial hardship. Eligible farmers included those identifying as American Indian, Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Islander. White farmers, regardless of need or debt level, were explicitly excluded.
On paper, the program promised up to 120% loan forgiveness — enough to cover the debt and its related taxes. In practice, it created a racial eligibility test for financial assistance, an approach that instantly raised red flags among constitutional scholars and eventually landed in federal court.
I met with a USDA whistleblower.
He says the Biden administration forgave farm loans for only non-white farmers and when they were told it was illegal, continued to secretly do it.
Kept it “hushed for the obvious implications of race based loan forgivingness.”
Full story: pic.twitter.com/0SMwAnLtsT
— Brian Entin (@BrianEntin) May 28, 2025
Small farm owner James Dunlap of Oregon, like thousands of other white farmers, was denied relief solely based on his race. Represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, he and other plaintiffs successfully argued that the USDA’s program constituted an “actual constitutional harm that cannot be undone.” The judge concurred, writing that excluding applicants from government assistance solely because they are white is a clear violation of equal protection under the law.
Despite the ruling, Biden officials pressed forward under a new banner: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — and that’s where the real scandal begins.
Although the original race-based relief was struck down, the USDA allegedly continued using similar racial filters behind closed doors. According to the whistleblower, the USDA only notified minority farmers about a revamped version of the loan forgiveness program funded by the IRA — a program meant to assist all distressed farmers, but one that was quietly marketed only to a select racial group.
In a Jan. 10, 2023 email obtained by NewsNation, minority farmers were told of their eligibility and, even more alarmingly, were reportedly advised to stop paying their loans — a privilege white farmers never received, even if they qualified under the same debt and delinquency thresholds.
The whistleblower painted a damning picture: discriminatory implementation, DEI ideology overriding merit, and agency officials — still in place today — who knowingly carried out race-selective relief programs. Meanwhile, white farmers facing the same economic pressures were ignored, or worse, penalized.
“It was discriminatory. Unethical. And the people who pushed it are still in charge of the agency,” the whistleblower said.
Now under the renewed Trump administration, Secretary of Agriculture John Rollins has rescinded all DEI-related programs on day one and terminated the “Distressed Borrowers” initiative, calling it another “woke handout masquerading as relief.” The administration has redirected efforts toward race-neutral, merit-based programs, including a $10 billion Emergency Commodity Assistance Program.
Rollins’s mission is clear:
“Unlike the Biden Administration, under Trump, USDA does not discriminate and single out individual farmers based on race, sex, or political orientation.”
