USDA hides outlays to farmers with operating loans, saying it's lenders who get the checks; USDA is the biggest lender!

Environmental Working Group photo illustration

It's harder to track payments of farm subsidies because the U.S. Department of Agriculture is listing lenders rather farm owners in answering open-records requests from the Environmental Working Group, which has long maintained a database of the payments.

"For most of the 22 years EWG has tracked subsidies, USDA has released the names of all farm recipients," the group reports. "Now . . . when a recipient has an operating loan with any bank or other financial institution, USDA now releases the name of the bank or financial institution, not the person’s name. Farm subsidies are sent to the banks instead of the recipients, to help pay off farmers’ operating loans.

"This is not a new practice. But it is new for the USDA to give us the bank names instead of the farmers’ names. The change occurred when the Trump administration switched to a new reporting system in 2019. USDA claimed the move was to increase efficiency but gave no reason why the new system names banks instead of recipients. The agency has denied our appeals for the farmer names."

EWG says the policy "effectively conceals the beneficiaries of almost $3.1 billion in taxpayer dollars between 2019 and 2021," about 6 percent of the total. "But it also means we can garner unprecedented insight into the main lending institutions farmers use. Surprisingly, the financial institution that received the most farm subsidies was the USDA." Its Farm Service Agency "got almost $350 million in farm subsidies between 2019 and 2021, more than any other financial organization." How about asking for those payments' real parties in interest?