12
Mar
Earthjustice Lawsuit Seeks to Defend Organic Farmers as Federal Funds Are Cut and Programs Eliminated
(Beyond Pesticides, March 12, 2025) Earthjustice filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), challenging the Department’s alleged illegal purging of datasets, resources, and pertinent information that organic farmers rely on to carry out their operations, according to the complaint filed on February 24, 2025.
The deletion of public data compounds the numerous threats facing organic and regenerative organic farmers across the nation. The uncertainty associated with the starting and then stopping of tariffs has led to surges in costs and supply chain challenges. Meanwhile, core organic programs, including the Organic Certification Cost Share Program, Organic Data Initiative, and Organic Certification Trade and Tracking Program, remain unfunded, leaving huge uncertainties for the organic sector moving forward. The administration has canceled the spring meeting of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), the Congressionally-mandated board established to guide the setting of standards and materials on the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances.
In theory, organic farmers and public and environmental health advocates align with some of the stated objectives of the Make America Healthy Again Commission (MAHA), established by executive order on February 13, 2025. MAHA’s stated efforts to “drastically lower….chronic disease rates and end…childhood chronic disease” would be undermined by the administration’s failure to support organic farmers who produce foodstuffs without the use of toxic petrochemical-based pesticides. It has been widely reported in the media that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “has vowed to crack down on dyes in the food industry and to reduce pesticides in the farm and agriculture industry,” which he can do through the tolerance-setting process at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Background on the Lawsuit
“On January 30, 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) ordered its staff to ‘identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change[,]’” reads the complaint filed on behalf of Northeast Organic Farmers Association-New York (NOFA-NY), Environmental Working Group, and Natural Resources Defense Council. “Within hours, and without any public notice or explanation, USDA purged its websites of vital resources about climate-smart agriculture, forest conservation, climate change adaptation, and investment in clean energy projects in rural America, among many other subjects. In doing so, it disabled access to numerous datasets, interactive tools, and essential information about USDA programs and policies.”
The websites purged of climate data include the general USDA website, as well as dedicated pages for the Forest Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Farm Service Agency, USDA Rural Development, and Farmers.gov. Listed in the lawsuit are several examples of purged data sets that farmers rely on, including the now-removed “Climate Risk Viewer” – a geospatial tool often leveraged to “[a]ssess the impacts of climate change on wilderness areas and wild and scenic rivers,” “[h]ighlight watersheds where future predicted climate change and demands on water supply will be the greatest,” and “[i]dentify areas where mature and old-growth forests on Forest Service . . . lands are most threatened by future climate change.” Vital information for financial and technical assistance has also been scrubbed, including webpages on the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Farm Loan Programs, which explained specifics on “how the programs work, specified loan purposes and amounts, and provided examples of covered activities.”
The lawsuit continues, “Without access to the removed webpages, NOFA-NY’s technical service providers are unable to connect participating farmers with resources explaining how to fund, implement, and measure climate-smart practices. NOFA-NY is also unable to assist farmers with USDA interactive tools, such as those on the now-purged ‘Climate Solutions’ landing page, to help them incorporate climate change into their planting and land management decisions.”
The lawsuit alleges the violation of The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) and Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
In terms of alleged PRA violations, the plaintiff alleges that USDA “provided no advance public notice before removing these webpages or rendering them inaccessible, it failed to comply with its obligation under the PRA to ‘provide adequate notice when initiating, substantially modifying, or terminating significant information dissemination products.’”
Regarding APA violations, the plaintiff alleges that “[b]y removing webpages from its websites solely because they focused on climate change, by failing to consider the significant public reliance on those pages, and by failing to provide any justification for doing so, USDA took agency action that was arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or not in accordance with law, in contravention of the APA.”
Farmer Testimonials
As the administration keeps freezing and cutting federal government programs, spearheaded by the multibillionaire Elon Musk and his handpicked group of acolytes at the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), this inevitably undermines the ability for farmers to adequately plan for the 2025 crop season.
“An active agricultural infrastructure project affecting hundreds of farmers in NY-21 and across New York is now on pause, costing the district and state millions of dollars in rural economic development,” shares Noah Simon of Breadtree Farms on the funding freeze of a $1.9 million grant (reimbursement) “to develop markets and infrastructure and reduce barriers-to-entry for organic chestnut farmers in New York and New England.” Dozens of farmers will be adversely impacted on upfront investments they already made with the assumption that USDA would follow through on the approved grant through the Organic Market Development (OMD) program. Simon goes on to share the multi-million dollar impact of other affected programs in the state, including funding through the Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities Program in support of organic and transitioning farmers in the state.
NOFA-NY, represented by Earthjustice and partners, is also directly impacted by funding freezes. “The Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY) has 2 USDA grants that comprise about 75% of our 2025 budget,” says Katie Baildon, policy manager at NOFA-NY. “The Climate Smart project funding has stopped flowing and USDA is in breach of contract but the status of the Organic Transition program is unknown.” The Climate-Smart Farming & Marketing program is a $400,000 previously approved grant, as well as the $236,968 grant through the Transition to Organic Partnership Program (TOPP) for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast Region.
There is a publicly available repository of farmer stories impacted by federal funding freezes that you can submit to if your farming operations have been impacted. See here for a National Resource Guide for Producers 2025 organized by American Farmland Trust, with relevant resources as of March 7, 2025. There are grassroots, volunteer-led efforts by data scientists to archive and preserve critical environmental justice and climate data tools, including the Environmental Justice Screening Tool. These efforts are led by groups such as Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP).
“At the Public Environmental Data Partners, we’re thinking about this work in phases,” says Jonathan Gilmour, data scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and PEDP coordinator. “The first phase is to identify tools and datasets at risk and save what we can. The second phase is to work to strengthen data governance, advocate for better data infrastructure, and increase public engagement with these informational goods.”
There is also a separate, soon-to-be-launched data tool, Federal Cuts Tracker Map, to serve as “an interactive visualization of impacts felt across the country as the result of federal firings” more broadly, based on one of the lead organizers of that initiative.
Call to Action
There has been a series of lawsuits filed as a response to the unrelenting rollout of executive orders undermining public health and the environment. There has been some pushback on federal staffing cuts, including the news that the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board Chair ordered USDA to reinstate over 5,600 probationary employees for at least 45 days as the Board reviews the firings, based on reporting by The Independent on March 7, 2025. And just yesterday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled “that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is wielding so much power that its records will likely have to be opened to the public under federal law,” according to reporting by Politico. Under President Trump’s first term, the courts were often utilized to roll back the most aggressive attacks on environmental and public health statutes. (See Daily News here.)
Amid the uncertainty, Beyond Pesticides is stepping in to archive and preserve vital peer-reviewed, independent research documenting not only the epidemiological studies based on real-world exposure scenarios that link public health implications of fossil fuel-derived pesticide exposure, but also the benefits of applied organic principles and practices on improving public health resilience, regenerating microbial life in soil systems, and bolstering ecosystem stability across the board.
See the Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database to access hundreds of pieces of scientific literature with no paywalls. We urge the public to send studies to [email protected] that are recommended for inclusion in the database.
To stay updated as more information emerges, see Keeping Organic Strong.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
Source: Earthjustice
