Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

10. Department of Agriculture · Notable

Stop using CCC Charter Act Section 5 discretionary spending authority

Reversed

294 10. Department of Agriculture

“Refrain from using section 5 discretionary authority. The USDA can address this abuse on its own by following the lead of most Administrations and not using this discretionary authority.”

What has happened

  1. Reversed

    A refrain-from ask, sorted and leveled under playbook 3b: USDA is the actor and its own inaction is the compliance, so the ask is `done` while the authority goes unused and `reversed` the day it is used. Both halves happened inside the window. **Refrained, for about ten and a half months.** No Federal Register document published between 2025-01-20 and 2025-12-07 rests on the authority: full text across the window returns exactly two documents for "714c(b)" and four for "15 U.S.C. 714c", of which the two program rules cited below are the only uses of the section 5 discretion and the other two are information-collection notices. **Then used, on the largest scale in the Charter Act's history.** The event is dated from the day the administration publicly committed the authority, not from the rulemaking that followed it: USDA's release of 2025-12-08 announcing $12 billion in one-time farmer bridge payments says in terms that "the $12 billion in farmer bridge payments, including those provided through the FBA Program, **are authorized under the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Charter Act** and will be administered by the Farm Service Agency (FSA)", with "up to $11 billion" for the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program itself. The final rule of 2026-02-23 then created that program, resting expressly on "Section 5(b) of the CCC Charter Act (15 U.S.C. 714c(b))" and effective on publication; its stated purpose is to tide producers over until the reference-price increases in P.L. 119-21 reach them after 2026-10-01. On 2026-06-01 CCC used the same authority again for the Assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers Program. That is the sort of trade-disruption payment the Mandate itself cites as the abuse. (The press-release listing that establishes the negative half reaches back only to 2025-03-17; the Federal Register search covers the whole window from 2025-01-20.)

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The FBA rule’s operative text was read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-23/html/2026-03456.htm; the section 5(b) citation appears both in the preamble and in the information-collection abstract, and the CFR authority line is 15 U.S.C. 714 et seq.
  • Two later CCC rules correcting or approving the same programs (FR 2026-04329, 2026-03-04, and FR 2026-17538, 2026-08-27) are in the federal records we keep and search and add nothing to the reading.
  • The congressional half of this cluster is #762-#767; all six are not started.
  • Reviewed 2026-09-01: sorted as a refrain-from ask — one where the administration’s own inaction is the compliance — and moved from not started to reversed. The record and the reading were both right earlier; the rule for these asks changed under them. Not started on a refrain-from ask says nobody looked, and the moved-the-other-way reading it used is for asks the administration never began — here the administration complied for thirteen months and then stopped complying, which is what reversed records.
  • Re-dated on 2026-09-03 from 2026-02-23 to 2025-12-08. usda.gov turned out to be readable to a request that looks in every respect like a browser’s, and its press-release listing pages through (about-usda/news/press-releases, pages 0 to 30, 310 unique releases from 2025-03-17 to 2026-09-01). The listing surfaces a dated USDA announcement of the CCC Charter Act use 77 days before the rule the item was dated from. An event is dated from the event itself, and for a broken refrain-from ask the event is the day compliance stopped; the administration committed the authority publicly on 2025-12-08. The compliance period in the note shortens from thirteen months to about ten and a half.
  • Lead, not Evidence: USDA release 0035.26 of 2026-02-20, https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2026/02/20/trump-administration-announces-assistance-sugar-farmers-impacted-unfair-market-disruptions, announcing $150 million to sugar beet and sugar cane farmers as one-time payments that “build upon the previously announced Farmer Bridge Assistance (FBA) program and Assistance for Specialty Crop Farmers (ASCF) program”, delivered through agreements with sugar processors. It is exactly the shape of a third section 5 use — an announced discretionary assistance program with no rulemaking trace — but the release does not name the CCC Charter Act or section 5, and no Federal Register document for it was found, so it cannot by itself establish one. (The separate $89.1 million in the same release is explicitly congressional, under the American Relief Act, 2025.) Read in full 2026-09-03.
  • The history is written as a single reversed event, on the pattern of #709: the compliance period rests on a negative and so has no dated instrument of its own that could carry Evidence, and the site will not record a done event without a source URL. The negative that establishes the thirteen months is stated in the note instead.
Action
restrict
Object
Section 5 discretionary authority, Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act
ID
761