Revealing Waste through FOIA

Revealing Waste of Federal Tax Dollars Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is well known for distributing large amounts of tax dollars to farmers and getting very little in return for the American public. USDA programs, such as the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP), pay farmers to take baby steps that partially and only temporarily protect the water quality of public waters. Most of the programs to ostensibly protect public waters are run by the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS).

NRCS issues voluntary guidance to farmers

These documents are often so vague that they amount to farmers’ deciding on their own what they want to do. The recommended farming practices are not based on protecting water quality but, rather, they are intended to protect farmland from soil loss (a virtuous goal). The most obvious example of a practice recommended by the NRCS that fails to protect water quality from farming is the 35-foot streamside buffer. Such a small buffer is inadequate to protect streams from any type of water pollution, whether temperature, pesticides, or nutrients. For example, the National Marine Fisheries Service has called for minimum 100-foot buffers for western Washington farms. NWEA submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to NRCS to investigate the agency’s expenditure of millions of dollars to support two non-profit organizations that operate in Oregon: The Freshwater Trust (TFT) and Willamette Partnership (WP). NWEA had to sue the NRCS to obtain the documents.

What did we find?

• TFT obtained $967,000 million, claiming it would sign up 100-200 farmers to grow streamside trees in Oregon. It signed up only 7 farmers. Read the TFT Final Report here.

• In 2013, as NWEA was successful in its litigation to replace the Oregon TMDL clean-up plans for temperature to allow temperatures lethal to salmon, TFT lobbied for a new NRCS grant to prove that farmers in the Willamette River basin were “doing all they needed” to meet the TMDLs. These TMDLs call for farmers to have nearly a zero impact on stream temperature, which is like saying that it will prove that all farmland in the Willamette Valley has 100-foot buffers along streams, an absurd notion. Read the TFT pitch here.

Worth noting is that TFT claims that its approach of paying farmers is a big improvement over us old-fashioned conservation groups that use regulation and litigation to protect salmon and water quality. Yet, TFT’s entire business model relies on the work that other groups—like NWEA—do to make the regulatory system work.

• The Willamette Partnership obtained over $1.5 million dollars to produce a “regional agreement” on how to allow pollution trading. The agreement has never been used. Read the WP grant proposal here.