USDA’s SDRP2 Pricing Choice Raises Fresh Questions Over Accountability
Who selected spring prices over fall harvest values, cutting disaster payments and leaving farmers — and Congress — searching for who signed off
USDA’s controversial decision to calculate Supplemental Disaster Relief Program Stage 2 (SDRP2) payments using spring crop insurance prices rather than fall harvest prices is drawing mounting scrutiny from farmers and lawmakers, not only because it reduced aid, but because no single USDA official has publicly taken responsibility for the call.
While the department has not formally identified a decision-maker, multiple congressional and farm-group sources say the pricing methodology was selected inside USDA by a top political official or officials, during the internal design of SDRP2. The choice was later cleared through standard departmental review channels, effectively locking in a policy outcome that many producers say bears little resemblance to their actual revenue losses. As one source put it, “The buck stops with political appointees.”
An internal, official-driven decision. SDRP2, unlike statutorily prescribed commodity programs, was created under broad discretionary authority, giving USDA wide latitude to define payment mechanics. According to sources familiar with the process, USDA political officials were responsible for choosing the price reference used to calculate losses.
In years when prices peaked early and collapsed by harvest, the spring-price approach systematically lowers payment levels compared with using fall prices — the benchmark that most directly reflects farmers’ realized income.
“There was no requirement in law to do it this way,” one farm policy adviser said. “This was a design choice.”
Budget and economic clearance, not direction. The pricing decision did not occur in isolation. USDA’s Office of Budget and Program Analysis (OBPA) reviewed SDRP2 for cost exposure, while the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) evaluated the methodology for internal consistency and defensibility.
Using spring prices materially reduces total outlays across multiple crops, aligning with OBPA’s long-standing mandate to constrain program costs. Sources emphasize, however, that neither OBPA nor OCE is believed to have originated the pricing change — only to have cleared or not objected to it.
Secretary Rollins’ role: ownership without authorship. Because Brooke Rollins is the current USDA Secretary, the final responsibility for SDRP2 as implemented rests with her department. But there is no public record showing Rollins personally directed the spring-price approach, or that she publicly endorsed it.
The situation has made the policy especially frustrating for producers.
Why farmers see it as unfair. Producers argue the spring-price methodology breaks with precedent and common sense. Disaster losses are realized at harvest, not planting, and most ad hoc aid programs — including earlier SDRP and ERP phases — used metrics tied more closely to fall prices or actual revenue declines.
By contrast, SDRP2’s structure can show little or no “loss” on paper even when farm income plunged sharply by harvest. “It looks like disaster aid, but it doesn’t behave like disaster aid,” one grower said.
Growing pressure for answers. The lack of transparency has fueled calls on Capitol Hill for USDA to explain:
• who recommended the pricing approach,
• whether alternative methodologies were considered,
• and why the farmer-adverse option was chosen without clear justification.
Absent a statutory fix, USDA still retains administrative authority to revisit the methodology — but doing so would require senior leadership to explicitly override a decision that was quietly embedded during program rollout.
For now, the spring-price choice stands as a case study in how bureaucratic discretion can materially reshape farm support, even when Congress intended disaster relief — and how, in the process, accountability can become diffuse enough that no one appears responsible at all.
| Total Disaster Aid Funding Total ag funding for natural disasters passed by Congress Dec. 21, 2024: $20.78 billionSDRP funding: $16 billion Block grants and livestock (ELRP): $4.78 billion SDRP1 was $5.8 billion of the $16 billion available There is $10.2 billion yet to be allocated. SDRP2 expected payments of $2.7 billion On-farm storage: $45.0 million Milk Loss: $1.65 million Total: $2.71 billion Remaining funding for SDRP top up: Around $7.5 billion Note: If USDA doesn’t fix the price issue for SDRP2, then top up for SDRP1 would be even more, and it would widen the disparity that much further between the two stages. |
