Breaking: Congress Votes to Slash Rural Program Funding, Putting Clean Water At Risk

This evening, Senate Democrats helped pass a continuing resolution that includes cuts to funding for environmental programs and the District of Columbia. It increases spending on defense and immigration enforcement. Included within the 99-page document proposed by House Speaker Mike Johnson are major cuts to programs within the United States Department of Agriculture, including the Rural Water and Waste Disposal assistance program and conservation funds. 

A “clean” continuing resolution refers to a plan that continues funding governmental programs without major changes. This time, the document is anything but “clean,” due to its long-list of federal spending changes, says Senior Food Policy Analyst at Food & Water Watch Rebecca Wolf. Founded in 2005, Food & Water Watch is an environmental advocacy group that opposes factory farms and their impact on the environment, and is critical of the Trump administration.

The budget zeroes out the $1.4 billion in earmarked funding from the Environmental Protection Agency’s State Revolving Fund (SRF), as well as USDA cuts resulting in “20 percent cut in funding for rural water and wastewater projects.”

“That program facilitates well and septic loans for rural residents and is very important to clean water in places that don’t have public water systems, which is a lot of the country,” Wolf says. 

Many people living in rural areas also face intense water pollution from agricultural chemicals and manure and rely on USDA funding to support clean drinking water access. 

The continuing resolution also calls for a cut to the Animal and Plant Inspection Service, one of the key agencies that has been charged with responding to bird flu, an outbreak that is now in its fourth year with no signs of slowing down. There are also cuts to USDA conservation programs, like the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and the Farm Service Agency (FSA), which have offices in nearly every county in the country.  

“We’re at a point in the farm crisis where it’s really hard for farmers to stay on the land. Any of these cuts are a threat to farmers losing their land. And then further kinds of consolidation, so these bigger companies or hedge funds or whatever, buying up the land and owning it, that’s a big concern of ours as well. We want to see more farmers on the land taking care of it,” she says. 

In largely agricultural rural states, farmers rely on USDA funding for conservation measures on their land such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and the Conservation Reserve Program, which are housed under NRCS and FSA.

“Now is precisely the time to be making critical investments in water quality and conservation, not cutting these programs to set the stage for more tax cuts to line the pockets of billionaires and corporate interests,” Ava Auen-Ryan, Farming & Environment Director at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a non-profit grassroots organizing group, wrote in an email to Sentient.

The continuing resolution (CR) comes at a time of “chaos” within the federal government, Wolf says. Major cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency are happening just hours apart from congressional spending re-allocations like this.

“These kinds of cuts in a CR are not normal,” Wolf says. “We’re entering a new kind of era of legislating, but also the kind of blatant cutting of these agencies and these functions that have already been authorized by Congress is a concern, and it’s a kind of a rubber stamp on the DOGE-Musk-Trump agenda of really trying to cut, cut, cut.”

Correction: This story has been corrected to note the 20 percent cuts as distinct from the 1.4 billion in cuts.