Urban Sustainability Directors Network v. U.S. Department of Agriculture

Filing Year For Action

The federal district court for the District of Columbia ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several component agencies and officials (together, USDA) to supplement the administrative record in a case challenging the termination of five grants awarded to four plaintiffs involved in agriculture and ecology-related projects. The plaintiffs alleged that their grants were terminated “without individualized review but rather based on vague allegations that the projects were not aligned with the President’s newly stated goals of eliminating funding for [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] and climate initiatives—without any effort to determine whether the projects could be brought into line.” The court directed USDA to produce records regarding any instruction received by USDA regarding the implementation of the Trump administration’s DEI and climate-related policies; documentation regarding how spreadsheets cataloguing grants were used to evaluate the grants for termination; termination letters for grants other than the plaintiffs’ grants; and all documents related to the termination of the plaintiffs’ own grants. The court also ordered USDA to produce a privilege log. The court denied the plaintiffs’ request for depositions but required the defendants to respond to certain interrogatories and requests for production. The court found that the plaintiffs were not entitled to an order for adverse inferences that the defendants “terminated DEI and climate-related grants based solely on the presence of DEI and climate-related search terms in grant documents” because the defendants’ alleged conduct did not at this point rise to bad faith.