If George Orwell were alive today, he wouldn’t be writing 1984, he’d be updating Animal Farm. Only this time, the pigs wouldn’t be walking on two legs—they’d be cross-dressing mice advocating for “food justice” in federal grant applications.
Yes, you read that correctly.
According to a blistering new report from the Trump-aligned USDA, over $1.5 billion in Biden-era woke nonsense contracts have been canceled—money that was being set ablaze in the name of everything from “indigenous food pathways” to “food systems equity,” whatever that means. My personal favorite? A grant funding a study on the dietary impact of hormones on transgender mice. No, that’s not satire. That’s what the Department of Agriculture thought deserved your hard-earned tax dollars.
It gets better—or worse, depending on your sense of humor.
Among the contracts axed: one for a “food justice” fellowship to teach people how to organize protests about food. Not how to grow food. Not how to distribute it more efficiently to those who need it. But how to stand on street corners with a megaphone and yell at grocery stores for not being “equitable” enough.
We’ve entered an age where bureaucratic absurdity has replaced basic governance. These contracts weren’t just ill-conceived—they were insults to real Americans who are hurting. Farmers, ranchers, small business owners, and low-income families don’t need symbolic performative grants about intersectional kale awareness—they need access, infrastructure, education, and relief.
Let’s be honest: "Food justice" is just the latest buzzword in a long line of academic gibberish. It’s a euphemism for anti-capitalist grievance theater masquerading as policy. And the Biden administration’s USDA bought it wholesale—hook, line, and tofu.
Thanks to the Trump-aligned USDA’s review, contracts with no measurable outcomes, no clear objectives, and no plan for sustainability are being tossed like yesterday’s compost. Take the $22 million that had been set aside to support “equity consultants” to develop frameworks for “inclusive food narratives.” That’s enough money to fund over 100 small farms for an entire growing season—or to feed thousands of children in underserved areas. But no—bureaucrats chose to waste it on workshops about how the term “farm-to-table” is colonially problematic.
You can’t make this up.
Meanwhile, veterans are waiting for food assistance. Rural hospitals are closing their cafeterias. Senior citizens on fixed incomes are choosing between groceries and medication. But someone in Washington thought it was a higher priority to fund a program teaching “decolonized eating habits” and conduct surveys on “food privilege” among graduate students.
This isn’t governance. It’s government-sponsored academic cosplay.
And where are the real “men” in all this? The kind who solve problems, feed people, and build systems that work? Where are the thinkers, the doers, the servants of the public good? They’ve been replaced by credentialed ideologues pushing abstracts no one reads and programs no one needs.
Let’s look at just one of the contracts that could have done something meaningful: a proposal submitted by a coalition of churches and food banks to build a scalable food distribution network in five impoverished counties. It was denied in favor of a study on “gender representation in food labor roles”—essentially counting how many men versus women versus nonbinary individuals drive forklifts at produce warehouses.
This is not just waste. It’s theft—of opportunity, of progress, and of hope.
Fortunately, the Trump-aligned USDA appears to be turning the ship around, even if it’s only beginning. Agriculture Secretary-designate Charles W. Herbster (expected to be tapped in a second Trump term) told Fox News the canceled programs lacked “accountability, integrity, and relevance to actual food production.” What a revolutionary idea: using agriculture funding to actually promote agriculture.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The rot is deep. The federal grantmaking machine has become a swampy pipeline for elite academics, leftist nonprofits, and DEI grifters. And unless someone slaps a red MAGA bumper sticker on a tractor, they’ll never see a dime.
We must return to sanity. We must prioritize real need over academic nonsense. There are community gardens to be planted. There are food deserts to be irrigated. There are children in cities and farms in flyover states that need investment, not intersectionality.
The government exists to serve the people—not the think tanks, not the activists, and certainly not transgender rodents in a USDA-funded hormone study.
Imagine, for a moment, if even a fraction of the money wasted on these contracts went to the faith-based pantries quietly feeding America’s hungry every night. Imagine if the USDA had funded rural food co-ops, farm-to-school programs, or veteran-run produce farms. Imagine if policy were driven by common sense, not common core Marxism dressed up in grant-speak.
Because at the end of the day, what we fund reveals what we value.
The previous administration valued slogans over solutions, ideology over impact. This one, thankfully, seems to be putting the shovel in the ground to fix it.
Because when the shelves are bare, the slogans don’t feed your kids. When the crops fail, intersectionality doesn’t put dinner on the table. When people are hungry, they don’t need a pamphlet about “colonial nutrition”—they need a sandwich.
And as for the men? The “food justice” men, apparently, are spending their days designing equitable quinoa charts and measuring how much privilege is packed in a box of Corn Flakes.
Let them.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will keep doing the hard work of feeding our families, building real communities, and holding this bloated, backward bureaucracy accountable.
Because the mice may be transgender. But the people running this country? They’d better remember what it means to be human.
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