For the USDA, Equal Still Means Equal at 250

Scott Wynn grows sweet potatoes and corn and raises cattle on land his family has farmed for decades. When the pandemic crushed beef prices in 2020, the federal government offered farmers in his position relief from their loans. Unfortunately, Mr. Wynn did not qualify—not because his need was small, but because he is white.

In June 2021, a federal court stepped in with a dose of common sense. The decision in Wynn v. Vilsack halted the program nationwide, and Congress soon replaced it with relief that turns on need rather than skin. But ending one program is not the same as ending the unjust habit of mind behind it.

Last year, President Donald Trump returned to office determined to end race-based sorting across the federal government once and for all. He directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to carry out this vision, and we have moved swiftly to end discrimination and elevate equality at every turn.

In the past 18 months alone, USDA has eliminated more than $200 million in discriminatory grants, directed every agency to operate on merit, built a commission to enforce it, and rescinded the rule that let officials brand a policy as biased based on a mere spreadsheet, with no intent or act of discrimination behind the numbers. We have returned this department to the words Congress wrote into the Civil Rights Act, a flat ban on discrimination against anyone on the basis of race. But that idea is far older than both the Civil Rights Act and USDA.

Abraham Lincoln, who founded USDA in 1862, fought to end slavery until his final breath. He understood that by recognizing human equality as a self-evident truth, the Declaration of Independence made an implicit “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

Nearly a century after the Founding, the 14th Amendment wrote this principle into the Constitution as the equal protection of the laws. Less than nine decades later, Brown v. Board of Education condemned a government that sorted children by race.

And now, as our country celebrates 250 years, we also mark three years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, which outlawed race discrimination in college admissions. The events behind these two anniversaries share an idea that is simple yet profound: every person is created equal.

We’ve heard the objection: Without a thumb on the scale, won’t old patterns return? Our response is that the cure for discrimination is not its mirror image. Discrimination against one farmer cannot be undone by inflicting it on another farmer. The solution is enforcing one rule, fiercely, for everyone. At its best, the civil rights tradition never asked for a heavier thumb. It asked for the scale of justice to be honest.

This spring at the University of Texas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas warned against treating the Declaration as a keepsake, merely to be admired from a comfortable distance. Its principles, he said, are a living obligation, to be honored by every generation that receives them, no matter the cost.

President Trump takes that obligation seriously, and so do we. The truth written into our founding, that all men are created equal, is the promise of our Republic, and it belongs to every American of every background, in every corner of this country. As our nation marks its 250th birthday, we are ensuring, across the Trump administration, that equal still means equal.

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