Excerpt from Civil Rights at the United States Department of Agriculture: A Report
There are some who call usda the last plantation. An old line depart ment, usda was one of the last Federal agencies to integrate and perhaps the last to include women and minorities in leadership positions. Considered a stubborn bureaucracy and slow to change, usda is also perceived as playing a key role in what some see as a conspiracy to force minority and socially disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices.
Many of the hundreds of minority and socially disadvantaged customers who addressed the civil rights listening sessions held across the country spoke poignantly of discrimination and mistreatment by county-level employees and advisory boards who administer usda programs. Employees also told of discrimination by usda managers.
The problems are not new, nor are they unknown. Studies, reports, and task forces have documented the problems in report after report. In 1965, the us. Commission on Civil Rights found discrimination problems both in usda program delivery and in usda's treatment of minority employees. A 1970 usda Employee Focus Group Report concluded the agency was insensitive to issues regarding equal opportunity and civil rights and that cronyism and nepotism were frequent factors in making personnel and management deci sions. A 1982 Civil Rights Commission report found the Farmers Home Administration had not placed adequate emphasis on dealing with the crisis facing black farmers, and saw indications the agency may be involved in the very kind of racial discrimination that it should be seeking to correct. A report by the Congressional Committee on Government Operations in 1990 identified Farmers Home Administration as one of the key causes of the dras tic decline in black farm ownership.
Despite the fact that discrimination in program delivery and employment has been documented and discussed, it continues to exist to a large degree unabated. Usda is a huge decentralized bureaucracy that administers several hundred federally assisted and federally conducted programs with more than Federal and nearly non-federal employees throughout the world.
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