The United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Development (RD) division is changing its funding opportunities to remove references to the previous Administration's key priorities and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria. This update follows an Executive Order titled "Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing," issued in January 2025. Programs affected by this change will no longer consider these previous criteria for application scoring. Additionally, the Rural Energy for America Program's funding notice is corrected to include $50 million from the 2018 Farm Bill that was previously omitted.
Simple Explanation
The USDA is changing how they give out money to help rural areas by not using some old rules and ideas that focused on fairness and diversity, following new instructions from the government. They also fixed a mistake about money info for a program that helps with energy projects in rural areas.