EXCLUSIVE — The Supreme Court on Monday was asked to weigh a challenge against a now-defunct Biden administration COVID-19 relief policy that offered farm loan forgiveness solely to nonwhite ranchers, according to a petition from a Wyoming-based farmer who says she was excluded from the program.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 COVID-19 stimulus bill, allocating $4 billion for the forgiveness of loans aimed at assisting socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers. Leisl Carpenter, a white farmer whose ranch in Wyoming’s Big Laramie Valley suffered during the pandemic, was excluded from the program on the basis of her ethnicity, according to a petition obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Section 1005 of the ARPA created a debt relief program for “socially disadvantaged” ranchers during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Department of Agriculture.
“Carpenter was ineligible for Section 1005 debt relief because she is Caucasian,” Carpenter’s petition read, arguing the program created violations of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the 5th Amendment.
Carpenter’s petition claimed that shortly after ARPA’s enactment, the Farm Service Agency of the USDA issued a Notice of Funds Availability defining “‘socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers’ based on race.”
Carpenter’s dispute was initially brought to federal court by the Mountain States Legal Foundation on behalf of her and 11 other farmers who did not qualify for the loan forgiveness plan, which “provided up to 120% debt relief for certain ‘socially disadvantaged’ farmers and ranchers,” according to the petition.
The program was quickly enjoined after one of Mountain States’s suits in Tennessee succeeded at the federal district court level in July 2021 — but not before the federal government had already distributed test payments under the race-based provision that amounted to roughly $1 million, according to court records.
Despite success in the Tennessee case, Carpenter’s suit did not lead to a successful injunction before Congress repealed Section 1005 after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, which replaced the loan forgiveness program with a similar plan that does not mention race.
Additionally, Congress “did not address the payments that USDA made before the repeal,” according to the petition.
Carpenter appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, arguing the federal district court in Wyoming was wrong to side with the Justice Department’s argument that the case became moot following the program’s repeal. In a per curiam order on Oct. 17, 2023, a three-judge panel upheld the district court’s findings that the repeal “rendered any equal protection injury impossible.”
Notably, the 10th Circuit held that the case couldn’t go forward because the roughly $1 million in payments went to farmers in New Mexico, and the court said geography played a role in determining Carpenter’s eligibility.
“If Appellees’ administration of the test payments can be said to have excluded Ms. Carpenter from consideration at all, it was because she lives in Wyoming rather than New Mexico. Even if she were not white, Ms. Carpenter would have been excluded from the test payments,” according to the panel’s majority decision.
The latest high petition, which was filed with co-counsel Braden Boucek of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, asks the Supreme Court to determine whether Carpenter’s case is actually moot and whether that would create a precedent that allows the federal government to quash a lawsuit after a federal internal agency administration decision allegedly violated equal protections.
“The 10th Circuit’s rule creates a road map for invidious discrimination whenever the federal government wants to do something,” William Trachman, Mountain States’s general counsel, told the Washington Examiner on Monday.
“Whether that’s Biden’s DEI across all forms of government or some other reparations program or Congress’s decision to focus on race at the Federal Aviation Administration, all these programs, the goal for the government could be to do as much as they possibly can, in secret, as fast as they can. And then pay no price,” Trachman said.
Although the petition mentioned no specific damages Carpenter seeks, it noted that her “ongoing unequal treatment [that] has never been remedied” raises “constitutional questions that warrant this Court’s attention.”
It would take at least four justices to agree to take up the petition and vote to grant the case certiorari or hear it on the merits during an oral argument session.
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The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions each term and annually reviews a large number of petitions at the justices’ long conference during the final week of September.
Read the petition in full: