GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance on Sunday accused the Biden administration of accelerating racial divides in America, citing as an example the Agriculture Department's efforts to help Black farmers.
The administration has “handed out farm benefits to people based on skin color. I think that's disgraceful. I don't think we should say, 'You get farm benefits if you're a Black farmer, you don't get farm benefits if you're a white farmer,” the Ohio senator said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation.
Vance didn’t specify the USDA program he was referring to, but in 2021 federal courts blocked a debt relief program for minority farmers that Congress enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan.
The administration later worked with a Democratic-controlled Congress to replace that program with assistance that was more broadly aimed at underserved or financially stressed producers as well as farmers who had faced discrimination in the past.
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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced last month that the department had issued one-time payments totaling about $2 billion to farmers, ranchers and forest landowners who experienced discrimination in USDA loan programs or did not receive equitable access to federal resources before the start of the Biden administration.
“All farmers, we want to thrive, and that's certainly the President Trump and JD Vance view of the situation,” Vance said. “But I do think unfortunately, when our leaders divide us by race, you're going to have hate on the left side of the political spectrum. You're going to have hate on the right side of the political spectrum.
“We should just judge people based on individual characteristics and based on merit, and that's certainly what President Trump and I want to do.”
When pressed by CBS' Margaret Brennan that racial division dated back long before Biden, Vance said "President Biden and Harris have certainly accelerated it. I don't think you've seen anything like what we've seen from Kamala Harris when it comes to handing out government benefits based on people's immutable characteristics. The actual legal enshrinement of discrimination in this country, we haven't seen anything like in the last 30 or 40 years.”
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