The following is based on an interview with a current employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture:
I’ve worked with the USDA for more than 25 years. The situation with Pigford has been horrible. There were cases of discrimination. Perhaps 100 cases in the whole state of [redacted]. But the federal government paid out thousands of claims, a lot of them churned by attorneys who made a lot of money.
Attorneys caught on to the fact that the federal government doesn’t keep records. They either don’t keep them well in terms of who they are meeting with or they are destroyed after a couple of years. Attorneys recognized this and exploited it in Pigford.
My name started to appear on Pigford claims as someone who had discriminated against applicants. I had to develop a chronology listing where I worked when, because almost all of the claims just didn’t make sense because I didn’t even work in those areas. Names got out that you were a USDA employee and lawyers would just have people put them on an application.
The legal standard for Pigford was supposed to be a preponderance of evidence in order to be granted a claim. But pretty soon they began giving money to whoever filled out a form. Sometimes it was just strange the claims that they granted. There were a lot of claims of racial discrimination against the USDA offices in Jefferson County, Arkansas, for example. But the supervisors there were all black.
In my area there were hundreds of claims from black women claiming racial discrimination. In my 15 year career at that time, I had seen only one black female farmer apply for a loan.
In another instances there were eight applications from one family that were filed and granted.
Pigford was basically legalized extortion–it reached a point where they were just handing money to people.
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