After decades of virtually no change, the past year has seen considerable momentum within the federal government towards reforming the rules for foreign agricultural land holdings in the U.S. On April 30, the House passed H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, whose National Security subtitle rewrites the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) to broaden its enforcement, national security integration, and disclosure obligations, and separately directs federal agencies to bar foreign adversaries outright from buying domestic agricultural land. The Senate Agriculture Committee released its own version of the Farm Bill on June 23, and an amended draft on July 31. Its AFIDA subtitle rewrites the statute section by section, extending the reporting duty to long-term leases and to land converted out of agricultural use, and backing civil penalties with a lien on the reported acreage. On June 25, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed new administrative rules under AFIDA that would reach a far wider universe of reportable interests and raise the penalties for noncompliance.
The three efforts stand in markedly different postures and vary in alignment. The USDA rule will very likely be the first to take effect; the comment period closed on August 10, and a final rule is projected for this December. The House bill awaits reconciliation with the Senate draft, which the Senate Agriculture Committee took up in markup on August 6. That draft has since sat deadlocked in committee. With the Senate returning this week, and the 2018 Farm Bill’s current extension set to expire on September 30, Congress is short on time where the regulatory track is not.
AFIDA Background
AFIDA is a federal disclosure statute passed in 1978 that requires a foreign person who “acquires or transfers any interest, other than a security interest” in agricultural land to notify the USDA of that interest within 90 days of the acquisition or transfer.[i] This reporting requirement includes real property that is converted to agricultural land after acquisition.[ii] The USDA is charged with creating administrative regulations to carry out AFIDA, codified under 7 C.F.R. Part 781, and it publishes annual reports summarizing AFIDA-covered ownership interests and assessed penalties.[iii]
The Act defines “agricultural land” as any U.S. land “used for agricultural, forestry or timber production purposes.”[iv] 7 C.F.R. § 781.2(b) tailors this definition to agricultural land currently used for these purposes, as well as idle land last put to one of those uses within the past five years. The regulation specifically excludes tracts of 10 acres or less in the aggregate whose products generate no more than $1,000 in annual gross receipts.[v]
A “foreign person” under the Act includes any individual who is neither a citizen nor a national of the United States, who is not a citizen of specified Pacific territories, and who has not been lawfully admitted for permanent residence or paroled into the country, as well as any foreign government or foreign business. This definition also reaches any domestic business entity that is owned or indirectly controlled by a foreign individual, foreign enterprise, or foreign government “holding a significant interest or substantial control.”[vi] The USDA reads that phrase to cover a 10% or greater interest held by a single foreign person, the same threshold for foreign persons acting in concert, or 50% or more in the aggregate held by foreign persons who are not.[vii] Entities may satisfy AFIDA reporting requirements by performing quarterly record checks (and sending inquiries to share-managing investment institutions if they have issued 100,000 or more shares) to confirm that foreign persons do not hold a significant interest or substantial control.[viii]
Under 7 C.F.R. § 781.2(c), foreign ownership interests in agricultural land are reportable unless they are leases of less than 10 years; contingent future interests; non-contingent future interests that do not become possessory when the present estate terminates; easements and rights-of-way used for purposes unrelated to agricultural production; or mineral rights.
Foreign persons who fail to file, or who knowingly file incomplete, false, or misleading information, face a civil penalty capped at 25% of the fair market value (FMV) of the property interest, assessed by the USDA and recoverable in a civil action brought by the Attorney General.[ix] 7 C.F.R. § 781.4 sets penalty guidelines by the type of violation. A late-filed report accrues 0.1% of FMV for every week or portion of a week the filing remains outstanding, capped by statute at 25%. Non-filing, failure to keep a filed report accurate, and submission of an incomplete, misleading, or false report each draw the full 25% from the outset, subject to downward adjustment for the total time the violation existed, the method of its discovery, any extenuating circumstances, and the nature of the information misstated or omitted.[x]
Push for Reforms
In the half century since Congress passed AFIDA, the statute has drawn only a glancing amendment.[xi] Before this year, the USDA had not issued any new regulations on AFIDA since 1995,[xii] and the USDA’s AFIDA handbook—the main source of guidance for county and state officials—was last updated in 2006.[xiii] The reporting process relied on an outmoded filing system whereby foreign persons would submit a paper form (FSA-153) at the county Farm Service Agency (FSA) office. County offices would then forward the reports through the state-level offices to USDA headquarters for manual entry into a national database. Submissions often arrived illegible or incomplete, and the database became replete with transcription errors. Worse still, the USDA had no practical way to verify the contents of these filings.
Enforcement thinned significantly over the same period. The USDA assessed only eight penalties for late or non-filing between 2012 and 2021, with zero penalties assessed between 2015 and 2018 or in 2020. For comparison, the USDA assessed 118 penalties in 1998 alone.[xiv] Foreign agricultural holdings moved in the opposite direction, growing at an accelerating rate that averaged 0.6 million additional acres annually from 2013 to 2017 and 2.6 million annually from 2017 to 2023.[xv]
Efforts to update AFIDA began in earnest with the 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which directed the USDA to establish a streamlined process for electronic submission of AFIDA disclosures, including an internet database of disaggregated data, within three years.[xvi] Congress reiterated this directive in Section 742 of the 2024 Consolidated Appropriations Act, and codified it in a note to 7 U.S.C. § 3501.[xvii] That act and its 2025 iteration added a second directive requiring the USDA to notify the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), to the maximum extent practicable, of agricultural land transactions that AFIDA reporting suggests may be “covered transactions” under CFIUS jurisdiction.[xviii]
On January 18, 2024, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) submitted a report to Congress identifying deficiencies in the USDA’s implementation of AFIDA.[xix] GAO found that USDA’s annual foreign ownership reports left CFIUS without data current or specific enough to identify unnotified transactions near sensitive federal installations, and that the agency did not sufficiently verify submissions or conduct quality reviews to track their accuracy. USDA’s published reporting, GAO concluded, omitted information the agency already held, including the country affiliations of foreign investors beyond the primary holder and the location of individual transactions. The GAO made six recommendations, primarily addressing the reliability of AFIDA data and the timeliness of sharing it with CFIUS agencies. In line with Congress’s direction, GAO further recommended that USDA assess the feasibility of an online submission system and a public database.
The USDA’s response to the congressional directives and the GAO recommendations has come in stages. The Trump Administration signaled its priority first, announcing AFIDA reform as the opening action item of its National Farm Security Action Plan on July 8, 2025. The USDA issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to replace the current AFIDA regulations on December 29, 2025.[xx] A few weeks later, the USDA launched an online reporting portal at afida.landmark.usda.gov, retiring the paper-only intake GAO had criticized. A separate administrative rule issued April 13, 2026, transferred AFIDA from FSA to the Assistant Secretary for Administration (USDA), who subdelegated general oversight to USDA’s Office of Homeland Security (OHS).[xxi] The full draft of the proposed rule followed on June 25, 2026.[xxii]
The Competing Efforts to Overhaul AFIDA
USDA Rulemaking
The USDA’s proposed rule would restructure AFIDA’s implementing regulations within the Code of Federal Regulations, removing and reserving 7 C.F.R. Part 781 and shifting the text to a new Part 5100 (§§ 5100.1–5100.7). Definitional changes would pull in filers who have never had an AFIDA obligation, and late filings would be priced as a running percentage of the land interest’s FMV at 15 to 25 times the current weekly rate. The rights available to contest those penalties would be limited to a single administrative review process inside OHS, with no option for a hearing. Foreign adversaries and the entities they control would lose the lease exemption that every other filer keeps, and any interest they hold, however small, would count as significant interest or substantial control.
Section 5100.1 would retain the core substance of Section 781.1, primarily substituting legacy FSA references with the newly responsible OHS. Section 5100.2 does the bulk of the proposal’s transformational work, introducing several new terms and rewriting existing ones. “Agricultural land” would categorize land use under the modern North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The definition would drop Section 781.2’s exemption for holdings of 10 acres or less producing no more than $1,000 in annual gross receipts, and it would reach:
- "under cover" production (e.g., greenhouses);
- agricultural and forestry support services;
- agricultural research and biotechnology;
- conservation land that could be used for farming, ranching, forestry, or timber production;
- solar and wind power generation;[xxiii]
- pipeline transportation;
- livestock wholesaling;
- animal slaughter and processing; and
- farm product warehousing.
Perhaps most consequential are the changes to what qualifies as “any interest” in agricultural land. Section 5100.2 cuts the current 10-year lease exemption to one year, measured either as a single term or as the aggregate of multiple leases over continuous and discontinuous periods. The exemption would disappear altogether for foreign adversaries and any entities they control or have jurisdiction over. “Foreign adversary” incorporates the list found at 42 U.S.C. § 19237(2), which names China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, and “any other country determined to be a country of concern by the Secretary of State.” The current exemption for non-agricultural easements and rights-of-way is likewise removed for all filers.
“Foreign person” is indirectly expanded by changing what constitutes foreign “substantial control” of a domestic entity. Where the current Section 781.2 establishes a threshold of 10% foreign interest (either by a single person or multiple persons acting in concert) or an aggregate 50% interest of foreign holders, Section 5100.2 would cut the aggregate limit to 10%.[xxiv] For foreign adversaries or Foreign Adversary Controlled Entities (FACEs), that threshold is removed entirely, extending “substantial control” to any interest held by these categories. The shareholder reporting exemptions currently contained in 7 C.F.R. § 781.3(h) are removed as incongruent with the updated threshold. The definition also expands on new ownership categories. Beneficial owners would meet the test regardless of how small their stake, and aggregate interests could be traced through shell corporations, trusts, and partnerships.
Consistent with the USDA’s online portal launch, reporting obligations under Section 5100.3 would shift to mandatory electronic filing. The section would add a geospatial map to the property description, drawn in the portal, that delineates the tract’s boundaries and subdivides them by crop, pasture, forest, research, other agricultural, and non-agricultural use. It would also require new disclosures: the filer’s current acreage at transfer; tax identification numbers, foreign passport numbers, and any other unique identifiers; and whatever additional information OHS asks for to satisfy itself that a report fully reveals the filer’s ownership interest. Business entity filers would face more under § 5100.3(f), which requires interest percentages broken out by person, by country, and by country in aggregate, along with an ownership diagram tracing the relationships among all interest holders. Foreign persons who were exempt under Part 781 but fall within the new definitions would have 90 days from the effective date of a final rule to submit a first report.
The AFIDA enforcement regime tightens considerably through expanded penalties. Section 5100.4 would establish three late-filing categories: late reports of (1) acquisitions and holdings, (2) transfers and inheritances, and (3) newly reportable holdings.
All three begin on the 91st day after the reportable event with a flat $250 civil penalty. Late acquisition and holding reports accrue an additional 2.5% of the interest’s FMV every seven days for foreign adversaries and FACEs, and 1.5% for all other filers, until the total hits 25%. A foreign adversary would get there within 10 weeks of the initial assessment and other filers in about 17, compared with nearly five years at the current weekly rate. Transfers and inheritances accrue at a slower rate, with the same 2.5% or 1.5% increment attaching 15 days after the initial assessment, again at 30 days, and weekly thereafter. Inheritances get an additional break; given that title can pass by operation of state law before the heir learns of it, the rule would start penalties 91 days after the date the foreign person knew, had reason to know, or should reasonably have become aware of the inheritance, rather than after the transfer itself. Newly reportable holdings would follow the 15-day, 30-day, weekly cadence at a flat 1.5% for every filer. That category sunsets after one year, after which late holding reports move to the acquisition-and-holding track and its 2.5% rate for foreign adversaries.
Substantive violations would incur a penalty of up to 25% of the interest’s FMV. An incomplete filing or a stale report becomes a violation only if it goes unremediated for 30 days. In contrast, a report containing misleading or false information has no cure window. The USDA frames the shift from a flat 25% to a ceiling as conforming the regulation to the statute and to its own practice. Outright failure to file would move into the late-filing tracks, and the downward adjustment factors in Section 781.4(b)(3) would be dropped. Notably, the USDA reads 7 U.S.C. § 3502(b) to cap penalties per violation rather than in the aggregate, so a filer with several defects can face multiple 25% assessments.[xxv]
Section 5100.5 compresses the process for contesting a penalty. The window for requesting an appeal would drop from 60 days to 30, and the written denial and hearing options available under current practice would disappear. Payment would run only through an electronic portal (www.pay.gov), which would end the option to pay while an appeal is pending and recover the money if the appeal succeeds. Section 5100.6 would create a dedicated OHS appeal process, replacing the administrative path at 7 C.F.R. Part 780 for AFIDA penalties. Requesting an appeal would pause accrual until 30 days after the decision, which the OHS Director would issue within 60 days and which would be administratively final.
The USDA is currently reviewing the public comments received for the proposed rule. The USDA’s regulatory agenda projects final action in December 2026, though the agenda dates are only estimates, and the agenda entry making this projection predates publication of the proposed rule.
The House Farm Bill
The House undertook its own reforms through Title XII, Subtitle C of the Farm, Food, and National Security Act. Only part of the subtitle amends AFIDA directly. The remainder imposes additional, freestanding obligations on the USDA and the broader executive branch. Sections 12301 through 12306 leave AFIDA’s reporting thresholds untouched and instead add CFIUS cooperation, a penalty floor, additional public disclosure, a nationwide outreach campaign, and a flat prohibition on purchases by foreign adversaries.
In line with the National Farm Security Action Plan, the clear focus of this legislation is a formal integration of AFIDA’s reporting into the broader national security apparatus. Section 12305 makes the Secretary of Agriculture a permanent member of CFIUS for any covered transaction involving agricultural land, biotechnology, or the agricultural industry, converting the case-by-case seat the 2024 appropriations act created into standing membership. It separately obliges CFIUS to act on transactions the USDA flags as involving buyers from China, North Korea, Russia, or Iran. To support the agency’s elevated role, Section 12301(b) directs the USDA to enter into one or more Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) with CFIUS for sharing all relevant AFIDA disclosure reports, including filer identities and submission dates. Section 12302 requires the USDA, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other specified agencies, to report to Congress on the security risks of agricultural land purchases by “covered foreign persons” from a “covered foreign country,” a label the section imports from the CHIPS Act of 2022, § 10638, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 19237.
The House would also build out the agency’s internal capacity to execute these responsibilities. Section 12303 strikes AFIDA’s investigative actions provision at 7 U.S.C. § 3503, replacing the USDA’s open-ended monitoring authority with a dedicated office headed by a Chief of Operations of Investigative Actions (COO). The COO must be a Senior Executive Service appointee and is entitled to classified space and clearance assistance for staff. Duties would include monitoring compliance, investigating malign efforts to steal agricultural technology or disrupt the U.S. agricultural base, referring suspect transactions to CFIUS, and publishing annual summaries of all disclosure filings. Section 12303(b) also reworks AFIDA’s definitions, inserting “foreign entity of concern” and “malign effort” into Section 9 and renumbering the paragraphs around them.[xxvi] Operational guidance would receive a long-overdue update under Section 12301(c), which requires the agency to overhaul its 2006 AFIDA handbook within two years (specifically incorporating recommendations from recent GAO reports) and to re-evaluate it every 10 years thereafter.
For penalties, Section 12301(d) retains the 25% FMV ceiling and adds a 5% floor that attaches only to knowing violations, meaning a report the filer knew to be incomplete, misleading, or false. A simple failure to timely file is subject only to the statutory ceiling. Section 12301(e) then requires the USDA to publicly name each person who pays a civil penalty, including after an appeal concludes.
Section 12304 directs the USDA to launch a publicly accessible database of foreign-owned agricultural land within three years, withholding the filer’s name and the purchase or lease price for at least 30 days after the filing. The COO audits the database 180 days after it becomes operational and annually thereafter, reporting to Congress on its accuracy. Section 12304(e) repeals the 2023 appropriations directive that set the digitization effort in motion. Section 12301(f) pairs that database with a nationwide educational outreach campaign aimed at farmers, landlords, appraisers, and auction companies.
Beyond the AFIDA update, Section 12306 directs the President to have the heads of federal departments and agencies promulgate rules prohibiting the purchase of U.S. agricultural land by a foreign adversary, a state sponsor of terrorism, any agent or instrumentality of either, or any person owned by, controlled by, or affiliated with either.[xxvii] The section supplies its own definition of foreign adversary under paragraph (2), reaching “any foreign government or nongovernment person engaged in a long-term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the [U.S.] or security and safety of [U.S.] persons.”
The Senate Farm Bill
The Senate’s proposed rewrite of AFIDA, contained in Sections 12201 through 12207 of the Agricultural Act of 2026, directs extensive structural changes to the Act. Section 12201 renumbers AFIDA’s sections, moving the definitions of Section 9 up to Section 2 to match modern statutory convention. The reporting, penalty, and investigative sections each move up by one number into the vacancy Congress left when it repealed Section 5 in 1998. The substantive focus of this rewrite, meanwhile, is on reporting triggers and penalty expansion.
Section 12202 widens the category of reportable events. Foreign persons would be required to report lease agreements longer than five years. In addition to acquisitions and transfers of interests in agricultural land, and conversions of land into agricultural use, the Senate adds a requirement to report within 90 days when land held by a foreign person ceases to be agricultural.
Section 12203’s penalties follow the House on its main penalty figures, with a general 25% ceiling and a 5% floor for knowing violations. Several features have no House counterpart. To make assessment unambiguously mandatory, the penalty provision shifts from a filer being “subject to a civil penalty” to a direction that “[t]he Secretary shall assess against a person a civil penalty if the Secretary determines that the person has committed a violation of this Act.” Additionally, failing to update a filed report becomes a statutory violation in its own right. The obligation itself is not new, since 7 C.F.R. § 781.4(b) has long treated a stale report as penalizable, but Section 3502(a) has never listed it among the violations the statute names. The House leaves that category unedited. The agency would have further authority to place liens directly on the land at issue upon assessment. Collected penalties are expressly available to the USDA for enforcing AFIDA, which provides a partial self-funding mechanism.
Section 12204 rewrites the investigative actions provision, redesignated as Section 5, converting a permissive authority into standing obligations. The agency must audit no less than 10% of reports filed each year and conduct annual training for state- and county-level personnel on spotting reportable land. It must also run a nationwide outreach program on AFIDA reporting, drawn in nearly identical terms to the House campaign and aimed at the same audience of landowners, tenants, county appraisers, appraisal companies, and auction houses.
The current public inspection regime of 7 U.S.C. § 3506 would be replaced by a mandate to publish AFIDA ownership data, similar to the House’s Section 12304. Under Section 12205, the USDA, within two years of enactment, would be required to build and publish human- and machine-readable datasets in the online database Congress directed in the 2024 appropriations act, covering the consideration paid for each reported interest, updated valuations, and the identity of each foreign holder categorized as a majority or minority owner. Ownership records would post publicly as soon as practicable after 30 days from receipt by the USDA.[xxviii]
Interagency coordination is relegated from the center stage of the House version to a supporting role across two sections. Section 12206 calls for an annual report to Congress on foreign holdings by state, a joint annual analysis with DHS of foreign influence in agriculture, and a one-time study of whether a comprehensive CFIUS referral process is feasible. Section 12207 then updates the OHS organizational chart by designating the office head as the Department’s Federal Senior Intelligence Coordinator, authorizing intelligence collection requests, permitting non-reimbursed national security detailees, and granting direct authority to refer transactions to CFIUS (subject to the feasibility study).
Sorting Out the Conflicting Provisions
Both legislative drafts would rewrite AFIDA’s compliance scheme, stand up a public database, and enlarge the USDA’s role at CFIUS, while the proposed rule builds out the reporting mechanics on Congress’s foundation. They do so through different vehicles and on varying timelines. The updates primarily conflict over whether the federal response stops at disclosure or extends to prohibiting acquisition; who inside the USDA polices compliance; and the threshold for reporting leases.
The House bill diverges farthest in its bar on land sales to foreign adversaries. Section 12306 would prevent foreign adversaries and state sponsors of terrorism from acquiring agricultural land outright, while neither the Senate draft nor the proposed rule reaches beyond AFIDA's original purpose of regulating disclosure. A conference that adopts Section 12306 would supplement AFIDA with an acquisition ban administered through agency rulemaking. The drafting of this ban would itself conflict with the USDA’s rulemaking. In the proposed rule, the USDA considered and rejected the same behavioral definition of foreign adversary that Section 12306 adopts, reasoning that a test naming no countries gives a reviewer no way to tell whether a particular filer qualifies.[xxix]
The chambers lay out competing visions for compliance and reporting triggers. House Section 12303 removes the general, unfocused monitoring authority of 7 U.S.C. § 3503 in favor of a new compliance office. Senate Section 12204 rewrites that provision into an audit quota and a training mandate, with no equivalent reorganization. For reporting, the House leaves AFIDA’s list of reportable events alone, so what starts the 90-day clock would keep whatever content the USDA’s regulation gives it. The Senate writes the triggers into the statute instead, adding leases longer than five years and land that ceases to be agricultural to the events a foreign person must report. A conference that takes the Senate’s approach puts the lease exemption threshold beyond the agency’s discretion, while one that takes the House’s leaves it wherever the final rule lands.
With the proposed rule projected to become final in December, the USDA is set to move forward without waiting on a final farm bill. Of course, a later statutory update would displace an inconsistent regulation, and at least two of the rule’s choices are likely casualties. The one-year lease threshold in Section 5100.2 would have to yield to the Senate’s five-year statutory trigger, and the penalty schedule in Section 5100.4, which prices every violation from a $250 base with no percentage floor, would have to make room for the 5% minimum both chambers attach to knowing violations.
Planning Ahead
The proposed rule’s definitional changes would reach clients who have never needed to file under Part 781. Anyone representing foreign persons should check ownership charts now against the new substantial-control thresholds. That same review should also cover leases against a one-year threshold rather than 10, easements and rights-of-way that lose their exemption, and the small or idle tracts the old acreage carve-out no longer shelters. The 90-day window for a first report may not be enough time to map ownership, gather passport and tax identifiers, and draw a geospatial tract map from scratch. The work of assembling that record should start as soon as possible.
Transactional documents should likewise begin allocating AFIDA risk. Purchase agreements and farm leases may benefit from carrying representations about foreign-person status measured at the new thresholds, assigning the reporting duty between the parties, and requiring notice of ownership changes that would flip a domestic entity into coverage mid-term. The Senate lien would attach to the reported acreage on assessment and release only on payment, which puts AFIDA compliance squarely inside the title diligence a purchaser or lender already runs. Moreover, as both chambers would publish transaction information after a 30-day hold, a client who values confidentiality should understand before signing that the transaction data will not stay private. Ultimately, practitioners should prepare now for the USDA’s new Part 5100 and can reasonably expect that foreign investment rules will shift again through legislation in the coming year.
[i] 7 U.S.C. § 3501(a).
[ii] 7 U.S.C. § 3501(d).
[iii] 7 U.S.C. § 3507. No current provision of AFIDA requires the annual report. Section 5 of the Act, codified at 7 U.S.C. § 3504, directed the Secretary to report to Congress and the President on the effects of foreign holdings on family farms and rural communities, and Congress repealed it in 1998. Pub. L. No. 105-362, tit. I, § 101(f), 112 Stat. 3280, 3281. USDA has published the report ever since without that mandate, and the appropriations directives discussed below now supply much of the impetus for it. See also 7 U.S.C. §§ 3505 (reports to the States), 3506 (public inspection).
[iv] 7 U.S.C. § 3508(1).
[v] 7 C.F.R. § 781.2(b). The definition also imports the Standard Industrial Classification Manual (1987), Division A, excluding industry numbers 0711-0783, 0851, and 0912-0919, which cover trapping, game management, hunting, and wildlife management.
[vi] 7 U.S.C. § 3508(3).
[vii] 7 C.F.R. § 781.2(k).
[viii] 7 C.F.R. § 781.3(h).
[ix] 7 U.S.C. § 3502.
[x] 7 C.F.R. § 781.4(b). Fair market value is measured on the date the penalty is assessed, or, if the land is no longer agricultural, on the date it was last used as agricultural land pursuant to Section 781.4(c).
[xi] See supra note 3.
[xii] 60 Fed. Reg. 67298, 67318 (Dec. 29, 1995) (amending the penalty review procedures in 7 C.F.R. § 781.5). The Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) discussed below was published on December 29, 2025, 30 years to the day after the last substantive amendment to Part 781.
[xiii] The current terminology in Part 781 is quite outdated. Section 781.1 still assigns collection to the “Agricultural Stablization [sic] and Conservation Service (FSA),” preserving both a typographical error and an agency Congress abolished in 1994, when the Department of Agriculture Reorganization Act folded ASCS functions into the Farm Service Agency. Pub. L. No. 103-354, 108 Stat. 3178. The county and State ASC committees survive in the text as well. Section 781.2(d) sends Alaska filers to the “State Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation committee,” and § 781.4(c) makes the “County Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Committee” the arbiter of fair market value for penalty purposes. The definition of agricultural land in § 781.2(b) still turns on the 1987 Standard Industrial Classification Manual, which OMB replaced with NAICS in 1997. Section 781.1 also describes the periodic reports to Congress and the President that Congress eliminated in 1998, and § 781.2(g)(1)(ii) refers to citizens of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which dissolved the same year as ASCS.
[xiv] It is possible that the 1998 figure is 117 rather than 118, as the USDA report may have duplicated an entry from the Antelope Coal Company dated June 4, 1998. In any event, the potential duplication totaled only $50, and a yearly moving average of assessment totals paints a similar picture—aggregate annual penalties dropped from $136,943 in 1998 to an average of $74,691 by 2021. See USDA, Foreign Holdings of U.S. Agricultural Land Through December 31, 2021, at 249–67 (2022).
[xv] 90 Fed. Reg. 60581 (Dec. 29, 2025). The ANPRM states both averages in these terms, citing USDA, Farm Service Agency, Foreign Holdings of U.S. Agricultural Land Through December 31, 2023.
[xvi] Pub. L. No. 117-328, div. A, § 773, 136 Stat. 4459, 4509 (2022).
[xvii] Pub. L. No. 118-42, div. B, § 742, 138 Stat. 25, 111 (2024) (codified at 7 U.S.C. § 3501 note).
[xviii] Id. § 787, 138 Stat. at 118–19; Pub. L. No. 119-37, div. B, § 739, 139 Stat. 495, 550 (2025). CFIUS is an executive interagency committee chaired by the Treasury Department that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. businesses and real property for national security risk. CFIUS may recommend that the President block or unwind a “covered transaction” as defined in 31 C.F.R. § 800.213. The USDA and Treasury Department began implementing Congress’s direction for increased coordination through an MOU signed July 8, 2025.
[xix] GAO-24-106337. This report was issued in response to an October 1, 2022, request from 130 members of Congress, who asked the Government Accountability Office to review whether FSA’s administration of AFIDA produced reliable data.
[xx] 90 Fed. Reg. 60581 (Dec. 29, 2025).
[xxi] 91 Fed. Reg. 18767 (Apr. 13, 2026).
[xxii] 91 Fed. Reg. 38315 (June 25, 2026).
[xxiii] Roughly two-thirds of the AFIDA transaction records the GAO reviewed were filings by entities with “wind,” “solar,” or “energy” in the name. See supra note 19.
[xxiv] In the proposed rule, the USDA requests public comment on whether to drop this threshold further to 5%, noting that 5% would align with its approach to leases and penalties.
[xxv] 91 Fed. Reg. 38315, 38327 (June 25, 2026).
[xxvi] “Foreign entity of concern” takes its meaning from 15 U.S.C. § 4651(8), reaching any foreign entity designated a foreign terrorist organization under 8 U.S.C. § 1189; listed on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list; owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a government listed in 10 U.S.C. § 4872(f)(2); alleged by the Attorney General to have been involved in conduct producing a conviction under various espionage-related offenses; or determined by the Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence, to be engaged in unauthorized conduct detrimental to the national security or foreign policy of the United States. “Malign effort” means any hostile effort undertaken by, at the direction of, on behalf of, or with the substantial support of the government of a foreign entity of concern.
[xxvii] Section 12306(3) defines “state sponsor of terrorism” by reference to determinations under section 1754(c)(1)(A) of the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, 50 U.S.C. § 4813(c)(1)(A); section 620A of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 22 U.S.C. § 2371; and section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act, 22 U.S.C. § 2780, as well as any other provision of law where “the Secretary of State determines [a country] has repeatedly provided support for international terrorism.”
[xxviii] The public release provision is the only noteworthy difference between the Senate Farm Bill drafts on AFIDA. The June 23 draft requires the database to be updated as soon as practicable after USDA receipt and withholds the filer name and price for 30 days. The July 31 version withholds the entire record for 30 days before posting it with personally identifiable information removed.
[xxix] 91 Fed. Reg. 38315, 38318 (June 25, 2026). The USDA also rejected the list of foreign adversaries at 15 C.F.R. § 791.4(a), on the ground that it is updated only through notice-and-comment rulemaking and still references regimes that no longer exist, adopting instead the “foreign country of concern” list at 42 U.S.C. § 19237(2).