2026 will mark the 10-year anniversary of our successful legal effort to reform, albeit partially, the government-mandated beef checkoff program.
Let’s revisit this partial reform and then decide what should be done in 2026 to achieve universal reforms to ensure that mandatory checkoff dollars are not used to promote the interests of global beef packers and retailers over the interests of independent cattle producers.
The beef checkoff program is a mandatory tax on cattle producers. This mandatory tax of $1 per head is collected by state beef councils in the state where the cattle were sold. The state beef council is allowed to keep half of all taxes collected to perform its own beef research and promotion. The other half of the tax is remitted to the national Cattlemen’s Beef Board (CBB) to be used to fund national research and promotion for beef.
Cattlemen’s Beef Board members are appointed by the secretary of agriculture to manage and oversee the entire beef checkoff program. The entity that decides how and where to spend the tax revenue remitted to the Cattlemen’s Beef Board is the 20-member Beef Promotion and Operating Committee. Ten of those 20 members are elected by the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the other 10 are elected by what is called the Federation of State Beef Councils, which is a division of the lobbying group the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA).
Every year, the overwhelming majority of the collected tax revenue goes to one organization – the NCBA. In 2023, for example, the NCBA received $26 million, more than half the amount the operating committee was authorized to spend.
Back in 2010, an independent auditor revealed that the NCBA had misappropriated hundreds of thousands of beef checkoff dollars. And in 2014, a report by the Office of the USDA Inspector General found that more than 82% of the NCBA’s total budget came from the beef checkoff program.
This was the backdrop of our successful reform effort. Our members, and many other independent cattle producers, were concerned that their mandatory checkoff dollars were being used to support the policy goals and interests of global packers and retailers at their expense.
It was early in 2016 when we learned that at least one of the checkoff program’s state beef councils – the Montana Beef Council – was using checkoff taxes to help pay for commercials for Wendy’s, a well-known fast-food restaurant. If Wendy’s had been sourcing its beef exclusively from Montana cattle producers, or even from U.S. cattle producers, then at least some might think that subsidizing a global restaurant chain might be beneficial. But Wendy’s made no such commitment to source its beef exclusively from Montana or elsewhere in the United States.
So in May of 2016, we filed a lawsuit against the USDA, and we used the beef checkoff-subsidized Wendy’s commercial as an example of how the USDA was not properly monitoring beef checkoff expenditures and how the beef checkoff program was violating the constitutional rights of independent cattle producers by forcing them to subsidize private speech.
A federal judge ruled that this advertisement subsidy was likely unconstitutional and that the USDA had failed to control the state beef council’s use of checkoff funds.
After losing in court, the USDA quickly took steps to assume more direct oversight of beef checkoff expenditures. It entered into contracts with each state beef council and required them to obtain USDA approval for all their checkoff expenditures.
That was our partial reform. Our case successfully imparted accountability regarding how the state beef councils spend millions of cattle producers’ hard-earned money each year.
But there’s much more to do on the national level. It’s clear the beef checkoff’s subsidization of lobbying organizations – which allows them to cover overhead expenses and market rates for staff time using checkoff dollars – guarantees income for those subsidized lobbying groups, enabling them to free up resources with which to influence national policy.
As a result, any lobbying group subsidized by the beef checkoff tax will have an outsized influence on policy development in Washington, D.C.
This helps explain why Congress has not already passed mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef and why the USDA has not already promulgated the rules necessary to properly administer and enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act.
There is a bill in Congress called the Opportunities for Fairness in Farming Act, or OFF Act. It is Senate Bill 1848 and House Bill 3516, and it would prohibit the beef checkoff’s subsidization of lobbying organizations and impart much-needed transparency and accountability to the beef checkoff program. Our goal is to include the OFF Act in the upcoming Farm Bill. We hope you’ll weigh in with your state’s congressional delegation.
