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Who are we?
Money is the only thing these Billionaires understand.
Early this month, after some equivocation,
President Donald Trump briefly endorsed the idea to hike taxes on the
wealthiest Americans in his budget proposal to Congress. Economists were
quick to point out
the meager impact a new millionaire tax bracket would have on the
ultra-rich, particularly in the context of other proposed tax cuts that
would offset any pain points for them. Still, the backlash from
Republican members of Congress was swift. They spurned the proposal and
instead advanced breaks for wealthier Americans. Last week, that version of Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill narrowly passed the U.S. House of Representatives and headed to the Senate.
Tax policy isn’t the only way that
this bill proposes to further widen the gap between the wealthy and the
poor. Though the more than 1,000-page megabill will look somewhat
different once it advances through the Senate, analysts say that there
are three food and agricultural provisions expected to remain intact: an
unprecedented cut to the nation’s nutrition programs; an increase of
billions in subsidies aimed at industrial farms; and a rescission of
some Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to help farmers deal with
the impacts of climate change.
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If they do, the changes will make it
harder for Americans to afford food and endure the financial toll of
climate-related disasters. They will also make it more difficult for
farmers to adapt to climate change — from an ecological standpoint and
an economic one. Overall, the policy shifts would continue Trump’s effort
to transform the nation’s food and agricultural policy landscape — from
one that keeps at least some emphasis on the country’s neediest
residents to one that offers government help to those who need it least.
Ever since the inception of the federal food stamps program in 1939, when it was created
during the Great Depression to provide food to the hungry while
simultaneously stimulating the American economy by encouraging the
purchase of surplus commodities, what’s now known as the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has been falsely portrayed as a
contributor to unemployment rates and politicized as an abuse of
taxpayer dollars.
A
sign outside of a grocery store in 2023 welcomes those on food
assistance in a Brooklyn neighborhood that has a large immigrant and
elderly population. Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Right now, more than 40 million
Americans are enrolled in SNAP, an anti-hunger program written into the
farm bill and administered through the Department of Agriculture’s Food
and Nutrition Service. The federal government has always fully paid for
benefits issued by the program. States operate the program on a local
level, determining eligibility and issuing those benefits, and pay part
of the program’s administrative costs. How much money a household gets
from the government each month for groceries is based on income, family
size, and a tally of certain expenses. An individual’s eligibility is
also constrained by “work requirements,” which limit the amount of time
adults can receive benefits without employment or participation in a
work-training program.
The Congressional Budget Office
estimated that the cuts to SNAP now being proposed could amount to
nearly $300 billion through 2034. An Urban Institute analysis
of the bill found that the cuts would be achieved by broadening work
requirements to apply to households with children and adults up to the
age of 64; limiting states’ ability to request work-requirement waivers
for people in high unemployment areas; and reducing the opportunities
for discretionary exemptions. But most unprecedented is how the bill
shifts the financial onus of SNAP’s costs onto states — increasing the
administrative costs states have to cover to up to 75 percent, as well as mandating that states pay for a portion of the benefits themselves.
If the Senate approves the proposed approach to require states to cover some SNAP costs, the Budget Office report
projects that, over the next decade, about 1.3 million people could see
their benefits reduced or eliminated in an average month.
The burden of these changes to
federal policy would only cascade down, leading to a variety of likely
outcomes. Some states might be able to cover the slack. But others
won’t, even if they wanted to: Budget-strapped states would then have to
choose between reducing benefits or sharing the costs with cities and counties. Ultimately, anti-hunger advocates warn, gutting SNAP will undoubtedly increase food insecurity across the nation — at a time when persistently high food costs are among most Americans’ biggest economic concerns.
As communities in all corners of the country endure stronger and more
frequent climate-related disasters, the slashing of nutrition programs
would also likely decrease the amount of emergency food aid that would be available after a heatwave, hurricane, or flood — funding that has already been reduced by federal disinvestment.
Sweeping cuts to SNAP would also
constrain how much income small farmers nationwide would be able to
earn. That’s because SNAP dollars are used at thousands of farmers markets, farm stands, and pick-your-own operations throughout the country.
Groups like the environmental
nonprofit GrowNYC helped launch the use of SNAP dollars at farmers
markets in New York almost two decades ago, and have since built matching dollar incentives into their business model
to encourage shoppers at the organization’s greenmarket and farmstand
locations to spend their monthly food aid allotments on fresh, locally
grown produce.
The program “puts money in the
farmers pockets,” said Marcel Van Ooyen, CEO of GrowNYC, and “helps
low-income individuals access healthy, fresh, local food. It’s a
double-win.”
He expects to see the bill’s SNAP
cuts result in a “devastating” trend of shuttering local farmers’
markets across the nation, which, he said, “is going to have a real
effect both on food access and support of the farming communities.”
While the ethos of this bill
can be gleaned by counting up the proposed cuts to social safety nets
like SNAP, looking at the legislation from another perspective — where
Trump wants the government to spend more — helps to make it
clearer. These dramatic changes to nutrition programs would be
accompanied by a massive increase in commodity farm subsidies.
The budget bill increases subsidies to commodity farms — ones that grow crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans — by about $50 billion.
Commodity farmers “typically have larger farms,” according to Erin
Foster West, a policy campaigns director specializing in land, water,
and climate at National Young Farmers Coalition. A trend of
consolidation toward fewer but more industrial farm operations was already underway. Less than 6 percent of U.S. farms
with annual sales of at least $1 million sold more than three-fourths
of all agricultural products between 2017 and 2022. The Trump plan might
just help that trend along.
Earlier this year, the USDA issued
about a third of the $30 billion authorized by Congress in December
through the American Relief Act to commodity producers who were affected by low crop prices in 2024. Because the program significantly limited who could access
the funding, it funneled financial help away from smaller farmers and
into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. An April report
by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute concluded
the $10 billion bailout for commodity farmers “was probably not
justified.”
Later in their report, the American
Enterprise Institute authors note that lobbyists representing commodity
farms have already begun pushing for more subsidies because of the
fallout of the Trump administration’s tariffs.
Then they pose a question: “Does the
Trump administration need to give farmers further substantial handouts,
especially when it is doing nothing for other sectors and households
significantly affected by its policy follies?”
The budget bill, with its $50 billion windfall for commodity farms, may be its own answer.
This September will mark
the deadline for the second consecutive year-long extension that
Congress passed for the farm bill, the legislation that governs many
aspects of America’s food and agricultural systems and is typically
reauthorized every five years without much contention. Of late,
legislators have been unable to get past the deeply politicized struggle
to agree on the omnibus bill’s nutrition and conservation facets. The latest farm bill was the 2018 package.
The farm bill covers everything from
nutrition assistance programs to crop subsidies and conservation
measures. A number of provisions, like crop insurance, are permanently
funded, meaning the reauthorization timeline does not impact them. But
others, such as beginning farmer and rancher development grants and
local food promotion programs, are entirely dependent upon the
appropriations within each new law.
Farmer
Jacob Thomas pulls plants as he prepares for a farmers market the next
morning on April 25, 2025 in Leavenworth, Kansas. He had a grant for a
new distribution warehouse that was rescinded then regranted. Now he’s
scared to proceed for fear it will be rescinded again. Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Trump’s tax plan contains a slick
budgeting maneuver that takes unobligated climate-targeted funds from
the agricultural conservation programs in President Joe Biden’s 2022
Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and re-invests that money into the same
farm bill programs. The funding boost provided by the IRA was designed
to reign in the immense emissions footprint of the agricultural industry,
while also helping farmers deal with the impacts of climate change by
providing funding for them to protect plants from severe weather, extend
their growing seasons, or adopt cost-cutting irrigation methods that
boost water conservation.
On its surface, the inclusion of
unspent IRA conservation money in the tax package may seem promising, if
notably at odds with the Trump administration’s public campaign to all
but vanquish the Biden-era climate policy. Erin Foster West, at the
National Young Farmers Coalition, calls it “a mixed bag.”
By proposing that the IRA funding be
absorbed into the farm bill, Foster West says, Trump creates an
opportunity to build more and longer-term funding for “hugely impactful
and very effective” conservation work. On the other hand, she notes, the
Trump megabill removes the requirements that the unspent pot of money
must fund climate-specific projects. Foster West is wary that the
removal of the climate guardrails could lead to more conservation money
funneling into industrial farms and planet-polluting animal feeding operations.
The House budget package also omits
many of the food and agricultural programs affected by the federal
funding freeze that would typically have been included in a farm bill.
Those include programs offering support
to beginning farmers and ranchers, farmer-led sustainable research,
rural development and farm loans, local and regional food supply chains,
and those that help farmers access new markets. None of these were
incorporated into the Republican megabill.
“It’s just a
disinvestment in the programs that smaller-scale, and beginning farmers,
younger farmers, tend to use. So we’re just seeing, like, resources
being pulled away,” said Foster West.
Moreover, up until now, several agricultural leaders in Congress have expressed confidence about passing a new “skinny” farm bill,
to address all programs left out by reconciliation, before September.
Provisions in the Trump budget bill may erode that confidence. By
gutting funding for SNAP and increasing funding for commodity support,
two leading Republican farm bill priorities, the need for GOP legislators to negotiate for a bipartisan bill diminishes.
Banners
showing images of President Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln hang on
the side of a U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Washington,
D.C., in May 2025. Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images
Inherent to the farm bill are
provisions set to incentivize Congress to break through its own
gridlock. If neither a new farm bill nor an extension is passed ahead of
its deadline, some commodity programs revert to a 1930s and 1940s law,
which helps trigger what is colloquially known as the “dairy cliff” —
after which the government must buy staggering volumes of milk products at a parity price set in 1949 and risk spiking milk prices at the supermarket. Trump’s tax package would suspend this trigger until 2031.
Under Trump’s vision, encoded in the
tax bill, U.S. food and agriculture policy would “cannibalize” itself,
according to Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable
Agriculture Coalition. The policies meant to make better food more
available to more people, and support the producers that grow it, in
other words, could make way for a world in which fewer people will be
able to farm — and to eat.
“It’s an
irresponsible approach to federal food and farm policy,” Lavender said.
“One that does not support all farmers, does not support the entire food
and farm system.”
