Here’s some bad news: The “big, beautiful bill” that President Trump signed into law on July 4 accelerates the egregious bipartisan tradition of showering taxpayer dollars on well-off farmers. It is projected to pour more than $90 billion into new agricultural subsidies and tax credits for farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol, while making it easier for the biggest farmers to vacuum up cash and the least sustainable biofuels to qualify for credits.
It gets worse: The congressional Republicans who passed the bill without Democratic votes also ended the tradition of pairing the lavish handouts known as the “farm safety net” with an actual food safety net for the poor. The bill slashes nearly $200 billion from the federal food stamp program known as SNAP, making life harder for millions of vulnerable families.
But here’s a potential silver lining: The G.O.P.’s decision to sever the half-century-old pairing of farm handouts with food assistance offers Democratic politicians an opportunity to stop supporting environmentally and fiscally ludicrous subsidies for farmers who wouldn’t dream of voting for Democrats. Instead, they could start pushing sensible policies focused on eaters instead of growers. It’s time someone in Washington did.
For decades, U.S. farm policy has been a bipartisan festival of ag-lobby pandering, shoveling enormous piles of cash to farmers through grants, heavily subsidized loans, even more heavily subsidized insurance, disaster aid and an alphabet soup of other thinly disguised welfare programs. Large farms that grow the most common row crops get the largest subsidies, with extra incentives for corn and soybean growers to produce supposedly eco-friendly biofuels that actually threaten forests and the climate.
Republican support for this kind of agricultural socialism is philosophically hypocritical but politically understandable, as rural America has trended overwhelmingly Republican. In the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, the G.O.P. provided more goodies than ever for its loyal base of multimillionaires in John Deere caps, relaxing payment and income limits for the wealthiest farmers, creating new insurance subsidies for big poultry producers and demanding absurdly lenient sustainability analyses of crop-based aviation fuels.
In the past, even as their brand became poisonous in rural America, many Democrats pandered to big farmers just as relentlessly as Republicans, supporting most of the same subsidies while echoing the same clichés about “heartland values.” Urban Democrats who might have otherwise fought farm bills reliably supported them as long as the bills funded food stamps.
But now that the deal is off, urban Democrats can stop backing expensive and destructive rural giveaways, and other Democrats can stop deluding themselves that their obsequious support for the dole will earn them good will in farm country. They’re simply on the wrong side of the political culture wars.
It doesn’t matter how loyally they support agricultural largess when the Farm Bureau’s statement of its beliefs begins by defining marriage as between a man and woman, then goes on to oppose minority business funding quotas and support English as the official U.S. language.
So if July 4 marks a political Independence Day liberating Democrats from the tyranny of senseless food and farm policies, what would a smarter approach look like? It won’t be easy to chart a new path, but since the status quo is such a substantive and political disaster, it shouldn’t be impossible.
The easiest place to start would be a kind of agricultural Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. Don’t support policies that create unnecessary environmental damage, and especially don’t support policies that increase the price of food, the new third rail of American politics.
That may seem like a low bar. But there’s evidence that America’s biofuels mandates and incentives not only drive deforestation and emissions, they also drive up corn and soybean prices, which is why the corn and soy lobbies love them. The federal sugar program is specifically designed to raise the price of raw cane sugar — the domestic policy law Mr. Trump just signed jacked up the guaranteed price around 22 percent — and degrades the Florida Everglades as well. The new law also increased price guarantees for other major commodities, especially the rice and peanuts grown in the districts of powerful Southern Republicans.
Mr. Trump is providing a target-rich environment for Democrats who want to take stands against inflation. His tariffs will increase the price of imported food. His immigration crackdown will increase the price of domestic food by threatening the farm labor work force. His SNAP cuts will force low-income people to spend more of their money on food. Meanwhile, his assault on clean energy will raise electricity prices, while his deep cuts to Medicaid could create a health care crunch in rural America.
The 1 percent of Americans who produce food at a large scale (and their powerful army of lobbyists) wield far more influence over agricultural policy than the 99 percent of Americans who only consume food. There’s an obvious opportunity to speak up for eaters, and it’s political malpractice that Democrats have let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seize it with his “Make America Healthy Again” rhetoric about greedy corporations peddling unsafe food — even though the Trump administration is laying off food safety regulators, protecting agribusinesses from state regulations and staffing up with appointees formerly from lobbying groups promoting corn, soybeans and even the seed oils Mr. Kennedy hates.
Democrats have often pushed for stricter food safety regulations and have also taken the progressive side of issues like limiting subsidies to the richest farmers and reining in the power of giant meat conglomerates. But they haven’t gotten political credit, perhaps because their credibility as reformers has been tarnished by their support for farm-lobby giveaways.
A new politics of “No” would at least distance Democrats from the worst farm-policy abuses. A trickier question is what the party should say “yes” to instead. Some politicians from the party’s more populist left wing — led by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and the organic farmer Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine — have pushed for a Kennedy-style approach, calling for a shift from industrial agriculture toward less intensive and more natural “regenerative” practices. I think that vision of fewer chemicals and less focus on agricultural productivity could accelerate hunger, deforestation and global warming, but it’s at least a vision.
A better vision would focus more on outcomes than specific practices, encouraging the production of more abundant (and therefore more affordable) food with less environmental damage. Agriculture now uses 40 percent of the earth’s habitable land and accounts for 70 percent of all fresh water use. It’s deforesting the Amazon and poisoning the Gulf of Mexico.
If Washington must keep pouring money into agriculture, Democrats should at least try to attach strings requiring more efficient land use and less indiscriminate pollution. They could also support investment in meat substitutes, eco-friendly bio-fertilizers and other innovations to lighten farming’s impact.
But the first step for Democrats addicted to enriching farmers who will never love them back is to admit they have a problem: They’re supporting terrible policies with no political benefit. It’s not clear whether withdrawing their support would win them any votes in farm country or anywhere else, but at least the terrible policies would no longer be their policies.
Michael Grunwald is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.”
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