Farm Bill politics 2024 lean toward Project 2025

Farm and Food File for the week beginning Sunday, July 7, 2024

This year, like last year, is a Farm Bill year and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver any Farm Bill.

The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics. Most Congressional Republicans aren’t interested in passing any bipartisan farm and food assistance bill when they believe a delay might deliver a GOP-controlled House, Senate, and White House which then would write and pass a Farm Bill that might well resemble something out of the 1980s.

If you think that’s hyperbole, then read the 30-page blueprint for U.S. agriculture included in Project 2025, a mostly unexamined, deeply conservative initiative that “if enacted,” explained Newsweek in late June, “would bring significant changes across various aspects of American life…”

In fact, the 920-page, highly detailed, deeply partisan plan–written and issued by the Heritage Foundation, not the Trump campaign–outlines “a radical transformation of the executive branch… replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president.”

According to Project 2025, a second Trump White House–and by extension, an already Trump-loving Congress–should enact a wholesale overhaul of the 2018 Farm Bill and its implementing agency, the 163-year-old U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

For example, according to the plan, a new Republican majority must kill the sugar program and with it, presumably, the high fructose corn syrup industry which uses, on average, 6 percent of the U.S. corn crop.

“The federal government should not be in the central planning business, and the sugar program is a prime example of harmful central planning,” explains Project 2025.

Next, “ideally” Congress should repeal the two principal crop insurance programs used by most farmers, the Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) and the Price Loss Coverage Program (PLC), the twin pillars of U.S. farm policy that farmers use to insure an estimated 81 percent of all eligible food-producing acres.

But, if both somehow survive the planned gutting, “Congress should prohibit… farmers [from] receiving an ARC or PLC payment the same year they receive a crop insurance indemnity…”

On top of that, the Heritage plan continues, Congress should “Reduce the premium subsidy rate for crop insurance” from “about 60 percent… to no more than 50 percent” because, “(a)fter all taxpayers should not have to pay more than the farmers who benefit from the crop insurance policies.”

Moreover, “The White House and the USDA should make it very clear that the farm bill process, including reform of farm subsidies, must be conducted through an open process with time for mark-up and the opportunity for changes to be made outside the Agriculture Committee process.”

Translation: Big Ag can save the $165 million–or thereabouts–it spends lobbying Congress during Farm Bill years because the $1.5 trillion legislation should be written in the clear sunlight of high noon on Capitol Hill.

And, of course, Project 2025 includes that oldie-but-goodie, “Separate the agricultural provision of the farm bill from the nutrition provisions… (A)gricultural programs should be considered separate legislation distinct from food stamps and the nutrition part of the farm bill… [because] when it comes to American agriculture and welfare programs, they deserve sound policy debates, not political tactics…”

But wait, there are even more changes an incoming Republican White House and Congress should implement.

“Champion the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program,” eliminate commodity checkoff programs “when possible,” “eliminate or reform dietary guidelines,” allow state-inspected meat to be sold across state lines, repeal export promotion programs, and “repeal the federal labeling mandate”–whatever that means.

Could Project 2025 become the guiding hand for Farm Bill 2025?

Of course it can. Continued foot dragging by today’s House leadership to even schedule a Farm Bill vote and a long-stalled Senate already has Washington discussing another extension of the 2018 law until after–you guessed it–January 2025.