When the U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of President Donald Trump’s megabill back in May, legislators included a loophole that would allow large farms to maximize the total amount of federal dollars they can collect. When the bill moved on to the Senate, legislators there first sought to expand that loophole and make it easier for industrial farms to cash in on subsidies.
Then, leading up to Tuesday’s vote, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who has previously advocated for reining in America’s factory farms, proposed an amendment that took aim at the loophole — a measure that would make sure that farm safety nets reach small and medium-size family farms, too, according to a one-pager on the amendment released by Grassley’s staff and obtained by Grist.
Other Republicans from farm country balked at the move, and in the end, Senate agricultural committee chair John Boozman convinced Grassley to drop the amendment. The Senate voted to pass the bill, a huge legislative victory for Trump. It now moves back to the House for a final high-stakes vote before heading to the president’s desk.
The exclusion of Grassley’s provision is congruent with the Trump administration’s two evident priorities when it comes to agricultural policy: slash federal food and farm funding, leaving small farmers struggling to stay afloat, and shower commodity farmers with multibillion-dollar bailouts.
The result, said Austin Frerick, an agricultural and antitrust expert, is akin to “throwing gasoline on the inequality in America and in the food system.”
In the end, the main agricultural policy elements of the Senate bill were virtually the same as what was in the House’s version. Funding for rural development programs, farm loans, programs that invest in local and regional supply chains, and farmer-led sustainable research remain conspicuously absent.
What both versions do contain is a slick budgeting maneuver that takes unobligated climate-targeted funds from President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, and reinvests them into programs under the current farm bill. In doing so, the budget bill would erase the requirements that the money must fund climate-specific projects. The Senate bill also retains the House’s proposal to increase subsidies to commodity farms — typically larger farms that grow crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans — by about $50 billion.
“To me, it’s sending the message that there’s only one way to support farmers, and it’s through increased commodity subsidies for a select few farmers,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “And the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.”
One prominent aspect where the Senate bill deviates from the House bill has to do with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The House proposed that the federal government shift the financial onus of SNAP costs onto states, for the first time ever — increasing the administrative costs states have to cover up to 75 percent, as well as mandating that states pay for a portion of the benefit costs. The Senate bill does that, too, but to a lesser degree: It would require states with specific payment error rates to pay anywhere between 5 percent and as much as 15 percent of the benefit costs, with some final-hour exemptions made by Senate Republicans for Alaska and Hawai‘i in order to get Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski to vote in favor of the bill.
By taking resources away from the federal government’s first line of defense against rising rates of hunger, the risk of food insecurity for millions of Americans is poised to deepen. The bill also puts forward new SNAP work requirements, mandating that parents of children ages 14 and older, veterans, those who are unhoused, former foster youth, and a subset of older people all work to maintain their benefits. If finalized, fewer immigrants, including refugees, people approved for asylum, certain domestic violence victims, and survivors of trafficking, would be eligible for the monthly grocery stipend.
These changes are emblematic of what Parker Gilkesson Davis of the Center for Law and Social Policy called “the decline of public benefit programs.” The changes to SNAP, Gilkesson Davis continued, will “take away from the people, who have just not been able to catch a break, the ability to put food on their table.” Congressional Budget Office estimates suggest the Senate proposal would reduce federal spending on SNAP by roughly $287 billion over a decade. It is also expected to cause a little over 22 million families to lose some or all of their monthly food benefits, according to a new report by the Urban Institute.
Another of Trump’s priorities will have grave implications for farmworkers and the business of producing food. As it is written now, the bill will increase the $10 billion annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, by more than $100 billion through 2029 for detention facilities, border wall operations, and deportations, and make it more expensive for immigrants to apply for asylum, work authorization, humanitarian parole, and temporary protected status. About 40 percent of crop farmworkers are immigrants without legal status.
“When we see ourselves targeting communities who are working to put food on our tables, and you are removing them from meat-processing plants, you’re removing them from the fields where they would have otherwise been processing or harvesting food, then we have less folks to put food on our tables,” said Nichelle Harriott, the policy director of HEAL Food Alliance. “What does that mean in terms of our broader food economy and food chain? So I don’t think this is a bill that has been thought through in terms of what will be the ripple effects on the economy, on people’s budgets, on people’s wallets.”
Senator Grassley was successful in advocating for another provision in the bill related to agriculture: an extension and increase for a federal credit for small producers of biofuels, a derivative of food crops such as corn. The bill also maintains the transferability rules that allow producers using the credits to avoid large tax liabilities. Biofuels, and the devotion of land to producing bioenergy crops, have long been regarded as a misguided climate solution.
“The significant investment in biofuel developments is going to be detrimental to building a food system that is centered on farmers and consumers. Under these provisions, we’re literally turning our farmers into miners, where instead of growing food, they’ll be growing feedstocks for energy production,” said Jim Walsh, policy director at the nonprofit Food & Water Watch. That will not only “push up food costs on consumers,” he said, “but undermine our ability to actually build true clean energy projects.”
For 20-year-old Cale Johnson, what’s at stake with the budget bill moving through Congress isn’t just about the national and global implications — it’s deeply personal. Growing up in Kearney, Nebraska, his family relied on SNAP dollars to be able to afford groceries for most of his life. Even with those benefits, he and his mother still had to go to food pantries and Salvation Army food drives every month to avoid going hungry.
The steep cuts to SNAP in the bill, Johnson said, is a reflection of how congressional policymakers misconstrue the purpose of the program, and who relies on it. “Especially in Nebraska, there are so many Trump voters and Republican voters, lifelong conservatives who are on [SNAP]” he said. “I don’t think they understand that this is going to hurt millions out of their own voter base, and that they’re going to be betraying the very people that have been loyal to them for decades.”
Frida Garza contributed reporting to this story.
Excerpts or more from this article, originally published on Grist , was republished here, with permission, under a Creative Commons License. Learn more about third-party content on AntifaHQ.com.
