Wildly misguided farm policy creates oceans of red ink for taxpayers across Kansas, U.S.
A farmer stores grain near Eldridge, Iowa, on Sept. 28, 2024. (Kathie Obradovich/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
“Check here if you, or your spouse if filing jointly, want even more of your money to go into the Farm Subsidy Kitty. Taxes might have to increase in the future to pay for it.”
Let’s face it: $1.4 trillion dollars is a lot of dough. Adding $20 billion, $10 billion and then $12 billion makes it real money — all for a new farm bill, recoupment from weather and market losses, and fallout frrom the tariffs. President Donald Trump proclaims this stupefying deluge of subsidies farmers’ “golden age.”
He and his advisors will not pronounce the obvious: It’s a red age. American agriculture is hemorrhaging red ink.
“The anxiety, the anxiousness, the angst is really weighing on producers, the most difficult that I’ve seen in my time as an elected official.” Half of American farmers agree with that statement from Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas). They say they’re worse off today than one year ago.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins knows it too. Farmers “are worried about whether they will make it through another season,” she wrote.
Her solution? A Potemkin Village fabricated from news releases touting feckless trade deals and a gusher of taxpayer dollars. She and her congressional allies are preparing to swell the spending orgy: $389 billion for a second farm bill in two years and, tucked into a measure paying for the Iran war, $15 billion in more trade war bailouts. They would rather open the fisc than ask: Is what we’re doing working?
Farm country’s rebuke is unambiguous: “The policies of this Administration have caused tremendous harm to US agriculture,” former USDA officials and farm groups wrote. Farmers expect their finances to continue deteriorating over the next twelve months. Midwestern farm bankruptcies climbed 70% last year. Seven hundred Kansas farmers called it quits.
Consider: The US spent $32 billion on military operations in World War I. The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion. The United States invested $13 billion rebuilding Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. Going to the the Moon cost $25 billion. Altogether, a trifle of the $1.8 trillion tab for barely 15 months of new agriculture subsidies — on top of a payout under existing law.
All of it skews to favor a handful of the largest, wealthiest operators.
Merely 10% of Kansas farmers pocketed more than 75% of the payments over the past two decades. The 2025 farm bill will exacerbate that inequality; it raises the amount the richest farmers receive. Kansas health care — childhood disease control and research, mental health care, and substance abuse treatment — along with food aid and assistance for the state’s neediest will lose millions because of the same legislation.
USDA’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network includes K-State’s Veterinary Diagnostics Laboratory. Its work falls within the programs Rep. Tracey Mann’s (R-KS) subcommittee on livestock oversees, along with responsibility for evaluating damage the Trump-Rollins trade war is wreaking on Kansas beef, pork and milk producers.
Instead of using his chairmanship to hold the administration to account, Mann has distanced himself as far as possible from examining the debacle. A session at K-State has been the only hearing the subcommittee conducted since tariffs took effect.
The “listening sessions” the agriculture committee held, Mann claimed, wrote the rationale for spending another $389 billion on the 2026 farm bill. The Kansas session, like the others, occurred in 2023 — two years before the present crisis. On that, the committee’s record is blank. At least Mann was able to showcase his alma mater.
The Senate agriculture committee, too, has passed. But it did find time to look at crypto currencies and check a box two decades on Big Milk’s to-do list: Sen. Roger Marshall’s bill allowing schools to serve whole milk again. Thousands from the dairy lobby poured into his campaign account; back-slapping, drinking-a-glass-of-milk videos ensued.
Farmers have no confidence in “the harmful and compounding effect that Administration policies are having. and are frustrated with “congressional inaction,” according to those former USDA officials and farm groups.
USDA can’t criticize the president for triggering the devastating farm economy collapse. Congressional Republicans won’t; they tend to the irrelevant and inconsequential. Accountability has disappeared. The dialectic of healthy policymaking is not tolerated. Republicans fear Trump may endorse their opponents if they criticize.
Foes will be sued, so will journalists who refute his fallacious statements. Retribution rules.
Republican lawmakers won’t even question Trump. They submit to the fiction that foreign governments pay the unilaterally and unconstitutionally imposed tariffs. They squelch debate about the consequences. To remain in good standing with the president, they acquiesce in the absurd and deadly serious — the delusional claim immigrants were eating pets and theevidence-free assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.
This is the guiding principle filling the void left by the atrophy of thoughtful policymaking: Don’t question; paper over the mistakes with money; spend, spend, spend.
The new masters of farm policy? They have no need to understand intricacies of crop insurance or the tenuousness of the global fertilizer market. They don’t bother with aggie lingo — reference prices, base acres, price loss coverage — or grasping a matrix of supplemental coverage options.
They just need to know that their 2025 federal income tax returns must be postmarked or submitted online by 11:59 p.m. on April 15.
Happy Farm Bill Day.
Greg Frazier was USDA chief of staff and USTR chief agriculture negotiator. He lives In Kansas City. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.