Industry interest groups have spent over $400 million lobbying lawmakers on the 2024 farm bill, according to a recent report from the Union for Concerned Scientists. It’s no surprise, then, that the legislation unveiled by House Republicans last week is facing criticism from taxpayer watchdogs across the political spectrum as a corporately-sponsored boondoggle.
On Tuesday, policy experts from the Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the Environmental Working Group held a joint press conference to criticize the $1.5 trillion bill as a government giveaway to favored special interests. Despite the attention on Boeing and Northrop Grumman profiting from overseas conflicts to boost their domestic influence, agribusiness has already spent nearly 20% more than the defense industry this year to win favors from Washington power brokers.
Josh Sewell, the Director of Research and Policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, criticized the GOP farm bill for including billions in new subsidies for agricultural special interests.
“Drastically increasing government-enforced minimum crop prices to guarantee payments for many of these crops is an exercise to grab more cash, regardless of need,” Sewell said. “More subsidies aren’t needed, especially as 70% of farmers don’t even grow eligible commodities.”
An analysis from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) earlier this month found that around 10,000 repeat recipients of farm subsidies or disaster relief payments have collected over $11 billion over 39 years. Farmers remain eligible to collect taxpayer subsidies every year, regardless of prior payments.
“Some subsidy recipients who have received payments for 39 consecutive years neither work nor live on a farm,” EWG found. “In fact, 48 of the 10,250 repeat recipients live in the nation’s 50 largest cities, despite a requirement that farm subsidy recipients be ‘actively engaged in farming,’” the group reported.
EWG Senior Vice President Scott Faber stated the House Republican farm bill would set commodity price floors so high that growers would be guaranteed additional taxpayer handouts for cotton, peanuts, and rice every year. Farmers are eligible for payments from the federal crop insurance program when crop yields or revenues fall below guaranteed levels.
“That would be as if the owners of a casino engineered the slot machines to pay off every time the mob pulled the handle,” Faber said. “A farm safety net that pays off every year is not a safety net. It’s a trampoline.”
A summary of the legislation presented by House Republican Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson points to inflation as a reason to lift commodity price floors and subsequently subsidies. However, Bryan Riley of the National Taxpayers Union said Tuesday the chairman’s bill pursues the wrong remedy while farm equity and assets approach record highs, according to this year’s forecast by the Department of Agriculture.
“If input prices are a concern, the farm bill should address that through measures that would moderate those input prices,” Riley said. The proposed farm bill, however, says nothing about rolling back tariffs on steel, fertilizer, aluminum, or lumber. “There’s more spending for export assistance programs but nothing to encourage more market-opening trade agreements.”
“So, if input prices are a concern, Congress should address those head-on by reducing costs for everybody,” Riley added, “Not by increasing subsidies that will cost taxpayers billions of dollars in direct funds to politically favored sectors of the farm economy.”
David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, called the bill, “one of the most common governmental responses to inflation and also the worst governmental response to inflation.”
“The ones who are going to be taking the biggest hit are going to be taxpayers,” Ditch said, given the downstream consequences of passing off higher prices to consumers.
Ditch warned the spending increases would also set new expectations for the next time the farm bill comes up in another five years.
“So even though the cost is going to be in the tens of billions of dollars over the course of this farm bill, in reality, it could easily go into the hundreds of billions of dollars in decades to come,” Ditch said.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for Truth Voices and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
