The U.S. farming industry may never be the same in the wake of Donald Trump's skyrocketing taxpayer-funded payments to the sector, warn policy experts and watchdog groups, according to Politico.
Trump has been shoveling cash to farmers in order to try to offset the massive hit they've taken from his ongoing trade disputes and tariff wars with China and other countries. And Trump’s cataclysmic handling of the coronavirus has only heightened farmers’ pain. But as subsidies ballooned from $11.5 billion in 2017 to $32 billion this year, experts fear weaning farmers off the government-subsidized cash cow could prove next to impossible.
Worse yet, the payments have flooded out with almost zero oversight from Congress. Instead, the Agriculture Department has just been left to its own devices in terms of deciding where to direct the taxpayer aid. Naturally, Trump has capitalized on the glut to endear himself to farmers—voters he can't afford to alienate in the heartland. In a January tweet, Trump said he hoped the "massive" subsidies would be "the thing [farmers] will most remember" about him helping them "get through tough times." Trump failed to mention that he was also personally responsible for helping to create said "tough times."
“It’s a big problem for agriculture because it’s not sustainable,” Anne Schechinger, senior economics analyst at the watchdog organization Environmental Working Group, told Politico. “It’s really difficult once you’re giving farmers this much money to then take away those [payments].”
The money was never actually appropriated by Congress and has instead been administered through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, which can borrow money directly from the U.S. Treasury to help farmers.
“It’s just, ‘Here’s your check," says Neil Hamilton, emeritus professor and former director of Drake University’s Agricultural Law Center. "It’s your and my tax money. It’s not a crazy idea to ask what the public’s getting from this, or could the public expect more for it.”
Not crazy except in the Trump swamp, where taxpayer money is no object in pursuit of bribing farmers' for their votes.