Day 922: Trump’s farm bailout overwhelmingly benefited the wealthiest farmers
Under Donald Trump, the wealthy have continued to reap the biggest benefits. That was true after his huge tax cuts swept trillions of dollars in the pockets of corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
And that has remained the case for those that have been affected by Trump’s disastrous trade wars. For instance, Trump has signed a series of bailouts for farmers who have seen international business, primarily to China, plummet as a result of trade wars stemming from Trump’s tariffs. These bailouts have cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars over the last two years.
Like the Trump tax cuts, the bailout cash is primarily benefiting the wealthiest farms, with at least one farm pulling in millions, and the top 1% receiving an average of $188,000 and the bottom 80% receiving an average of less than $5,000.
More than half of the Trump administration’s trade-war aid for farmers went to just one-tenth of the recipients in the program, according to an analysis of payments by an environmental organization.
Eighty-two farming operations received more than $500,000 each through April under the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Market Facilitation Program, according to the Environmental Working Group, which analyzed records it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act covering $8.4 billion in payments.
One farm, DeLine Farm Partnership of Charleston, Missouri, has so far received $2.8 million in trade aid payments, according to the analysis.
Even some elected Republicans in the area are concerned about what’s happening to a large portion of their constituency.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Republican who has long favored payment limits on farm subsidies, said the findings show the need for “hard payment caps” on the assistance.
Trade aid and other farm subsidies are “meant to help people over humps beyond their own control,” Grassley told reporters. “Some large farmers do have the benefit of having resources to get over those humps without government help.”
(Grassley voted for the Trump tax cuts, so while his statement seems noble, he clearly feels that large farmers “having resources to get over those humps without government help” doesn’t apply to wealthy non-farming Americans in a thriving economy.)
One union spokesperson noted that the aid is a double whammy: not only are small farmers getting the short end of the stick in the short term, the bailout helps the large farmers get even bigger in the long term.
“We are disappointed that USDA did not use its discretion to focus this aid on family farmers and ranchers who need it most,” added Johnson, whose organization says it represents about 200,000 farmers and ranchers.
The bailouts were directly tied to acreage size, so the Trump administration knew exactly what it was doing. As usual, the policy allowed more money to flow to the people that needed it the least at the expense of those that needed it the most.
922 days in, 540 to go
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