There’s one bloated federal government agency that routinely hands out money to millionaires, billionaires, insurance companies and even members of Congress. The handouts are supposed to be a safety net for certain rural business owners during tough years, but thousands of them have received the safety-net payments for 39 consecutive years. And tens of thousands of those recipients are actually city dwellers, including a resident of a Palm Beach mansion down the street from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
The bureaucracy in question is the Department of Agriculture, and it’s exactly the kind of dysfunctional behemoth that Elon Musk and his waste-whackers at the Department of Government Efficiency, in their new advisory role, ought to recommend for downsizing and reform. Even though only 1 percent of Americans farm, the U.S.D.A. employs five times as many people as the Environmental Protection Agency and occupies nearly four times as many offices as the Social Security Administration.
So far, Mr. Musk’s minions inside the U.S.D.A. have most prominently targeted its nobler activities, including efforts to prevent wildfires and food contamination, respond to the avian flu, improve animal welfare and study methods to make agriculture more productive and less environmentally damaging. President Trump’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, suggested last month that the administration expects to make cuts to food stamps for low-income Americans.
Maybe they’ll find some waste in that program. But the real problem with the U.S.D.A. is that its subsidy programs redistribute well over $20 billion a year from taxpayers to predominantly well-off farmers. Many of those same farmers also benefit from subsidized and guaranteed loans with few strings attached, price supports and import quotas that boost food prices, lavish ad hoc aid packages after weather disasters and market downturns as well as mandates to spur production of unsustainable biofuels. A little reform to this kind of welfare could go a long way toward reassuring skeptics that the administration’s efficiency crusade isn’t only about defunding its opponents and enriching its supporters.
It was President Abraham Lincoln who created the U.S.D.A. for the express purpose of supporting American farmers long before they became a reliable Republican voting bloc. In Mr. Lincoln’s day, a majority of Americans farmed, so the so-called People’s Department truly supported the people. Today, far more Americans work in stores or offices or factories than on farms. But there’s still a plausible argument that food producers need protection from catastrophic risks to ensure a stable and affordable food supply.
Unfortunately, the current safety net is more like an automatic profit generator for row-crop farmers in good years as well as bad. The problems begin with the supposedly “countercyclical” agricultural subsidies that were conceived during the New Deal to get struggling farmers through future Dust Bowls but have become a perennial entitlement for growers of the Big Five commodities — corn, soy, cotton, wheat and rice. The Environmental Working Group has documented that 10,000 farmers have received those payments every year for four decades — even though the average food stamp recipient receives aid for under a year. And the payments are structured by farm size, so the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients receive three-quarters of the subsidies.
Congress has at least enacted some modest limits on the windfalls for wealthy farmers from those countercyclical payments. But there are no such limits to the U.S.D.A.’s crop insurance program, which is now America’s largest source of financial goodies for farmers. It’s a phenomenal deal: They receive more than $2 in claims for every dollar they’ve paid in insurance premiums, mainly because taxpayers subsidize 62 percent of those premiums.
If you’re wondering why insurance companies would agree to such a lousy deal, it’s because the U.S.D.A. pays them around $2 billion a year to do the paperwork, with guaranteed rates of return that put rates in many other sectors to shame. It’s a sweet arrangement for insurance agents, too; one received a $3 million fee for writing a single policy.
Crop insurance was initially pitched as a more rational alternative to the haphazard disaster aid packages that Congress shoveled into farm country every year. But the disaster aid has continued to flow. In December, a bipartisan spending bill to keep the government open included more than $30 billion in relief for farmers dealing with storms, droughts and low prices. Many of them had already been compensated for their losses; farmers in a large majority of America’s counties have “triple dipped,” raking in countercyclical payments, crop insurance payments and disaster payments in the same year.
This is why the Government Accountability Office, the independent watchdog that was calling out wasteful federal spending long before DOGE, has repeatedly called for reforms to the farm safety net. If Mr. Musk really wants to reduce duplicative and regressive government outlays to well-connected insiders, he — in conjunction with Ms. Rollins and Congress — could impose income limits and subsidy caps on crop insurance, slash overhead payments to insurers and prevent farmers from receiving multiple safety-net benefits in a single year.
He could look beyond the safety net, too. For instance, President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created generous subsidies for “sustainable aviation fuels,” an effort to help corn and soybean farmers sell more ethanol and biodiesel even though those products drive up food prices, induce deforestation and ravage the climate. If Mr. Musk is really concerned about redundancy and efficiency, he could take a whack at more than 50 financial aid programs that the U.S.D.A. operates for rural health, rural energy, rural housing, rural infrastructure and rural development, an unnecessary parallel mini-government that congressional agriculture committees created to expand their own fiefs.
The obvious political obstacle to reform is that the farm lobby is arguably Washington’s most powerful lobby, and farm country is Mr. Trump’s base. In his first term, he pandered to it by tapping a U.S.D.A. fund to give farmers a $28 billion bailout to offset the pain of his trade wars, a courtesy he did not extend to manufacturers, retailers or other affected industries. Last week, after DOGE created a mini-backlash in rural America by blocking conservation funding for work that farmers and ranchers had already completed, Ms. Rollins hastened to reassure them the department would honor its previous commitments — even though much of that “conservation” funding was for routine farm work like building fences and manure lagoons. Mr. Trump’s new tariffs could cause more pain for American agriculture, but Ms. Rollins said on Tuesday that his message to farmers is: Trust me.
They probably should. Mr. Trump has been consistent about protecting their interests. The question is whether he and DOGE will protect the interests of the other 99 percent of American taxpayers.
