Trump Is Really Screwing Over Some of His Core Supporters

Last November, people in farming-dependent counties voted for Donald Trump by a staggering average of 78 percent. So why does he seem so hell-bent on screwing them over?

Earlier this month, multiple outlets reported farmers’ complaints that promised funds—including reimbursements for improvements already paid for and installed—had been frozen, contrary to the administration’s assurances. Missouri cattle farmer Skylar Holden, in a viral video on TikTok, said that although he voted for Trump, his $240,000 contract with the Agriculture Department to improve infrastructure on his farm was now frozen, and he’d already spent $80,000 on materials and labor. The Washington Post last week “spoke with farmers and farm organizations in 10 states who had contacted their congressional delegations about the USDA funding freeze. Some farmers from conservative-leaning districts said they have received no reply. Others said they were told that their representatives supported the administration’s decision—and some representatives appeared to suggest that Trump’s funding freeze was not affecting farmers at all.” These kinds of stories are now proliferating in local news outlets in rural states, whose residents are also being hit by USDA firings.

And this week, the Post revealed a new detail: After a federal judge blocked the freeze on January 28, middle managers at the Department of Agriculture asked superiors whether they could release these funds—and were told they could not. But supposedly, this is getting resolved: Newly confirmed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently claimed to have “release[d] the first tranche of funding that was paused due to the review of funding in the Inflation Reduction Act” and promised that the department would “honor contracts that were already made directly to farmers.”

You’ll notice some caveats in there: “already made” and “directly to farmers.” It’s unclear whether this money will be enough, or be disbursed soon enough, for some of the farms in question, NBC’s Suzy Khimm reported Saturday. First, the IRA funds aren’t the only funds that have been frozen. Second, small farms operating on tight profit margins “make up a large proportion of the farms participating in some of the federal grant programs” in question. And third, farming isn’t something that can be put on hold: As March draws near, many farms are heading into thawing, planting, and animal birthing season.

This, on its own, would be cause for concern in an agricultural system that already operates with worryingly few redundancies—especially since American agriculture is also heavily dependent on immigrant workers, whom the Trump administration is also targeting. But it’s not the only crisis at USDA right now. Only days after Rollins was sworn in, the department accidentally fired people working on the government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu and had to set about trying to rehire them. While Trump said Friday that Rollins is “going to do something with the eggs” (by which he apparently meant lower egg prices), this is hardly a good start. NPR recently profiled two other workers fired at USDA, both of whom worked on securing the food system in the face of escalating threats from pests, pathogens, and climate shocks. This is consistent with recent New York Times reporting that some 400 people in the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service have been fired, along with an estimated 800 agricultural scientists. The USDA apparently did not answer Times reporters’ questions about how many employees had been fired overall, but current estimates are that around 4,200 probationary USDA employees alone have been laid off.

Many experts already consider U.S. agriculture to be underprepared for the pathogens, pesticide resistance, weather pattern shifts, and other threats that are predicted to become more common. On Monday, a coalition of environmental groups and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York sued the USDA for “unlawfully removing department webpages focused on climate change,” which help farmers “make the best choices and access resources to mitigate harm to their livelihoods,” according to the press release.

Whether Rollins is the best person to sort through this mess is another question. As Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, told journalist Tom Philpott on a recent podcast, the USDA is a large department, which means a core component of the job is “managing a huge number of people.” But aside from growing up on a farm, Rollins’s primary qualification for this role seems to have been her time leading the America First Policy Institute, “which was a relatively small think-tank organization that didn’t focus a ton on agriculture,” Lavender said. “So when you start parsing through her record, looking for the substantive linkages to domestic agricultural policy, there’s not a ton there to go on, and there’s not a lot of record of experience in managing huge businesses, organizations with a lot of employees, which is a significant part of the USDA role.”

One of the fired USDA employees NPR profiled was a veteran who’d served in the Air Force for 20 years and was training dogs to detect contraband agricultural products so that potential pathogens and pests can be kept out of the U.S. “I gave blood, sweat, and tears to this country for 20 years to continue service to the federal government,” he told NPR. “I kind of feel like I was just thrown out like a piece of trash.”

Stat of the Week
$5 billion

That’s how much BP now plans to cut from its low-carbon investment plan, instead increasing its oil and gas production targets by 60 percent.

What I’m Reading

Coffee Prices Are at a 50-Year High. Producers Aren’t Celebrating.

Last week, this newsletter mentioned some of the upward pressures on coffee prices right now, including the crop’s particular vulnerability to climate change and weather shocks. The Times recently published a wonderfully in-depth feature on this topic, covering not just the market quirks that make this industry particularly tricky but also farmers’ efforts to shift to new coffee varieties and farming techniques that may make them more resilient. Don’t miss the more hopeful story of one farmer in Corquín, Honduras:

An agricultural engineer by training, Mr. Romero began studying how to shelter his own crop from the elements. He proposed adding a canopy of taller trees like pine and mahogany to cast shade over his coffee. That would keep moisture in the soil and preserve the health of the roots, allowing them to take up more water and nutrients. He made plans to intersperse fruit trees—mangoes, oranges, lemons and plantains—diversifying his harvest while adding additional roots to preserve soil.

In 2009, Mr. Romero persuaded his wife, his parents and his brother to pool their land holdings, turning their 140 acres into a collective plantation that would pursue this new mode of operation, with sustainability as their lodestar.

He organized two dozen other farms into a cooperative called Cafico. Members could share techniques and operate a nursery to produce suitable varieties of coffee plants and shade trees. They financed the construction of a mill to dry and process their harvest and sell the crop. They eschewed chemical fertilizers and pesticides, dedicating themselves to organic production.

His pitch encountered initial resistance from potential members, given the arithmetic.… “Everyone said we were crazy,” said Mr. Romero, 45. “Now, they are copying the model.”

Read Peter S. Goodman’s and Alejandro Cegarra’s full report at The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.