Feed the World by Cutting SNAP
Published: Friday, June 6, 2025
The following is from Alan Guebert, a freelance agricultural journalist from Illinois.
For U.S. farmers and ranchers, May 22 was right out of a Dickens novel: It was the best of days and the worst of days.
Early—and I do mean cow-milking early—that morning, the U.S. House of Representatives teed up a vote to pass the tax-cutting, deficit-exploding 1,000-page bill favored by GOP leaders and the Trump White House. Despite two Republican members sleeping through the actual vote, the bill squeaked by in a 215-214 count.
Farm groups and Big Ag lobbyists greeted its passage warmly because it delivered top wants: expanded crop insurance subsidies; extended breaks for depreciation, income tax, and inheritance taxes; 30 million more farm-program eligible acres; and extended biofuel tax breaks through 2031.
Their cheers were muted, however, because while the biggest of the bigs in American agriculture will receive huge benefits under the GOP bill, the smallest of the small are targeted to pay for much of it.
In fact, "The nutrition portion of the bill proposes more than $300 billion in reductions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over 10 years," explained the Ohio Country Journal in a preview of the law. "The Congressional Budget Office estimates these adjustments could affect around 3 million recipients."
So, according to the Republican budget plan, a good way for American farmers to feed the world is for Congress and the White House to slash food aid abroad while creating three million more undernourished, hungry people in the U.S.
Little wonder then that quiet restraint was the order of the day, especially if, as the Environmental Working Group (EWG), using the U.S. Department of Agriculture's own data, showed last year that "between 1985 and 2023, a total of 10,249 recipients got farm subsidy payments every year ... (that averaged) $1,090,970 over the 39-year period."
The total take by these few over those nearly four decades was $11.18 billion, noted the EWG, while "The top 10 repeat farm subsidy recipients collected between $9 (million) and $20 million each during this period."
And yet, according to 215 House Republicans on May 22, federal spending is so out of control that one crucial way to reel it in is to cut $300 billion in SNAP benefits from 3 million people who now receive an average of $6 per day in federal food assistance.
Farmers, ranchers and Republicans did, however, receive their own bitter pill later that day when the unnaturally-tanned U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a report "that found two weed killers widely used by farmers could be linked to chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease and asthma," noted the New York Times.
Indeed, the two GOP chairs of their respective ag committees, Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania and Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas, were so vexed by this MAHA—Kennedy's "Make America Healthy Again"—moment that they issued a statement calling it "imperative" that Kennedy and his MAHA minions "adhere to the 'risk-based and scientific processes' set forth by Congress."
So, Congress, when not doing a splendid job managing the nation's finances, also serves as the final arbiter of all things scientific? Who knew.
The American Soybean Assn. had a more heated reaction. It called the MAHA report "brazenly unscientific," "misleading" and "anti-farmer. ..."
President Donald Trump, who attended the MAHA meeting, was hot, too, just not in the way the ASA was, reported Food Fix's founder and editor Helen Bottemiller Evich.
"The most telling thing I heard during the event," she noted, "was from Trump himself. He said more than once that MAHA was 'hot.'"
Hot? Forget Dickens; bring in Orwell.
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