The ages-old dilemma: Guns or butter

In its program-slashing 2027 Department of Agriculture budget plan, the White House hoped to head off sure-to-come complaints by tying spending cuts to that handy whipping boy, big bad government.

“The president’s budget focuses on the needs of American farmers and ranchers, which is predominantly to get the federal government out of their business while supporting the great American food supply,” the proposal explains.

While that sounds great to city-raised budget hawks, it’s not accurate. Like most Americans, farmers and ranchers do want to be left alone — until, of course, they don’t.

For example, farmers never hesitate to ask “the federal government” — you and me — to fund crucial food programs like crop insurance, the Conservation Reserve, port upgrades, river locks and dams, federal meat inspection, plant and animal research, foreign export aid, public school lunches, and on and on.

That’s not a fault of farmers or the feds. In fact, it’s a feature because every government’s central purpose is to meet the needs of its collective citizenry, and few things are more vital to any nation than a safe, accessible food supply.

And, of course, farm leaders are completely sincere when they say they “don’t want government checks” to provide a living. Still, no farm leader worthy of their title would ever tell their members to not take every penny of federal aid offered by lawmakers.

But that’s not what the 2027 White House budget plan for USDA does. It is a uniquely bleak document that tackles none of today’s plain-to-see problems: soaring input costs, rising export competition, undone trade deals, weakened farm prices and endless tariff threats.

In fact, the plan is a dissertation on disassociation; it’s more about political bogeymen than the actual hardworking people whose skill and sweat grow and deliver the food and fiber our freedom depends upon.

For example, the White House opened its defense of today’s flat farm incomes and rising farm costs not by offering any market-stabilizing plan or income-boosting program. Instead, it proposed an agency-shattering 19% cut to USDA’s 2027 discretionary budget.

The reason for the cuts? The “budget eliminates programming that does not serve a core mission such as radical transgender and Green New Scam ideologies and brings the agency’s resources closer to the rural Americans it serves.”

To ensure that message came across loud and clear, the White House repeated it loudly and clearly — a lot.

The entire “92-page top-line plan,” according to DTN’s Chris Clayton “mentions ‘rural’ 12 times across all departments and agencies, but mentions ‘woke’ 34 times and ‘New Green Scam’ 21 times. Diversity, equity and inclusion are also mentioned 26 times while ‘transgender’ is mentioned 16 times.”

For those counting at home, that’s 97 mentions — more than one per page of the summary plan — of politically-loaded, idea-empty rhetoric that has little to do with any American farm, ranch, or rural community.

Despite all this constant cultural hectoring, the White House does get around to its USDA spending cuts. The biggest to suffer is the Food for Peace program, clipped for $1.2 billion, and the McGovern-Dole Food for Education effort, hacked by $240 million.

The administration also targets two of its least favorite programs, SNAP and WIC, again and plans to slice another $510 million from USDA’s research budget. It also hopes to wipe out numerous programs focused on conservation, small farms, beginning farmers and farmers markets.

The steep cuts, according to Capitol Hill handicappers, are to aid the administration’s effort in boosting Pentagon spending by nearly 50%, from $1 trillion today to $1.5 trillion in 2027.

That will be a hard sell even in ruby-red rural America where they make butter, not guns.