Time to Confront the Alarming Waste and Distortion of the Farm Bill
The massive farm bill and its SNAP boondoggle represent pure cronyism that distorts free markets and wastes taxpayer dollars.
With the House passing the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 just weeks ago on April 30 and the Senate now taking it up, this is the moment to expose the waste before it gets locked in.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funnels billions every year in subsidies to farmers for commodities like corn, soybeans, and wheat—payments no other industry gets simply for existing. This isn't a free market; it's government picking winners with your money.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the food stamp program and now a huge chunk of the farm bill, suffers the same problem. It is a cronyistic giveaway funneling billions of dollars to special interest groups. Additionally, SNAP suffers an additional problem related specifically to COVID. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, SNAP spending ran around $60.4 billion in fiscal year 2019 before COVID. Then COVID-era benefit enhancements ballooned it to $112.8 billion in fiscal year 2023. Instead of receding when the pandemic did, these temporary-intended increases remained behind. As Ronald Reagan sagely warned: nothing lasts longer than a temporary federal program.
Yet another major problem was President Trump's unilateral (and constitutionally dubious) tariffs, which cost farmers billions in lost export markets. Once again, Trump acted unilaterally and illegally to hand out roughly $28 billion in bailouts. That's like prescribing medicine to fix the side effects of an improvidently directed first dose. When the original policy was wrong, you don't fix it by treating the symptoms with more taxpayer money.
This setup violates every principle of limited government and fiscal responsibility. Agriculture is an industry like any other. It should respond to supply, demand, and competition—not perpetual handouts that enrich producers at everyone else's expense. True capitalism rewards efficiency and innovation. This behavior is the opposite. Ironically, it is often incorrectly and ludicrously described as "crony capitalism,” although it has nothing to do with capitalism and is the antithesis of it. Rather it should be referred to as cronyism, full stop. Historical context shows these programs expand regardless of need, while double taxation and bureaucratic waste pile up. Economic reasoning is simple: distort prices and incentives with subsidies, and you get overproduction in favored crops, dependency, and higher costs for taxpayers who fund both the farm supports and the nutrition entitlements.
It's time to end this cycle of political favoritism. Repeal the subsidies, let markets work, scrap the poorly-conceived tariffs that created the problems now used to justify more bailouts, and roll back the permanent SNAP expansions that never should have outlived the emergency. Taxpayers cannot afford this endless cronyism, and limited government demands we stop pretending otherwise. Congress must choose fiscal sanity over special interests—before the debt and distortions get even worse.