Trump’s big bill leaves the future of food aid in doubt

Even before Donald Trump retook the White House, US policymakers had created a paradox of plenty in the nation’s agricultural system: environmentally destructive overproduction of a few major food commodities, combined with stubbornly high and rising hunger rates, particularly among children. Now, the Trump administration and its congressional allies have found a way to intensify and prolong both crises at once, with a radical reshaping of food and farm policy nestled within their Big Beautiful Bill. 

The consequences promise to be devastating for the economy, the environment, and public health. 

The BBB slashes food aid for poor people while showering cash on already lavishly subsidized farmers, mainly corn and soybean producers. These food and farm programs normally get funded in a once-every-five-years legislative ritual known as the farm bill that, however imperfect, embodied the kind of bipartisan compromise that has been largely abandoned in American politics.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a “smash and grab” of anti-poverty resources on behalf of agribusiness.

Jonathan Coppess

In 1964, Congress mashed food aid and farm aid together, hoping to protect the flagship US food-aid initiative, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), from budget-cutting conservatives. The idea was that urban congressional members would support farm subsidies in exchange for preserving SNAP, and rural members would support SNAP in exchange for votes for farm subsidies. The compromise has worked ever since, though it began to fray with the rise of the Tea Party in the early 2010s. By bypassing the farm bill—which has been overdue to be reauthorized since 2023—and slipping its biggest programs into Trump’s Big Beautiful one, the GOP leadership has vaporized the old coalition, literally taking food off the tables of poor people and handing much of the savings to large-scale commodity farmers. One more headstone in the teeming graveyard of the Trump era’s shattered norms. 

Jonathan Coppess, a former US Senate and Department of Agriculture staffer who now directs the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois, calls the move a “smash and grab” of anti-poverty resources on behalf of agribusiness. Under the farm bill, if agribusiness lobbyists or farm-state members of Congress wanted to boost subsidies, he says, they didn’t do it by raiding SNAP. And vice versa for anti-hunger proponents. 

The end of the farm bill compromise couldn’t have come at a worse time. During the Covid-19 pandemic, food insecurity fell (after an initial surge) as the federal government poured money into relief efforts, bolstering local food-aid projects across the country. But Congress withdrew the extra funding in 2022 and 2023, and hunger has been rising ever since. Today, 20 percent of American kids regularly have trouble getting enough to eat, according to Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks and pantries. It’s not hard to see why. Food prices have risen more than 25 percent since 2020, about 10 percentage points higher than the overall rate of inflation, pinching low-income families who spend a larger portion of their income on food than wealthier families. 

Even before his signature bill, Trump was already hacking away at anti-hunger spending. In March, the USDA cut $1 billion in congressionally allocated funds to buy produce and meat from local farmers and ranchers from two institutions crucial to keeping hunger at bay: school cafeterias and food banks. 

The Big Beautiful Bill revolved around Trump’s fixation on extending $4.5 trillion in tax cuts—passed during his first term—that accrue mostly to the wealthy, while also pumping fresh money into the military and giving hundreds of billions to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Desperate for spending cuts to offset at least some of the deficits generated by these moves, House leadership looked to SNAP, which provides food aid to 40 million people, including 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 4 million non-elderly adults with disabilities, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of Congressional Budget Office projections. Raiding SNAP had been a dream of congressional Republicans of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus variety since at least the early 2010s. But because of the old farm bill quid pro quo, even many of the most right-wing farm-state Republicans in Congress declined to go along. Now, under pressure from Trump, which included threats to primary anyone who refused to get on board, almost all of them caved.  

The new law slashes $185.9 billion from SNAP over the next 10 years, a 20 percent reduction. It does so by imposing red tape-laden work requirements on some SNAP recipients (including parents with children 14 years old or older) and by shifting as much as 15 percent of the spending burden to the states—knowing full well that many states will fail to take it on. “If a state can’t make up for these massive federal cuts with tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in its budget, it would have to cut its SNAP program (such as by restricting eligibility or making it harder for people to enroll),” the CBPP analysis states. “Or it could opt out of the program altogether, terminating food assistance entirely in the state.” 

The cuts can be expected to end food aid for more than 2 million current recipients nationwide, including 270,000 veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth, Jacob Kaufman-Waldron, the CBPP’s director for media relations, wrote in an email. 

The nation’s food banks, already pushed to the hilt by growing demand for their services and the earlier Trump cuts, will face another surge of people in need of aid once the SNAP rolls are purged starting later this year. The megabill also cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid and other healthcare resources for low-income people over the next decade. That will further stress grocery budgets, as paying for doctor visits and medicine means less money for food. 

“Food banks say they are wholly unprepared to feed millions of Americans when Republicans’ cuts to traditional federal safety net programs take effect,” Politico’s Marcia Brown reported recently. “Those food banks would need to double their operations to close the gap SNAP leaves behind.” There’s little hope they can. 

While low-income people got kicked in the teeth, large-scale commodity farmers cashed in from Trump’s bill. Driven largely by billions of dollars of annual incentives for all-out production embedded in decades of farm bills, farmers in the upper Midwest have maximized corn and soybean production in ways that have pushed this vital growing region to its ecological limits. Soil is rapidly eroding away there, and pollution from agrichemicals fouls drinking-water sources and feeds harmful algae blooms from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The rapidly warming climate makes both problems worse. 

The new bill is projected to lavish an additional $66 billion on commodity growers through 2034, according to an analysis by the University of Illinois Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, thus accelerating these deleterious trends over the next decade. 

The bounty of corn and soy the bill triggers won’t improve the dietary prospects for low-income people hurt by the SNAP cuts. The Midwest’s commodity farmers produce little healthy food for people to eat. The great bulk of what these subsidies churn out ends up as feed in vast industrial-meat operations and fuel for cars, in the form of ethanol and biodiesel.

The safety net, designed as a buffer against hunger, has been ripped anew.

The rest is transformed into a stunning array of sweeteners, fats, and additives that suffuse the ultra-processed foods that form the basis of the American diet. A growing body of science indicts this packaged fare as a major driver of the epidemic of diet-related diseases afflicting Americans, including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has lambasted their ubiquity on our plates, but any notion that he might influence farm policy to move away from propping them up with subsidies crumbled with the Big Beautiful Bill’s passage.

In short, despite the very-online agitations of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy movement, the Trump administration successfully rammed through a bill that will likely make the least-healthy food even cheaper, rendering it even more attractive to millions of cash-strapped Americans whose food budgets the same bill has cut. And the bill’s massive increase in immigration-enforcement spending will likely target the undocumented people who harvest the bulk of US fruits and vegetables, making healthier choices even more expensive. 

“This is a new era of farm bill policy and politics,” says Coppess. SNAP has taken what could be a permanent hit, he says, because it’s designed to help 40 million politically marginal recipients receiving “really small” benefits, while commodity subsidies accrue to a few hundred thousand farmers, backed by a potent agribusiness lobby, receiving “really big” annual payouts. 

Farm bills run on “baselines,” which just means the level of funding set by the previous policy intervention. And in general, it’s much easier to maintain funding for a program than to boost the budget for one, because any increase in spending has to be offset by a cut somewhere else. In the next farm bill, due to be renewed in 2031, big commodity farmers will enjoy a position of strength; while people in need and their advocates will be on their back foot. The safety net, designed as a buffer against hunger, has been ripped anew.