Farm & Food File: The new administration acts and the Heritage Foundation smiles

Throughout the hard-fought, often ugly 2024 presidential race, Republican Donald Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s highly detailed, deeply conservative blueprint for government should Republicans regain legislative and presidential power.

In fact, candidate Trump was adamant in denying any role in either its development or future use.

“‘I have nothing to do (with it),’ Trump stated during his nationally televised debate with Vice President Kamala Harris,” the New Republic reminded readers Nov. 19.

And, it added, the president-elect’s “loyal transition co-chair” — and soon-to-be secretary of commerce — “Howard Lutnick describes the project as an ‘absolute zero’ and ‘radioactive.’”

Now, just weeks into the Republican takeover of Congress and the White House, Project 2025 is the cornerstone of President Trump’s governing plans.

Moreover, many of his most controversial cabinet and other federal appointees come with Heritage Foundation’s stickers on their considerable baggage.

Those plans and that assembled team — including policy-heavy, farming-lite secretary of agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins — will have a deep impact on farmers, ranchers and rural America if used as guidelines to write the 2025 farm bill.

This isn’t a blindingly new or novel insight. In fact, that likelihood was noted in this space last July, when the largely unexamined plan and its laundry list of policy-shifting ideas were being downplayed by most ag groups and policy experts.

“According to the plan,” I noted then, “a new Republican majority must kill the sugar program and with it, presumably, the high fructose corn syrup industry which uses, on average, 6% of the U.S. corn crop.”

“Next, ‘ideally,’” I noted, quoting Project 2025, “Congress should repeal the two principal crop insurance programs used by most farmers, the Agricultural Risk Coverage and the Price Loss Coverage Program, the twin pillars of U.S. farm policy that farmers use to insure an estimated 81% of all eligible food-producing acres.”

And that attack on crop insurance has a second act, I added, again quoting the report’s explicit instructions: “On top of that, the Heritage plan continues, Congress should ‘reduce the premium subsidy rate for crop insurance’ from ‘about 60% … to no more than 50%’ because, ‘after all, taxpayers should not have to pay more than the farmers who benefit from the crop insurance policies.’”

And then I added a long list of other programs square in Project 2025’s gunsights: “‘Champion the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program,’ eliminate commodity checkoff programs ‘when possible,’ ‘eliminate or reform dietary guidelines,’ allow state-inspected meat to be sold across state lines, repeal export promotion programs and ‘repeal the federal labeling mandate,’ whatever that means.”

Less than two weeks into the Trump administration, we have some idea about the overall meaning: picking unnecessary fights with vital ag trade partners like Colombia, firing government watchdogs like the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s inspector general, attempting to repeal the 14th Amendment’s guarantee to birthright citizenship and proposing deep cuts to critical food aid programs like SNAP.

So far, Senate and House Republicans alike have energetically supported the president’s cabinet choices, executive actions and budget proposals.

That’s mostly a reflection on Trump’s strong November showing in most of rural America where he won all but 11 of the nation’s 444 rural counties and mostly by a blowout margin.

Now, however, the really hard work of governing — writing the still-delayed 2025 federal budget, raising the federal debt limit and accommodating the massive $5 trillion Trump tax cuts — runs smack into the unyielding wall of reality.

And then there’s the 2025 farm bill.

“Could Project 2025 become the guiding hand for” it? I asked last July. “Of course, it can.”