Farm & Food File: We’re about to find out

During the final stages of building the world’s first atomic bomb, scientists at the secret New Mexico research site worried that the initial test of their new weapon might ignite the atmosphere and wipe out every living thing.

The project’s anxious physicists, however, considered it “extremely unlikely and ultimately downplayed the possibility as a realistic threat,” but “not an unreasonable concern.”

Farmers, ranchers and rural communities are experiencing similar anxieties as the White House and congressional Republicans rev up their efforts to slash federal spending.

Unlike the nuclear pioneers, however, neither GOP group has produced quantifiable numbers to support their views.

Moreover, any voter with an internet connection can quickly disprove key claims the budgeters are using to underwrite their claims.

For example, in the attention-grabbing Jan. 27 White House directive labeled “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan and other Financial Assistance Programs,” the Office of Management and Budget predicated its spending cuts on this hardworking phrase: “In the fiscal year 2024, of the nearly $10 trillion that the federal government spent…”

There’s a problem with that case-building opener; it’s simply not true. Indeed, “according to the June 2024 estimate by the Congressional Budget Office … ‘in fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $6.9 trillion.’”

So, 2024 spending by the federal government — as reported by the federal government — was about 30% smaller than what the administration’s current budget office used to justify its government-wide spending “pause.”

What happens when deep spending cuts and future government budgets are based on numbers that are at least 30% out of line with reality? We’re about to find out.

In the meantime, mandated federal spending cuts are coming to rural America with or without the White House working with honest numbers.

For example, the University of Illinois recently reported its College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences received “$61 million in direct federal funding last year.”

How does folding up federal programs at a land-grant university’s ag teaching and research umbrella affect that state’s farmers and rural communities? We’ll soon know.

Caught in the crossfire is the university’s Soybean Innovation Lab that receives vital funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

That agency was one of the first targets for deep cuts and dramatic overhaul by the Trump White House team.

After USAID’s mid-February gutting, “Peter Goldsmith, the executive director” of the Illinois soybean research facility, “announced the lab will shut down in April as (USAID) terminated its funding. … Thirty soybean experts working in the local lab were let go last Friday.”

What happens to those experts and their work — described as “one of U.S. farmers’ best tools to expand their markets … globally” — when it is dismantled without thought, understanding or appeal?

The United States’ more than 500,000 soybean growers in nearly 30 states are about to find out.

And what about trade dependent American farmers; how will the recently advanced Trump trade policy of “reciprocity” — essentially a country-by-country, eye-for-an-eye mashup of arcane, trade-killing rules — reverse U.S. ag’s fast growing trade deficit?

Even more worrisome, can the pared back and still-being pared U.S. Department of Agriculture handle today’s fast-moving avian flu outbreak before the disease discovers a pathway to a COVID-like pandemic as the White House continues to cut, freeze or eliminate funding and jobs at USDA testing facilities and National Institutes of Health research programs?

And what impact will Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump administration’s newly approved secretary of health and human services, have in upcoming food debates as the boss over the Food and Drug Administration?

No one knows, but we’re about to find out.