Republicans loved Project 2025 until it threatened Big Ag handouts

From Day 1, the Trump administration has moved quickly to implement many of Project 2025’s policy recommendations and to put project architects in positions of power, but agricultural reform is conspicuously absent. The Republican-backed Senate farm bill is only the latest departure from the core values Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise claimed to espouse. That infamous manifesto laid out a governing vision for a Republican administration and the 119th Congress. And broad swaths of the governing Right have otherwise supported and worked to enact so much of the Project 2025 program. All but one glaring exception: Chapter 10, Agriculture.What could congressional Republicans find so troubling about a conservative agriculture revamp?While many aspects of Project 2025 were controversial, its recommendations on agriculture are far from radical. The suggested reforms follow the same contours conservative experts and activists have been advocating for years: reducing overreliance on government handouts and restraining government power and overreach. Specifically, Chapter 10 first warns officials not to abuse the Commodity Credit Corporation’s Section 5 Charter Act authority, which gives the Secretary of Agriculture free rein in dispensing “extra” CCC funds without congressional say-so. This long-standing problem saw previous secretaries blatantly defy Congressional oversight. Without reforms, the repeated misuse of the CCC’s slush fund will continue and set a dangerous precedent for future administrations. Chapter 10 prescribes a legislative fix to prevent such a power grab, as many Republicans have tried to do in the past. It also lists other congressional to-dos that would bring federal agriculture policy more in line with long-standing conservative principles by reforming or repealing costly commodity programs, preventing double-dipping across programs for the same loss in the same year, reducing premium support for crop insurance, reforming or eliminating marketing order and checkoff programs, and repealing trade promotion programs. These changes target programs that primarily benefit large, wealthy agribusinesses and corporations.In fact, the Heritage Foundation’s annual “Budget Blueprint” has regularly suggested these reforms to save billions of dollars, and similar proposals used to feature in the House Republican Study Committee’s own annual budget. Moreover, committee members like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have previously championed efforts to better target these programs to those who need them most and reduce wasteful loopholes.Even the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s Options for Reducing the Deficit report has repeatedly listed “reduce subsidies in the crop insurance program” and “eliminate Title I agriculture programs” as potential actions. Green Scissors, a joint project between taxpayer and environmental groups, endorses the same cuts. And although the goal of Project 2025 was to guide a Republican majority government, many of its agriculture reforms have historically enjoyed bipartisan support both on and off the Hill, uniting an ideologically diverse community in the pursuit of right-sizing the industry’s golden parachute. Plus, polar-opposite presidents, former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump, both demonstrated alignment on farm subsidy reform in their annual budget requests before Biden broke the bipartisan trend toward reform.Despite all of this, Republicans have pursued a purely partisan path away from these reasonable reforms. First, to increase reference prices, they doubled down on commodity programs that should have been slated for reduction or repeal in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now, the Senate Committee on Agriculture’s Farm Bill 2.0 proudly “more than doubles funding” for wasteful trade promotion programs and lacks any conservative reforms.92% OF AMERICAN CORN IS MODIFIED — AND BIG AG IS SUING TO KEEP THE RECIPE SECRETAt the committee’s August bill markup, Republicans united to vote down a commonsense amendment that would have required farm subsidy recipients to be “actively engaged” in farming rather than city slickers “farming” over Zoom. The rejected amendment was previously a bipartisan initiative led by Grassley, and parallels other federal welfare work requirements expanded by Republicans.Chapter 10’s precepts are established, long-held recommendations that could modernize the farm economy and spur innovation. The Senate Agriculture Committee will likely take up the bill again when the chamber is back in session. If the bill passes on a partisan line, its supporters will no doubt crow about a “conservative win.” But those who have read the playbook and know the lore will recognize this as a win for cronyism, not what was once called conservative.Nan Swift is a Governance Program Resident Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute. She previously worked as professional staff for the U.S. Senate Budget Committee and was the director of federal affairs for the National Taxpayers Union.