What’s going on with Congress’s budget bill?
Last month, House Republicans passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a budget bill which slashes essential programs for millions of Americans in order to extend tax cuts and create new ones that will enrich millionaires, billionaires and corporations.
This bill was made through the reconciliation process, which allows for the passage of fiscal legislation and can be a tool for the party in power when they have a slim majority (as Republicans currently do), because it isn’t subject to the delay tactic of the filibuster in the Senate.
Under this budget bill, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as “Food Stamps”), which provides food benefits to 42 million low-income Americans to supplement their grocery budget, would see the deepest cuts in history. The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan organization in charge of quantifying the impact of policies on the federal budget, estimates that over the next ten years this reconciliation bill will result in nearly $294 billion in food assistance reductions. In total, more than 3 million adults and 2 million children would be directly impacted and lose benefits.
The budget proposal makes cuts to SNAP by pushing at least five percent of program costs and 75 percent of administrative costs onto individual states, mandating work requirements for SNAP eligibility and prohibiting changes to SNAP benefit amounts even if food costs rise. In addition to cutting SNAP, the bill also makes Medicaid more expensive and difficult to access, which would cut coverage for an estimated 7.8 million Americans by 2035.
The goal of gutting safety net programs is to fund tax breaks for America’s wealthiest citizens and businesses. In effect, this bill would be a direct transfer of wealth from America’s most vulnerable – including small farmers and folks reliant on SNAP benefits and Medicaid – to America’s highest earners. An analysis by the Yale Budget Lab found that as a result of this bill, households who make less than $14,000 per year would see incomes fall by $800 in 2027, while the top one percent wealthiest households would gain an average of $63,000 and the top 0.1% of Americans would see a gain of $389,000.
In effect, this bill would be a direct transfer of wealth from America’s most vulnerable – including small farmers and folks reliant on SNAP benefits and Medicaid – to America’s highest earners.
How do SNAP cuts hurt farmers?
In addition to funding tax cuts for the wealthy, the bill uses SNAP cuts to pay for an increase of $52 billion to agriculture commodity support programs. While cutting SNAP funding in favor of agriculture programs may on its surface sound like a win for farmers, the reality is SNAP benefits farmers too, through its use at farmers markets and farm stands. SNAP is an important economic multiplier, meaning that each dollar spent returns that dollar and more to the local economy. SNAP helps create thriving local communities, jobs and impacts our national GDP positively. Meanwhile, the agricultural subsidies that this bill pays for would serve a relatively small number of large-scale commodity farmers – small and mid-sized farmers who grow fruits and vegetables would not see benefits from this bill.
Because SNAP recipients use their benefits at local businesses, every one dollar in SNAP benefits generates approximately $1.50 in local economic activity. Farmers, grocers and retailers across the country rely on SNAP benefits to sustain their businesses. Thousands of farmers markets are sites for redeeming benefits from food assistance programs, including SNAP. In 2020 $33 million in SNAP benefits were redeemed at farmers markets (USDA Food and Nutrition Service, 2021).
Farmers have already suffered tremendous local market losses with the Trump administration’s termination of the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) and the Local Food in Schools and Child Care Centers (LFSCC) programs. Cuts to SNAP will be yet another blow to farmers, impacting their ability to feed their communities and stay on their farms. Overall, rural communities will be the most affected by these SNAP cuts.
What does this budget bill mean for farmers?
This bill benefits America’s largest agricultural producers at the expense of the smallest and least resourced farmers. The bill helps large producers by increasing crop insurance subsidies and creating exemptions that would allow for taxpayer agricultural subsidies for millionaires and absentee landlords. These changes largely benefit the largest and wealthiest farm operations, many of whom already received support from the federal government earlier this year. At the same time, the bill takes back unobligated funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, removing support for popular programs and practices that help farmers of all sizes deal with the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events.
By slashing nutrition programs and increasing subsidies for large-scale commodity growers, this bill essentially disincentivizes Congress from creating a new farm bill, as there is no need for Republicans to negotiate with their Democratic counterparts when most Republican farm bill priorities are included in the reconciliation bill. Similarly, with Democratic priorities like SNAP and funding for climate change gutted, Democrats will have little incentive to come to the table.
This is a disheartening prospect; without a new farm bill, farmers won’t see the renewal or creation of programs that address critical issues like farm loan access, improvements to conservation programs and the farm safety net, investments in rural communities, new market development and agricultural research.
The bill adds $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit; potentially further destabilizing already shaky U.S. markets that are reeling from Trump’s tariffs and slowing economic growth – another loss for farmers. Additionally, the bill’s cuts to Medicaid harms farming communities. In the ten states with the largest proportion of farmers, 19 to 34 percent of the population are covered through Medicaid. If Medicaid is slashed under the budget bill, rural hospitals and health systems, many of which are reliant on funding from the program, will be devastated.
The bottom line and what’s next
Overall, the reconciliation bill takes away food assistance and other important safety net programs from low-income Americans in order to fund tax breaks and increase spending on the largest agricultural operations, pitting the wellbeing of vulnerable and food insecure communities against the interests of farmers. Among the many groups harmed by this bill are farmers who sell to their local communities and rural communities whose residents rely on food assistance and Medicaid. This bill further tilts the scale in favor of the largest and most well-off producers, corporations and consumers.
The bill narrowly passed the House on May 18, 2025 with a vote of 215-214. In the coming weeks, it will be debated in the Senate. Any changes to the bill made in the Senate will then have to go back to the House for approval. Congress aims to pass the bill by July 4, 2025.
