Donald Trump’s foreign-aid cuts threaten his rural voters
THE TALLEST structures in Pawnee County, Kansas are the grain elevators. They loom over the cows, the low-slung buildings and the occasional oil-pump jacks that litter western Kansas. In the basement of the county co-op, a collective that purchases locally grown sorghum, wheat, corn and soyabeans to sell to bigger buyers, several farmers sit around a table and wax lyrical about working in the fields. “The smell of dirt, the smell of rain, the sunrise and sunsets,” says Jerrod Smith, “it’s a pretty beautiful thing to do.”
But there is trouble in Pawnee County, and it is emanating from an unlikely source: President Donald Trump, who won the county by 52 points in November. Mr Trump’s mission to dismantle the federal bureaucracy has already touched Kansas farmers, who are struggling with low commodity prices, drought and inflation.
A big shock has come from the shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Tearing down USAID may have seemed like a savvy place to launch an assault on the federal bureaucracy, since foreign aid is unpopular and aimed abroad. But USAID has a domestic rural constituency. The food it gives away is grown by American farmers who, in a troubled farm economy, depend on the government to be a consistent customer.
The backlash to USAID’s demise in middle America presents a test for the new administration: will it enforce budget cuts even when some of Mr Trump’s most ardent supporters are affected? Agriculture subsidies offer an early measure of how far the president and Congress will go this year as they seek more than $1trn in cuts to federal expenditures. Other programmes on the chopping block—particularly Medicaid, a federally funded health care programme for poor people—also have important constituencies in red states.
Kansas has long been a font of America’s charitable food exports. In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower (a Kansan) signed a law establishing what became Food for Peace, a programme that donated American farm surplus to hungry people abroad. In 1966 senator Bob Dole (another Kansan) expanded the scheme. Chris Tanner, president of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers, keeps a framed USAID wheat bag hanging in his office. “We have plenty, and there’s really no reason for anyone to go hungry at night,” he says.
Because of the way agriculture supply chains work, individual farmers often don’t know where their crops end up. They sell to co-ops or grain elevators, which may sell to multinationals or the government for export. But “if we go a few years without food assistance people will be surprised how their sales decline”, warns one furloughed USAID worker. The federal government allocated $1.7bn for Food for Peace in 2023, which went towards farms—but also to truckers and barge operators that get commodities to ports. Kansas accounts for 57% of American sorghum production, almost all for export. The loss of USAID means one less big customer. Kim Barnes, the co-op’s chief financial officer, is cold-calling potential clients to find new markets. “A co-op went under last year,” he says, and he predicts several more will close this year, causing local farmers to lose their equity.
USAID also funded 19 labs at universities for crop research which helped develop new markets. “I had to fire everyone,” says Peter Goldsmith, who ran the soyabean lab at the University of Illinois. Several lab directors argue that the cuts will sabotage American agriculture in the long run as China fills that research vacuum.
Beyond USAID, cuts to the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) conservation service could leave farmers with deep holes in their pockets. Some growers in Pawnee County upgraded to drip rather than flood irrigation, thinking that they would be reimbursed by the government, says Jed Fleske, a member of the county conservation board. Now that money may not arrive. Meanwhile, farmers fret about potential tariffs and a labour shortage if deportations of field workers ramp up.
The gutting of USAID will also reveal the influence, or lack thereof, of the farm lobby. Agribusiness firms donated $75m to Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle, roughly double what they spent on Democrats. Their pleas have pushed Kansas lawmakers to try to move Food for Peace into USDA, in the expectation that the department will maintain the status quo. Brooke Rollins, Mr Trump’s agriculture secretary, told The Economist that “decisions that were made that compromise especially our ranchers and our farmers are all under review”. So the farmers of Pawnee County are optimistic that their pain will be temporary. “Once they get through figuring out where all the fraud is, I expect a lot of these conservation programmes to come back,” says Mr Fleske. If not, he adds, “it’s gonna hurt”.■
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