This series of posts consists of excerpts from Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a project led by the Heritage Foundation that outlines policy goals for a second Trump term. Daren Bakst is the author of Chapter 10: Department of Agriculture (USDA). Bakst is Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. He is also an advocate for Free Market Environmentalism. He is a member of the Federalist Society’s Environmental Law and Property Rights Executive Committee. 

While Donald Trump may not pursue all the policies advanced by the Heritage project, these policies are being proposed by individuals who support Trump’s overall approach to governing, many of whom also worked under the first Trump administration. So I’m thinking the Heritage project offers a pretty good idea of what to expect should there be a second Trump administration.

Excerpts* from Chapter 10: 

Congress must limit the USDA’s role. A proper mission would clarify that the department’s primary focus is on agriculture and that the USDA serves all Americans. The USDA’s “client” is the American people in general, not a subset of interests, such as farmers, meatpackers, environmental groups, etc. 

From the outset, the next Administration should:  

  • Denounce efforts to place ancillary issues like climate change ahead of food productivity and affordability when it comes to agriculture. 

  • Remove the U.S. from any association with U.N. and other efforts to push sustainable-development schemes connected to food production. 

Subsidies should not influence planting decisions, discourage proper risk management and innovation, incentivize planting on environmentally sensitive land, or create barriers to entry for new farmers. The overall goal should be to eliminate subsidy dependence. 

As a general matter, the next Administration should ensure that [conservation] programs address genuine and specific environmental concerns with a focus on currently existing environmental problems, not those that are speculative in nature.  

These conservation programs should have clearly identifiable goals, with the success or failure of these programs being directly measurable. Any assistance to farmers to take specific actions should not be provided unless the assistance will directly and clearly help to address a specific environmental problem. 

Further, any assistance to encourage farmers to engage in certain practices should only be provided if farmers would not have adopted the practices in the first place. 

The Conservation Reserve Program…pays farmers to not farm some of their land. This program has recently received attention, as agricultural groups rightfully seek to farm without penalty voluntarily idled land, in light of the consequences to food prices of Russia invading Ukraine. 

The next Administration should: 

Champion the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program. Farmers should not be paid in such a sweeping way not to farm their land. If there is a desire to ensure that extremely sensitive land is not farmed, this should be addressed through targeted efforts that are clearly connected to addressing a specific and concrete environmental harm. The USDA should work with Congress to eliminate this overbroad program. 

Reform NRCS [Natural Resources Conservation Service] wetlands and erodible land compliance and appeals.  At a minimum, a new Administration should support legislation to divest more power to the states (and possibly local Soil and Water Conservation Districts) regarding erodable land and wetlands conservation. 

Reform easements. The new Administration should, to the extent authorized by law, limit the use of permanent easements and collaborate with lawmakers to prohibit the USDA from creating new permanent easements. 

Despite the importance of agricultural biotechnology, in 2016, Congress passed a federal mandate to label genetically engineered food. This legislation was arguably just a means to try to provide a negative connotation to GE food. The next Administration should… repeal the federal labeling mandate. 

Reform Forest Service Wildfire Management. The Forest Service should… be focusing on addressing the precipitous annual amassing of biomass in the national forests that drive the behavior of wildfires. By thinning trees, removing live fuels and deadwood, and taking other preventive steps, the Forest Service can help to minimize the consequences of wildfires. 

Increasing timber sales could also play an important role in the effort to change the behavior of wildfire because there would be less biomass. 

For a conservative USDA to become a reality, and for it to stay on course with the mission as outlined, the White House must strongly support these reforms and install strong USDA leaders… There would be strong opposition from environmental groups and others who want the federal government to transform American agriculture to meet their ideological objectives.

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* The USDA has a wide mandate, including programs addressing poverty and nutrition, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, colloquially known as “food stamps”). The excerpts in this post pertain to USDA environmental programs and policies only. Punctuation was occasionally revised for aesthetics and readability. I occasionally added acronyms or full names for acronyms that weren’t in the original text. My intention in this series of posts is informational, so for now I’m keeping my opinions to myself. 

Reference:  

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves. https://www.project2025.org/policy/ Chapter 10: Department of Agriculture, by Daren Bakst, pp 289-318.