The Farm Bill Boondoggle Is Back: New at Reason

It’s Farm Bill time again. And that’s too bad.

Perhaps wary of the fact that it took years to pass the most recent Farm Bill in 2014, Congress has already moved to begin deliberations over the next five-year bill, which would likely become law in 2018. The U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee will hold its first hearing on the upcoming Farm Bill in Kansas later this month.

The Farm Bill is perhaps best known for handing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to a small number of the shrinking percentage of Americans who farm. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s agriculture Henry Wallace pitched payments to farmers during the Great Depression as “a temporary solution to deal with an emergency.” The emergency—the Depression—ended lifetimes ago. But the subsidies remain. In fact, they’ve only mushroomed in the decades since their adoption. Food policy writer Baylen Linnekin explains more.

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