Farmers cast their votes for Trump. Now Musk’s cuts are hitting them.
It’s no exaggeration to say that America’s farmers helped put Donald Trump in the White House. Of the 444 counties classified as farm-dependent by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), most of which are located west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies, Mr. Trump won all but 11 last November.
But now, some of these same communities are reacting with a sense of dismay and concern as they watch the Trump administration dismantle federal agencies and freeze Biden-era financing programs that directly impact their own economic livelihood.
Farmers who sell surplus crops to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for overseas distribution are fretting about future purchases and calling their state delegations. Business owners that qualified for USDA grants and invested in renewable energy technology and climate-resistant crops are unsure if they will be paid. Contract lawyers are getting involved.
Why We Wrote This
Many voters won’t object to the Trump administration shuttering agencies in Washington, but if their communities feel the effects of cuts, frozen funding, and stalled loan guarantees, the political winds could shift.
As courts weigh the legality of President Trump’s flurry of executive orders and actions taken by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the response from voters is also starting to take shape. And a key factor for the administration’s success in weeks to come will be whether some of the same people who say they support pruning a bloated federal government, in the abstract at least, start to feel differently as those cuts ripple through their own communities in unexpected ways.
“When you start ripping wires out of the federal government ... the unintended consequences could be strong and unexpected,” says Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire.
The White House has framed DOGE’s slash-and-burn approach as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to finally shrink the government. “Voters want to see this stuff fixed. In their mind, they’ve elected Trump to do this job,” says Matt Wylie, a Republican strategist.
So far, polls suggest that Mr. Trump’s efforts to remake the federal bureaucracy are popular with Republicans. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll put the president’s approval at 53%, a relatively strong rating in a polarized nation. Mr. Musk is viewed less favorably, however: More than half of respondents in a recent Pew Research poll had an unfavorable opinion of the world’s richest man, including 24% of Republicans.
Polls also suggest that voters want to see more action on everyday economic hardships. In the CBS News/YouGov poll, 66% of respondents, including almost half of Republicans, said Mr. Trump wasn’t focusing enough on lowering prices. Inflation unexpectedly jumped in January and is running at 3% annually, according to government data released Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Mr. Musk spoke at length to reporters alongside Mr. Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, in an apparent effort to explain and justify his actions, which critics are calling an unconstitutional attack on federal agencies. He said he has uncovered fraud at USAID and other agencies, but offered no evidence. Asked about his team’s access to Treasury payment systems – the subject of a court injunction – Mr. Musk said he was introducing “commonsense controls” and that Mr. Trump had won an electoral mandate to cut federal spending.
“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get,” he said. “That’s what democracy is all about.”
The sheer pace and volume of White House initiatives may work to Mr. Trump’s advantage, says Professor Scala. “For people who treat politics as background noise, it’s a very noisy presidency,” he says. They see Mr. Trump is “doing a lot.”
Most voters won’t object to attempts to shutter agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, since few understand what those agencies even do or how it could affect them.
But if their local economy is affected by the cuts, and voters start to connect the dots between economic pain and Mr. Trump’s policies, then the political winds could shift, says Professor Scala. He points to things like research grants to universities that, while viewed with suspicion by many Republicans, are major employers and purchasers of goods and services in blue and red states alike. (On Monday, a federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration’s order to slash overhead payments to universities and other research centers that receive grants from the National Institutes of Health.)
Impact on farmers
Farmers who signed contracts with the USDA under programs funded by President Joe Biden’s 2022 clean energy law, the Inflation Reduction Act, are now calling on lawmakers to defend them. The law provided grants and loan guarantees for farmers to invest in renewable energy systems and plant crops that could withstand climate change. After Mr. Trump signed an executive order to rescind Biden-era initiatives, the USDA and other agencies were instructed to freeze funding in order to comply with new policies.
Among the funds frozen by the Trump administration is a $3 billion program called the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities. The Iowa Soybean Association (ISA) said last week that its members were at financial risk because of suspended reimbursements.
Farmers “are contractually owed $11 million for practices implemented in 2024,” the association’s president, Brent Swart, wrote in a letter to Iowa’s congressional delegation, all of whom are Republicans. “We ask for your support in advocating USDA honor its contractual obligation to ISA and its commitment to Midwestern farmers.”
Skylar Holden, a cattle farmer in Missouri, said he had invested in new fencing and a well on his farm after signing a $240,000 contract with the USDA to share costs, and had been told that he would have to wait on reimbursement. In a series of TikTok videos, he said he’d already spent more on materials for further improvements on his farm, including for water systems, and was counting on the promised federal funding. “I’ve already done a bunch of the work, already paid for the material and the labor, so I’m out all that cost,” he said.
Congress passed a bill in January that authorized $10 billion in emergency aid for farmers of designated crops, money that isn’t directly affected by the freeze on clean energy-related funds. Chris Gibbs, a farmer of corn and soybeans in Shelby County, Ohio, says he’s received assurances from USDA officials that he’ll get the funding. But Mr. Gibbs, a former Republican-turned-Democrat, says he’s worried now about the Trump administration’s tariffs. “Don’t forget that everything that farmers buy is made of steel or aluminum,” he says in an email.
In addition to the funding freeze, farmers also stand to lose out from Mr. Musk’s dismantling of USAID, which distributes food aid globally, including U.S.-grown crops. Republicans in Congress are reportedly preparing legislation to salvage a $1.8 billion USAID crop-purchasing program by transferring it to the USDA. The bill’s sponsors include GOP lawmakers from Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Arkansas. The program, called Food for Peace, is the largest donor of food to the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump fired the inspector general of USAID, a Biden appointee, after he issued a report that detailed how DOGE’s abrupt dismissal and recall of employees made it impossible to guarantee safe delivery of food aid. Mr. Trump had previously dismissed inspectors general at 17 agencies, ignoring a 30-day notice requirement to Congress. Eight of those inspectors general have sued the White House over the legality of their dismissals.
Changes at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Also on Tuesday, Mr. Trump nominated a new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis to guard against predatory lending. Critics of the CFPB argue that it duplicates the work of other federal banking regulators and wasn’t accountable to Congress; defenders point to its track record of investigating and levying fines against big banks for cheating consumers. The agency has stopped all its investigations amid an exodus of career staff and a lockout at its headquarters. It’s unclear what its future role will be.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts who helped set up the CFPB, has railed against its dismantling. On Monday, she addressed a rally held by Democrats outside the bureau, which has sued tech companies as well as banks and other financial institutions.
Senator Warren accused Mr. Musk, who has talked about adding digital payments on X, his social media platform, of advancing his personal and business interests at the expense of consumers. “This is a fight between millions of hardworking people, who just don’t want to get cheated, and a handful of billionaires like Elon Musk who want the chance to cheat them,” she said.
At some point, Mr. Musk’s “sledgehammer approach” to government programs could become a political liability for Republicans, warns Mr. Wylie, the GOP strategist who is based in South Carolina.
GOP lawmakers who don’t assert congressional authority over budget matters and who simply applaud Mr. Trump for taking on the bureaucracy may wind up vulnerable in midterm elections, he says. If voters see DOGE’s actions impacting things like food prices and overdraft charges, “The risk is in two years ... they get kicked out because they didn’t do their job.”
