What to know about Project 2025’s plan for agriculture, and how it could lead to ‘real chaos’

Steep increases in logging. An end to federal environmental enforcement for farms. Work requirements for food aid. Fewer school meals for children. And the demolition of the network of farm subsidies that have backstopped Big Ag since the New Deal.

These are some of the sweeping changes that would be made to American agriculture under Project 2025, the controversial battle plan conservative groups have prepared to guide the next Republican administration.

The vision for agriculture laid out in Mandate for Leadership, the nearly 1,000-page manifesto that outlines Project 2025, is a very long shot — even if Republicans retake the entire government, experts told The Hill.

Carrying out most of the policies detailed in the project would force a confrontation with urban Democrats and a polarized Congress, as well as with some of the most powerful players in the Republican coalition.

A spokesperson for House Agriculture Committee Chair Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) panned the Project 2025 vision as an “obscure think tank paper” that didn’t speak for the chair, committee or “any of our future plans,” they told The Hill.

The spokesperson added that “these same misguided proposals were overwhelmingly rejected” by House leadership over the past decade.

Former President Trump, meanwhile, has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, saying he knows nothing about it and that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The Hill has reached out to Trump’s campaign and the Senate Agriculture Committee for comment on the project’s agriculture proposals. 

But if a future administration does seek to implement those proposals, experts say the effort, even if it fails, could cause a long-lasting mess.

Because the odds are stacked against such reforms, “there’s a tendency to laugh this off, to say, ‘It’s a fever dream from a think tank,’” agricultural economist Jonathan Coppess of the University of Illinois told The Hill. 

“But it’s not their success that we should be concerned about. It’s failure while getting super creative and trying. That’s what leads to real chaos,” Coppess said.

Here are the highlights of what Project 2025 wants to accomplish in the farm sector; why realizing those goals would be difficult; and what could happen if right-wing appointees were to try anyway.

What Project 2025 proposes for agriculture

The farm bill, the massive omnibus that underpins the U.S. food system, is built on a grand bargain that unites policies backed by GOP-leaning rural farm counties, such as subsidies for farm production, with priorities of Democratic-leaning urban population centers, such as food aid under programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The agriculture section of Project 2025, authored by Daren Bakst of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, would break those two halves apart into separate legislation — and target both with significant cuts and policy changes. 

The project proposes ending “safety nets” such as the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs, which pay farmers of selected commodities when the prices of those commodities fall below a predetermined level. 

It also pushes to cut government subsidies for crop insurance — for which taxpayers currently pick up about two-thirds of the cost — and to end the sugar program, which manages U.S. sugar production to keep prices high.

Project 2025 also doesn’t stint in its attack on Democratic priorities such as food aid, a long-standing target of the far right.

The project’s agriculture section proposes moving SNAP from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to Health and Human Services. Bakst also argues that a future administration should make recipients work or apply for jobs for more than 20 hours a week.

Additionally, it proposes reversing the Biden administration’s 2021 reforms that sought to increase SNAP disbursements to reflect the real-world costs of healthy food — and rejiggering the federal math that determines whether all students in a district have access to free meals.

The next administration, Bakst argues in the project, should “reject efforts to create universal free school meals.”

The project also targets another element of the Biden administration’s farm policy that has been widely criticized by Republican lawmakers: its use of billions of dollars from the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), a line of USDA funds intended to stabilize and support farm income.

That spending, the project acknowledges, builds off of its use during the Trump administration. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and after provoking a trade war with China by raising tariffs on American goods, then-President Trump used the CCC to give more than $20 billion to American farmers.

Project 2025 argues that step allowed Biden to “abuse the CCC” by using it to fund programs promoting agricultural programs aimed at slowing the pace of global heating — a goal the project universally pans.

It pushes for a future Republican administration to refuse to use its authority to draw on the CCC, and to work with Congress to ensure that it isn’t being used for nontemporary problems, or for aid to anyone but farmers.

The Project 2025 framework also takes aim at “obstacles imposed on American farmers” — ostensible barriers that include sustainable development goals and environmental protection. 

Many of the proposed measures cut against the grain of mainstream scientific thought. For example, to address destructive wildfire, the plan seeks to ban the use of prescribed burns to reduce the amount of fire-prone vegetation in forests — something Republican lawmakers have also pushed for.

Instead, Project 2025 would fight wildfires with increased logging — a strategy that many ecologists argue makes fires worse. (Logging is distinct from expensive and noncommercial tree thinning — rather like weeding with a chainsaw — which does reduce fire risk.)

The fire plan is part of a broader Project 2025 attack on the USDA’s historic role, born out of the 1930s Dust Bowl, as a steward of America’s natural resources. 

The project also seeks to constrict or eliminate the Conservation Reserve Program, which was established in 1985 to pay farmers to fallow sensitive land to give it time to recover. Its creation was part of a broader attempt to slow the loss of American topsoil, which is both the basis of the food system and is vanishing 25 times faster than it is generated.

“Farmers should not be paid in such a sweeping way not to farm their land,” Project 2025 reads.

The project additionally makes a related proposal to end the ability of the National Resources Conservation Service to work with farmers to protect wetlands and erosion-prone landscapes using strategies such as terracing or screens of vegetation to hold down the soil.

Finally, Project 2025 argues that a future Republican USDA should allow facilities inspected by the states to sell food across state lines.

This proposal hinges on the 1978 language requiring state-inspected facilities to be “at least equal to” USDA inspected ones.

But after Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) proposed the same change in a 2021 bill that failed to escape committee, the Safe Food Coalition (SFC) noted in an April letter to congressional leaders urging them to vote against the measure that this standard doesn’t mean state inspections are equally safe.

State inspectors, for example, don’t have the same level of inspection authority as that claimed by federal inspectors, the SFC argued. They also wouldn’t have any ability to recall tainted food sold beyond their borders.

Bills like Rounds’s, the SFC argued, “would compromise long established food safety standards for consumers in exchange for speculative, thinly supported benefits.”

Can these proposals be implemented?

At least when it comes to Congress, it would be extremely difficult, experts told The Hill — even if Republicans kept the House and took the Senate.

As many of Project 2025’s agriculture proposals target major priorities of both right- and left-leaning lawmakers and groups, they would face opposition from across the political spectrum.

To see why, Coppess told The Hill, one only has to look at the current farm bill morass: Democratic lawmakers have refused to accept a bill that freezes SNAP in place, let alone cuts it.

And even if Republicans won such a victory as to remove Democrats from the equation, the current GOP caucus is also divided — with the lawmakers who support farm subsidies firmly in the driver’s seat. 

In the House Agriculture Committee’s current version of the farm bill, members staked their vision of the bill on an increase — not cuts — in ARC and PLC subsidy payments.

Even with a Republican president and Congress and the possibility of passing a SNAP or subsidy-cutting farm bill through reconciliation, these intraparty divides would remain, experts told The Hill.

There is “no chance” subsidies get cut, even with a Trump victory and Republican trifecta, Scott Faber of the progressive Environmental Working Group — an occasional ally of the right on subsidies — told The Hill.

Similarly, Faber argued, the idea of a Republican USDA eschewing the billions of dollars of discretionary power offered by CCC was “the reverse of what will actually happen” if Republicans win in November. 

Trump has already vowed to raise tariffs on Chinese goods again, a move that in his first term helped spark a trade war that sent U.S. farm costs soaring.

“If the past is prologue, the Trump team will restore tariffs on agricultural products — and then use the slush fund that is CCC to provide tens of billions to the largest, most successful and overwhelmingly white farmers,” Faber added.

Similarly, the attack on the USDA’s voluntary conservation programs is “baffling,” Aviva Glaser of the National Wildlife Federation told The Hill. 

Like many other Project 2025 agricultural priorities, the USDA conservation programs are also supported by decades-old bipartisan coalitions — making them difficult to get rid of through legislative action.

Difficult, however, doesn’t mean impossible: Sizable factions of congressional Republicans support shrinking conservation programs and instituting work requirements for SNAP, though current House leadership has steered away from this goal.

What would happen if a Republican administration tried anyway?

In the case of conservation programs, it could do “a lot of damage,” Glaser said.

A key part of the project’s overall agenda is the proposed replacement of thousands of current civil service employees with political appointees.

Like SNAP and crop subsidies, the conservation programs require an active and engaged USDA to keep them running. While a Project 2025-influenced civil service “can’t just get rid of these programs, they could try in a way that would be damaging to the programs, to producers and to their trust of USDA,” Glaser said.

That trust, she argued, is as nonrenewable as American topsoil. “USDA has worked for years to create these relationships with farmers and ranchers. To do anything that would jeopardize that — I think is damaging all around.”

Similarly, because USDA staff plays a crucial role in implementing farm programs — from approving insurance and SNAP payments to scheduling prescribed burns — a failure to pass legislation in line with Project 2025’s proposals would not keep a USDA inspired by the project from devastating targeted programs, Coppess added.

If conservatives are able “to clear out the ranks of career professionals able to operate the programs,” Coppess asked, “then can they accomplish their goals by other means — because [USDA] can’t operate its programs?”

The example of such backdoor deregulation that gives Coppess the most “heartburn” is the Project 2025 proposal to devolve food inspection to the states.

Even without congressional support, Coppess said, the USDA could devolve some authority to the states simply by firing lots of inspectors — at least in the short run.

But over the long term, “can you imagine the uproar if food inspectors are fired or lost and you can’t get meat in grocery stores, or prices skyrocket? All these proposals go nowhere if there are breadlines and inflation.”

He noted, however, that all his assumptions about what is possible for agencies to accomplish on their own — or, conversely, where Congress can rein them in — comes from a world before the Supreme Court struck down Chevron deference, and as such may not be relevant to a future Republican administration. 

That legal doctrine, for 40 years a bedrock of administrative law, instructed judges to defer to federal agencies in cases where the law was ambiguous. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn it last month means judges will now substitute their own interpretation of the law.

“There’s an operational mindset that maybe the usual rules don’t apply,” Coppess said.