MAGA Report Cards — Farmers

Gabe Evans' New Ad Says He's Spent 15 Years 'Ranching.' His Own Disclosure Shows $345 in Farm Profits From Livestock — Below the Rancher Standard His Spokeswoman Named.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:53:23 +0000

There is a new campaign ad running in Colorado's 8th Congressional District. It shows a congressman hauling hay, dropping a bale into a trough, and talking straight to camera with cows shifting around behind him.

"They say my boots don't fit my suit. They are probably right. But I've worn these for 15 years, ranching here on my place in Weld, on patrol in Adams, in a Black Hawk over Colorado wildfires. … The last thing Washington needs is another suit."

The congressman is Gabe Evans. He owns three cows.

The standard his own campaign chose

Evans has called himself a "rancher" and a "beef producer" for his entire political career. When the Colorado Times Recorder pressed him on it last year, his campaign gave a specific defense: the U.S. Department of Agriculture counts people who earn more than $1,000 from agricultural products as ranchers or farmers. By that measure, his spokeswoman said, he qualifies.

That is a useful thing to have on the record, because it turns a vague argument about identity into a number anyone can check.

Evans' latest financial disclosure reports one line of earned income from agriculture: $345 in "Farm Profits (livestock and beef sales)" for last year.

That is $655 short of the line his own campaign drew. He did not meet the test he asked to be judged by.

Fifteen years of it

This is not a slip in one ad. It is the whole brand, and it goes back to before he was in Congress.

In his first legislative race in 2022, Evans put photos of himself with a Long Horn cow on his campaign website. Supporters of his opponent that year, Terry DeGroot — who manages his family's dairy operation, Colorado Cow — reportedly mocked him for owning pet cows rather than running an actual ranch.

It did not slow him down. During his 2024 congressional run and after he won, Evans posted a steady run of images across social media and his official congressional website: gazing at cows, in the dirt with his family and some cows, standing with cows over his shoulder, leaning on a cow pen gate.

Former Congressman John Salazar, a Democrat who had roughly 500 head of cattle when Colorado elected him in 2004, gave the Colorado Times Recorder the assessment that stuck last year: Evans is "all hat and no cattle."

Where the three cows actually went

The detail that matters most is what happened to the animals when Evans got to Washington.

When he entered Congress last year, Evans handed his three cows to a friend to look after. The cows now appear to be back on his Weld County property — which lets him keep claiming an agricultural tax break on the land.

So the herd left when he did not have time for it, appears to be back on land that carries an agricultural tax break, and features prominently in a campaign ad about how he is not a suit.

Evans' response to this line of questioning has been to call it a distraction. "While the Left wastes time and taxpayer dollars questioning the validity of the Evans' family farm, Congressman Gabe Evans is fighting serious battles to make Colorado a better place to live, work, and raise a family," his spokeswoman said last year.

What he does when agriculture is actually on the line

The 8th District is farm and ranch country north of Denver. Evans' record there is not the record of the man in the ad.

When 3,800 meatpackers at a JBS plant went on strike, Evans told their union he would stand with them — a month after cashing a $5,000 check from the company. Ninety thousand people in his district get food stamps; he voted to cut them and would not say how many of his own constituents lose out. He keeps posing for photos at Colorado businesses while voting eight times to protect the tariffs that are squeezing them.

He also spent more than $320,000 of taxpayer money advertising himself, $225,000 of it routed to his own campaign consultant. The image is the product. The record is the thing the image is covering.

His seat is one of the closest in the country — he won it in 2024 by about 2,500 votes — and Elon Musk's America PAC is now spending on his behalf, one of eighteen Republicans on this site getting that money. His opponent this year is Democrat Manny Rutinel.

What the filings show

Gabe Evans owns three cows and reported $345 in farm profits from "livestock and beef sales" on his most recent financial disclosure. His own spokeswoman said the federal standard for calling yourself a rancher is $1,000 in agricultural earnings, which puts him $655 below it. He is running an ad that says he has spent 15 years "ranching," and the cows he gave away when he went to Congress appear to be back on his Weld County land, where they support an agricultural tax break.

Source

Colorado Times Recorder, Gabe Evans Raises 3 Cows, But in a New Campaign Ad He Says He's 'Ranching' in Colorado, by Jason Salzman, September 8, 2026. Image via Colorado Times Recorder.

Ashley Hinson Wrote a Bill to Void Other States' Farm Rules. Iowa Farmers Say It Punishes the Ones Who Already Paid to Follow Them.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:46:52 +0000

On Wednesday, September 9, a group of Iowa hog and dairy farmers stood on a farm in Elkhart and asked a Republican congresswoman to stop protecting them.

The congresswoman is Ashley Hinson, who is running for the U.S. Senate. The bill is hers: the Save Our Bacon Act, H.R. 4673, which she introduced on July 23, 2025. It would block individual states from enforcing conditions on livestock products sold across state lines, as the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported from the farm that day.

Hinson sells the bill as a shield. Her own announcement called California's Proposition 12 and Massachusetts's Question 3 "a major threat to family farms and food security," and promised "there will be no bacon ban on my watch."

The family farmers who showed up in Elkhart do not want the shield. They say it takes away the only market where their work is worth more.

What the farmers actually said

Proposition 12 is the California law that says certain pork sold in the state has to come from hogs given at least 24 square feet of usable floor space. California voters passed it in 2018 with 62.7% of the vote, and it was not fully in force until 2024, after the Supreme Court upheld it.

Some Iowa farmers spent real money to meet that standard. Hinson's bill would make the standard unenforceable, and with it the market those farmers invested to reach.

John Gilbert, a Hardin County farmer whose operation runs on dairy and hogs, said the Save Our Bacon Act would "punish" producers who invested in upgrades to comply with the California law. Tony Thompson, a farmer and candidate for the Iowa Senate, said the bill would stop markets from rewarding farmers who "do something different":

"Small family farms aren't going to win a race against multinational, vertically integrated corporations on producing the cheapest pound of protein. Frankly, I don't want them to, because when lowest cost becomes the only goal, everything else starts to look like a cost to be eliminated."

That is the whole argument in two sentences. A small Iowa hog farmer cannot beat a corporate operation on price. Sometimes they can beat it on how the animals were raised — and only if a state is allowed to let its own shoppers ask for that.

Gilbert also raised something Hinson's press release does not mention. He is worried the bill would wipe out state laws that keep diseased animals out of the state. A legislative analysis from Harvard Law School identified 13 Iowa laws that the Save Our Bacon Act could affect.

And he named what bothered him most — not the money, the message:

"People like you and me, it's telling people you don't have a right … you're not entitled to have a say in what you eat."

Who is asking for this

Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, said the things that would actually help struggling Iowa livestock farmers are mandatory country-of-origin labeling, antitrust enforcement, support for local meat processing, and closer ties between farmers and the people who eat their food.

"We know how to make meaningful changes to help Iowa livestock farmers," Lehman said. "We just need the political will to demand that they be put in place. The Save Our Bacon Act won't get it done."

He also put a number on the squeeze: farmers receive less than 15 cents out of every food dollar spent in this country. That is why, as he put it, farmers can be struggling to make a living at the same time shoppers are paying more at the register.

The groups backing Hinson's bill are the other end of that arrangement. Her own announcement lists the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation among its endorsers. The Iowa Farm Bureau's political action committee has also endorsed Hinson in the Senate race.

Holly Bice, of a producers' alliance opposing the bill, told Food Tank it "would primarily benefit large China-owned pork corporations, not independent family farmers." Pork farmer Anna Pesek told Food Tank that if Prop 12 is preempted, "it is just another signal from our policymakers that what they care about are the interests of a handful of multinational companies" — and that profits would flow out of rural communities, states and even the country.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Hinson's record on who gets protected in Iowa agriculture is already on the record here.

Iowa has the fastest-rising cancer rate in America, and Hinson has taken $77,000 from pesticide and meat companies. When a company sought to seize Iowa farmland for a carbon pipeline, the man who founded it co-hosted a fundraiser for her. Now the bill she calls a defense of family farms is opposed by family farmers and endorsed by the trade associations of the industry's biggest players.

Her opponent in the Senate race, Democrat Josh Turek, has said he opposes the Save Our Bacon Act.

The bill was written into the farm bill the House passed. It is not in the Senate version, which is still in committee — so it is still live, and Hinson is still running on it. At the Iowa State Fair on August 21, she called Proposition 12 "an over-regulatory policy, Californians trying to tell Iowans what they know how to do already best".

Nineteen days later, Iowans who raise the animals stood in a field and told her she had it backwards.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson's Save Our Bacon Act would strip states of the power to set conditions on livestock products sold inside their borders, voiding a California standard 62.7% of that state's voters approved and putting 13 Iowa laws at risk. She describes it as protecting family farms. The Iowa Farmers Union, a Hardin County dairy and hog farmer, and a farmer running for the Iowa Senate all stood in a field on September 9 and said it does the opposite — while the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau, whose PAC has endorsed her, are the ones asking for it.

Source

Iowa Capital Dispatch, Iowa farmers argue Hinson's Save Our Bacon act would hurt small producers, by Cami Koons. Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Rick Crawford Called Trump's Tariffs 'a Powerful Move to Help Support American Ag Producers.' That Same Year, Arkansas Led the Nation in Family Farm Bankruptcies.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:31:03 +0000

On August 24, 2026, Arkansas Breaking News reported the results of a new tracking project out of the University of Arkansas. Between January 2021 and June 2026, Arkansas farms filed for bankruptcy 83 times. Only California filed more.

And 80 of those 83 Arkansas cases were filed under Chapter 12 — the chapter of the bankruptcy code written specifically for family farmers. That is the highest family-farm bankruptcy count of any state in the country.

Arkansas is the number one rice-producing state in America. Farming is its largest industry. And it is now the place where family farms file for bankruptcy more often than anywhere else in the United States.

Rick Crawford has represented Arkansas's 1st District — the Delta, the rice and soybean country — since 2011. His own biography calls him "a senior member on the House Agriculture Committee, having played a critical role in passing two Farm Bills, having served on the Conference Committees in 2014 and 2018." He has a degree in agriculture business and economics and built a career in farm-news broadcasting before Congress. If any member of Congress owns this file, it is him.

Here is what he has been saying while it happened.

2018: "I don't think it's going to be a problem"

In March 2018, when Trump first announced steel and aluminum tariffs, Arkansas agriculture officials went to the press worried. Crawford went the other way.

"I don't think it's going to be a problem," he told Talk Business & Politics of the tariff threat. "China is creating economic strife. … It's time to play hardball with China."

In the same article, the president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau said the opposite. Randy Veach warned that if the United States put tariffs on steel and aluminum, China, Canada and Mexico might retaliate against soybeans and rice. "It has the potential to hurt our farmers and ranchers," he said.

The president of the American Soybean Association, quoted in the same story, put it this way: "Our competitors in Brazil and Argentina are all too happy to pick up supplying the Chinese market."

Remember that sentence. It was published in March 2018.

A month later, Crawford was still not worried. "I think right now it's just rhetoric. … Ultimately our soybeans will find their way to China," he said. Soybean-producing countries such as Argentina, he added, wouldn't be able to match American farmers on quality or volume.

2025: "yielding some pretty positive results"

Seven years later, he had not changed his mind.

On August 3, 2025, Crawford told Talk Business & Politics: "I actually commend the president for taking the action that he's taken, and I see this as a powerful move to help support American ag producers, American workers, American industry, and American consumers." He added: "I think it's yielding some pretty positive results."

Here is what 2025 actually looked like for the farmers he represents.

The Arkansas Farm Bureau says the state's soybean, rice, corn and cotton growers lost an average of $243 per acre that year. Every major Arkansas row crop saw prices fall.

Nationally, Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies rose 46% in 2025 to 315 filings, the second straight annual increase. And the American Farm Bureau Federation named the state at the top of the list: "Arkansas, leads the U.S. in Chapter 12 filings in 2025 with 33 filings, more than double 2024 and the most in the state in the 21st century."

Thirty-three filings out of 315 nationwide. As KATV put it, that is roughly ten percent of the country's farm bankruptcies for 2025.

Kenneth Graves, chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, told the station what that feels like from inside it. "If things don't turn around, probably this year, if not the next year, the door won't be big enough for everybody to get out at the same time."

The Argentina part

In the fall of 2025 — weeks after Crawford called the tariffs a powerful move to support American ag producers — the U.S. Treasury signed a $20 billion currency lifeline for Argentina, and the Treasury Secretary said he was looking for ways to add another $20 billion on top. Around the same stretch, Argentina's government temporarily removed its export taxes on farm goods, and China bought roughly 7 million metric tons of Argentine soybeans almost immediately.

American taxpayers helped prop up the currency of the country that took the sale.

That is the scenario the American Soybean Association's president had described in March 2018 — in the very article where Crawford said tariffs wouldn't be a problem. Crawford was in Congress for all of it, on the Agriculture Committee for all of it. Arkansas farmers are still waiting to hear what he did to stop it.

The help that arrives too late

To his credit, Crawford now says the aid is not enough — and he is right.

A $12 billion farmer relief package cleared Congress in late December 2025, and the USDA promised the money would be distributed no later than February 28, 2026. Talk Business & Politics reported that many experts figured the $12 billion might offset as much as 25% of farm losses.

"It was an inadequate number by itself, which is why we're working aggressively to provide some legislative solutions," Crawford said in that February 2026 interview. "If the damage is done in 2025, you can't wait till 2026 to get help."

That is a good sentence. So look at what happened to the solution.

Crawford's answer was the Bridge the Gap for Rural Communities Act, H.R. 5710, which would let farmers take a 50% advance on their safety-net payments for the 2025 crop year instead of waiting until October 2026, and would lift the caps on those payments. He introduced it on October 8, 2025. It picked up 31 cosponsors.

On December 2, 2025, it was referred to the Agriculture Committee's Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities, Risk Management, and Credit — a subcommittee Crawford himself sits on.

It has not moved since. That is nearly nine months of nothing, in a subcommittee he serves on, in a committee run by his own party, in a House run by his own party, for the state with the most family-farm bankruptcies in the country.

The reason the "gap" exists at all is worth saying out loud. The improved farm safety-net payments Crawford wants to advance were written into Trump's budget bill — the same bill Crawford voted for on July 3, 2025, and the same bill that cut $187 billion from food assistance. Those farm payments don't start flowing until after October 1, 2026. By his own account, the damage was done in 2025.

Meanwhile the farm bill itself — the actual law that sets the safety net — has been extended on a temporary basis yet again, now running through September 30, roughly three years behind schedule. Republicans have held the House majority for that entire stretch.

This is a pattern in Arkansas

Crawford is not the only one. Steve Womack spent years backing the spending-bill rider that stopped the USDA from enforcing protections for chicken farmers against the meat companies that buy their birds. When we went through what Arkansas's whole congressional delegation is costing the state, farm policy was one of the clearest examples: six Republicans, one of the most agricultural states in the country, and a record of votes that keeps landing on the wrong side of the people who grow things.

Crawford's version has one extra feature. He was warned in print, in an Arkansas business paper, by the president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau, before any of it happened. He said it wouldn't be a problem.

What the record shows

Arkansas has recorded 83 farm bankruptcies since 2021 — second in the nation, and first in the country for Chapter 12 family-farm filings, with 80. Its soybean, rice, corn and cotton growers lost an average of $243 an acre in 2025, the year Rick Crawford called Trump's tariffs "a powerful move to help support American ag producers" that were "yielding some pretty positive results." Crawford has been in Congress since 2011 and calls himself a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee. His own relief bill for those farmers has sat in a subcommittee he serves on since December 2, 2025, and the farm bill is roughly three years behind schedule.

Source

Arkansas ranks second in nation for farm bankruptcies, new tracking project shows — Field Walsh, Arkansas Breaking News, August 24, 2026. Photo courtesy of Arkansas Breaking News.

208 House Republicans Just Voted to Lock In the Food-Safety Layoffs. Complaints About Contaminated Meat Had Risen 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:51:48 +0000

Last year, complaints to the federal government about contaminated meat, poultry and egg products rose by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

That happened because the people who do the inspecting had been leaving in numbers. Since the start of 2025, the FDA has laid off nearly 4,300 employees, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, about 9% of its workforce in six months.

On June 4, 2026, the House had a chance to decide what to do about that. It voted, 213 to 210, to leave it alone.

What the bill actually does

Be precise here, because Republicans dispute the word "cut," and on one point they have a case.

H.R. 8646 is the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. By the Appropriations Committee's own summary, it:

provides $26.27 billion in total — $380 million, or 1.4%, below the level enacted for 2026;
gives the FDA $7.1 billion; and
claims to increase money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service "to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors and bolster support for state inspection programs."

So this is not a bill that zeroes out food safety, and anyone telling you it is has skipped the document.

Here is the line that matters instead. It sits in the committee's own list of the bill's accomplishments, under "Safeguards American taxpayer dollars":

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

Read that in plain English. Thousands of federal food-safety staff were fired. Congress's response was not to fund those jobs back. It was to lower the budget line to match the emptier building — and to call that a saving.

That is what 213 members voted for. The staffing losses stop being an emergency and become the new baseline.

The man who quit over this said so at the time

None of this was a surprise to anyone in the building.

Jim Jones, who ran the FDA's food division, resigned in February 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that the people fired "represent the future of the agency," and that staying on would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group called his departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The consequences reached specific places. On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, because its Moffett Center laboratory was "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right — the same staffing problem, one more thing the government stopped doing.

The 188 who voted yes

Everyone below has a page on this site and is recorded voting Yea on H.R. 8646. All but one are Republicans — the clerk records Kevin Kiley of California as an independent. Grouped by state:

Alabama (5) — Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt
Alaska (1) — Nick Begich
Arizona (6) — Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar
Arkansas (4) — Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack
California (6) — David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Young Kim
Colorado (4) — Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert
Florida (16) — Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin
Georgia (7) — Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen
Idaho (2) — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher
Illinois (3) — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, Mike Bost
Indiana (7) — Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz
Iowa (3) — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn
Kansas (3) — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann
Kentucky (4) — Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer
Louisiana (4) — Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise
Maryland (1) — Andy Harris
Michigan (7) — Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett
Minnesota (4) — Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer
Mississippi (3) — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly
Missouri (5) — Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford
Montana (1) — Troy Downing
Nebraska (2) — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood
New Jersey (2) — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew
New York (6) — Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis
North Carolina (10) — Addison McDowell, Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx
North Dakota (1) — Julie Fedorchak
Ohio (10) — Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson
Oklahoma (5) — Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole
Oregon (1) — Cliff Bentz
Pennsylvania (8) — Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry
South Carolina (4) — Joe Wilson, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons
Tennessee (8) — Andy Ogles, Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett
Texas (17) — August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson
Utah (3) — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy
Virginia (5) — Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman
Washington (1) — Michael Baumgartner
West Virginia (2) — Carol Miller, Riley Moore
Wisconsin (6) — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied
Wyoming (1) — Harriet Hageman

The four who voted no

Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted against this bill. Four of them have pages here, and they deserve to be named for it:

Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania)
Rob Bresnahan (Pennsylvania)
Tom McClintock (California)
Greg Steube (Florida)

The fifth was Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has no page on this site. Their reasons were not identical and several are fiscal conservatives who vote against spending bills as a matter of course — but on this roll call, they are the Republicans who did not vote to bank the losses.

Four more Republicans did not vote at all: Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Kean of New Jersey, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Chip Roy of Texas. Not voting is not a no, and none of them are on either list above.

What the record shows

Complaints about contaminated meat, poultry and eggs climbed nearly 40% in one year, to 2,016, after the FDA shed nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900. On June 4, 2026, the House passed a spending bill that comes in $380 million under last year and, by the Appropriations Committee's own description, trims salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" rather than restoring them. It passed 213-210. Two hundred and eight Republicans voted for it, 187 of them people we track — 188 counting Kevin Kiley of California, whom the clerk records as an independent. Five Republicans voted no.

How they voted

The official record: Roll Call 205, H.R. 8646, 119th Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 2026 — On Passage, Passed 213-210. Bill details from the House Appropriations Committee. Staffing figures from UpNorthNews.

Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany Voted for a Budget That Locks In the Loss of Food Inspectors. Food Safety Complaints Had Just Jumped 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:32:57 +0000

In fiscal 2025, consumer complaints to the federal government about meat, poultry and egg products jumped by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany voted for a spending bill that leaves the agencies responsible for catching that food with the staffing losses they have already taken — and writes those losses into the budget.

The vote

The bill was H.R. 8646, the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. It passed the House 213 to 210 — Republicans 208 to 5, Democrats 4 to 205.

Van Orden voted yes. Tiffany voted yes. Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted no.

Be precise about what the bill does, because Republicans dispute the word "cut." By the Appropriations Committee's own account, the bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $26.27 billion — $380 million, or 1.4%, below what was enacted for 2026. It gives the FDA $7.1 billion, and the committee says it increases money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors.

Then there is this line, in the committee's own list of what the bill does:

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

That is the part that matters. Congress is not restoring the people who were fired. It is adjusting the budget downward to match the fact that they're gone.

The people who do the inspecting are already gone

This is the part that makes a 1.4% cut land differently than it would have in 2024.

Since the beginning of 2025, according to the federal government's own workforce data:

The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, out of a workforce that now stands at about 7,500.

Those losses trace back to the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation President Trump ordered at the start of his term. We've covered what the same push did elsewhere in the department: the USDA told more than 2,500 Washington-area employees to move across the country or find another job, and lost more than 20,000 workers along the way.

The FDA's own head of the food division, Jim Jones, quit over it on February 17, 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that continuing in the job would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda, and that the people fired "represent the future of the agency."

He was reacting in part to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had said in a November 2024 MSNBC interview, months before his confirmation, that FDA's nutrition staff should be cleared out entirely: "Their entire departments, like the nutrition department in the FDA … have to go." Jones answered Kennedy's charge that the agency is corrupt, writing that his "comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities is a disservice to everyone" — and noting that the food program is more than 99% funded by Congress, not by industry fees.

Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, called Jones's departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The FDA also stopped checking the labs that test milk

On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, according to an internal agency email obtained by Reuters. The reason the email gave was that the agency's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory "is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." It was the same staffing problem.

Be precise about this one too, because it was widely misreported as the FDA halting milk testing. It wasn't. The suspended program is a check on laboratories, not a test of milk: the FDA spikes milk samples with microbes, animal drugs and chemical contaminants, sends them to the labs that test Grade A milk, and scores whether their answers match its own. Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right.

What each of them has been telling voters

Both men represent rural districts where agriculture is the economy.

Van Orden's 3rd District runs along the Mississippi and includes some of the state's densest dairy country. He is facing Rebecca Cooke again in November.

Tiffany, who represents the northern 7th District, is running for governor. His campaign is built on affordability — on August 27 he unveiled an eight-point affordability plan whose fourth point is returning the entire state surplus to taxpayers. He has also spent the summer attacking data center subsidies while collecting money from the industry's registered lobbyist.

Neither has explained why the answer to a 40% jump in food safety complaints is a budget written around the inspectors who are already gone.

The bill now goes to the Senate, which will decide whether the FDA and FSIS staffing and funding levels in it survive into a final agreement.

What the record shows

Consumer complaints about meat, poultry and egg products rose nearly 40% in fiscal 2025, to 2,016. The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900 since the start of 2025. On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany both voted for a spending bill that comes in $380 million below last year and, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" — joining 206 other Republicans, while five voted no. The FDA has also suspended the annual program that checks whether the laboratories testing Grade A milk are getting the right answers.

Source

Van Orden and Tiffany voted for another food safety cut as FDA, USDA lose inspectors, UpNorthNews, August 28, 2026. Photo: David Goldman / AP. Vote totals verified against the official House roll call.

Ben Cline Says He's Listening to Farmers. Virginia's Cattlemen Called Trump's Beef Deal 'Bad Policy' 90 Minutes Later.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:06:00 +0000

On Sunday afternoon, Ben Cline posted about a listening session with the Virginia Farm Bureau. He said he would "hear directly from the farmers who feed and fuel our Commonwealth," and committed to giving Virginia's farmers "support, resources, and certainty."

Ninety minutes later, the Virginia Cattlemen's Association posted something else.

What the cattlemen said

The VCA is headquartered in Daleville — about a ten-minute drive from Cline's home, and inside the 6th District he represents.

At 3:21 p.m., it posted a statement describing widespread industry concern about the administration's plan to flood the market with imported ground beef. The association called it "bad policy that will do more to hurt cattle producers than help consumers."

Its president, Bill McDonald, spelled out why. The policy, he said, "undermines the market from encouraging cattle producers to retain more females to grow the USA herd, which in the long run will make for an affordable and secure national food supply."

That's the technical version. The plain version: when the government dumps cheap foreign beef into the market, ranchers stop holding back heifers to build their herds — and the American cattle supply shrinks, which makes beef more expensive later, not less.

The association urged people to contact their elected officials.

Cline is their elected official. His post about listening never mentioned it.

What Trump actually did

On August 21, 2026, Trump announced he was waiving the tariff on imported ground beef that normally kicks in once foreign shipments pass a set limit. That clears the way for up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef over 90 days, at a promised 25% below market price.

Cattle futures dropped that same morning.

So American cattle producers now face a market being deliberately undercut by their own government — while the steel and equipment tariffs that drove up the cost of running a farm are still in place.

Cline told Virginians they had it coming

Cline has been asked about the tariffs before. He was clear.

As the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect, he told Charlottesville's WVIR that Virginians shouldn't complain: "These are all things that they voted for in November." He said the tariffs were how Trump would "attack inflation."

They did not attack inflation. They raised costs on the farms he now says he is listening to.

And he voted to take away Congress's say

This is the part that goes beyond a photo op.

There is a law — the National Emergencies Act — that lets any member of Congress force a vote to end a national emergency a president has declared. Trump used emergency powers to impose the tariffs on February 1, 2025, which started that clock.

House Republicans turned the clock off. They buried a provision inside H. Res. 211, the rule for a government funding bill, saying that each remaining day of that session of Congress "shall not constitute a calendar day" for the purpose of ending that emergency. No days, no clock, no forced vote.

On March 11, 2025, the House adopted that rule 216–214. Ben Cline voted aye. He also voted aye on the procedural motion that cut off debate on it minutes earlier.

We wrote about the Minnesota Republican who managed that rule on the floor. Cline wasn't the manager. He was one of the 216 votes that made it work.

So when farmers in the Shenandoah Valley asked Congress to do something about tariffs, the answer was that their congressman had already voted to make sure Congress couldn't.

Not a Virginia problem — a Republican one

The same squeeze is hitting farm country everywhere Republicans hold a seat and won't cross the president. Ohio farmers watched their senator vote three separate times, over three days in October 2025, to keep the tariffs that drove up their input costs. Indiana growers lost $607 million in exports. Michigan soybean farmers lost the Chinese market outright.

Meanwhile, in Cline's district, 31,685 households — about 10% of all households in VA-06 — rely on SNAP, according to USDA data. Cheaper beef at the register was the pitch. It isn't reaching them, and it's costing the people who raise the cattle.

What the record shows

Ben Cline posted about listening to Virginia farmers on Sunday afternoon. Ninety minutes later, the cattlemen's association based ten minutes from his house called the administration's 300,000-metric-ton beef import plan "bad policy that will do more to hurt cattle producers than help consumers." Cline told Virginians the tariffs squeezing those same farms were "things that they voted for," and on March 11, 2025 he voted for the rule that declared days would stop counting so the House could not vote to end the tariff emergency for the rest of that session.

Source

Ben Cline pretends to listen to farmers, as Valley beef industry struggles to keep up — Chris Graham, Augusta Free Press, August 23, 2026. Photo via Augusta Free Press.

Jon Husted Voted Three Times to Keep the Tariffs Squeezing Ohio Farmers. Now Trump Is Dropping the Tariff on Imported Ground Beef.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:09:56 +0000

At the Mercer County fair last week, farmers loading cattle told a New York Times reporter that business conditions were getting scary. Fertilizer costs up. Machinery costs up. Few people in that deeply conservative corner of western Ohio were inclined to blame the president for any of it.

Then, on Friday, the president gave them one more thing to worry about.

On August 21, 2026, Trump announced he was waiving the tariff on imported ground beef that kicks in once foreign shipments pass a set limit — clearing the way for up to 300,000 metric tons of it over the next 90 days, with a promised discount of 25% off market price. Cattle futures dropped on the news that same morning.

So here is where Ohio's farmers stand. The tariffs that raised the price of nearly everything they buy are still in place. The one tariff that was holding cheap foreign beef out of the grocery case is off for 90 days.

And Jon Husted, the senator who is supposed to be their voice in Washington, voted three separate times to keep the first set of tariffs exactly where they are.

Three votes, three days, three no's

This isn't a matter of interpretation. It's in the Senate's own roll call record, from three days running in October 2025:

October 28, 2025 — S.J.Res. 81, to end the emergency declaration behind the tariffs on Brazil. Passed 52–48. Husted voted no.
October 29, 2025 — S.J.Res. 77, to end the emergency declaration behind the tariffs on Canada. Passed 50–46. Husted voted no.
October 30, 2025 — S.J.Res. 88, to end the emergency declaration behind the global tariffs. Passed 51–47. Husted voted no.

All three passed the Senate anyway. That chamber has a Republican majority, so none of those tallies happened without Republicans voting yes — which means Husted wasn't stuck with his party. He had a choice, and he made the same one three days running.

What the tariffs did to Ohio

Ohio is not a small farm state. According to USDA's 2025 state agriculture overview, Ohio has 73,600 farm operations, 1.23 million head of cattle as of January 1, 2026, and soybean and corn crops worth roughly $2.7 billion and $2.5 billion a year.

The soybeans are where the trade war landed hardest. China was a major customer for Ohio-grown soybeans. After a 20% tariff went on, China stopped buying U.S. soybeans — not fewer, none — and started buying from Argentina instead. Sherrod Brown, the Democrat running against Husted, asked the Statehouse News Bureau why the administration was giving Argentina $20 billion at the same time.

By harvest 2025, Shelby County farmer Chris Gibbs — a former chairman of his county GOP who quit the party in 2019 over Trump's first trade war — described Ohio's family farms as "in a hell of a mess". China had bought 54% of U.S. soybean exports the year before and none at all so far that year, while tariffs drove up the cost of fertilizer, steel and machinery at the same time.

That's the squeeze. Costs up on one side, markets gone on the other. It's the same story we've reported from Indiana, Michigan and southern Minnesota. Ohio's version is no different.

What Husted said when Ohio farmers spoke up

Husted's public line as the damage mounted was that the people complaining were mistaken. In a clip collected by the Ohio Democratic Party, he says the critics "are wrong," that the tariffs "haven't affected the economy negatively," and that "the policies are working."

In October 2025, the Statehouse News Bureau went to him about the tariffs and Ohio's farmers. His office said he was not available for an interview. It sent a written statement instead, which the newsroom quoted in part:

"My record shows that I support Ohio's farmers and consumers. I voted for the working family tax cuts, which allows farmers and job creators to immediately expense investments in new factories, capital investments in machinery and equipment, and in research and development—all of which Democrats opposed."

Read it twice. He was asked about tariffs. He answered about a tax deduction. A write-off for buying new equipment does nothing for a farmer who can't sell his crop, and it does not lower the price of the fertilizer he already bought.

Not being available is a pattern with Husted. He also didn't show up when Ohio's disability community held a forum about his Medicaid vote.

Now the tariff comes off — on the one product that competes with Ohio cattle

The beef waiver is the part that should sting most in Mercer County.

Most beef the United States imports is lean trimmings, according to USDA's report on beef import quotas — the grass-fed cuts that get blended with American beef to make ground beef. That is precisely the product now coming in without that tariff, up to 300,000 metric tons of it.

Cattle producers have spent years shrinking their herds through drought and high input costs. U.S. cattle inventory sits at its lowest level in about 75 years, and that tight supply is finally letting ranchers turn a profit. One market analyst quoted by the cattle trade publication Drovers put the incoming shipment at roughly 44 days' worth of American ground beef consumption.

The cattle industry did not read it as help. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association said that "flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd." The United States Cattlemen's Association was blunter: "You don't put America first by putting U.S. cattle producers last."

Notice what the waiver concedes. Husted has said the tariffs "haven't affected the economy negatively." The administration just suspended one for 90 days for the stated purpose of bringing a grocery price down. Both of those cannot be true.

None of this is a defense of the beef tariff the president is now dropping. It's the direction that matters. When tariffs were raising Ohio farmers' costs, their senator voted three times to keep them. When a tariff was the thing standing between Ohio's cattle farmers and cheap imports, it came off in an afternoon, with no vote at all.

What the record shows

Jon Husted voted three times in three days to keep tariffs that had already pushed up Ohio's fertilizer, steel and machinery costs and cost U.S. soybean farmers their largest customer outright. He told Ohioans the critics "are wrong" and that "the policies are working," and when a public radio newsroom asked him about the damage, his office would not make him available and answered with a tax deduction. Ten months later the president waived the tariff on imported ground beef — up to 300,000 metric tons of it, about 44 days of the country's ground beef consumption — and cattle prices fell the same morning, with 1.23 million head of cattle standing in Ohio fields.

Source

Reporting from Millersport, Dayton, Celina, North Ridgeville and Akron by Campbell Robertson and Jessica Contrera, "Angry Ohio Voters Could Turn Their State Purple Again," The New York Times, August 23, 2026. Photo: Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times.

Zach Lahn Calls Agribusiness a 'Cartel.' He Built His Career at the Koch Brothers' Political Shop — and Still Sits on a Koch-Funded Board.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:49:33 +0000

Zach Lahn has built an unusual campaign for a Republican in Iowa. He calls agribusiness multinationals "cartels" that "have pillaged our state." He wants to break them up with antitrust lawsuits. He promises to "tax the heck" out of Wall Street hedge funds. He says the EPA has been captured by corporate interests.

He told Tucker Carlson it sometimes makes him sound like a "hippie."

A new investigation by Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network asks the obvious question about a man who says all that: where was he before?

The answer is that he was working for the other side.

He ran the Koch brothers' Montana operation

In 2014, Lahn was hired to direct the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity — the Koch brothers' flagship political advocacy group.

What did he do there? He urged Montana's Republican legislators to vote against the state's Medicaid expansion. When some of them supported it anyway, he tried to run them out of office.

Lahn is singled out by name in the award-winning 2018 documentary Dark Money as an example of how the Koch political operation works.

That is not ancient history that a man can simply grow out of. It is a career spent doing the specific thing Iowa's rural communities are still paying for. He's still defending privatized Medicaid today, after Iowa's own state auditor found it caused an 891% jump in illegal denials.

And he still sits on a Koch-financed board

In 2018, Lahn co-founded a private school in Kansas with Annie Koch, wife of Koch scion Chase Koch, who financed the project. Lahn and Annie later married.

Lahn still serves on that school's board of directors.

Now hold that next to his stump speech. Lahn wants the agribusiness "cartels" broken up. Koch Industries is one of them: its fertilizer arm, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, is one of just four companies — with CF Industries, Nutrien and Yara — holding 84% of North America's nitrogen fertilizer capacity. Farmer advocacy groups have accused it of monopolistic practices in Iowa specifically.

To be fair and precise: Lahn did not work in the Koch family's agricultural business. He worked in their politics. But the distinction is thinner than it sounds — the politics existed to protect the business, and Americans for Prosperity was campaigning in Iowa too, for Republican candidates Mother Jones describes as friendly to Big Ag and corporate interests.

Austin Frerick, an expert on Iowa agricultural antitrust and author of Barons, offered the most economical summary:

Lahn, "at his core, is an all-star, major league political operative."

The crisis he's campaigning on is real

None of this means Iowa's problem is invented. It is severe, and both parties have avoided it for decades.

Iowa has the nation's second-highest cancer rate, and is one of only three states where the rate is increasing. The Iowa Environmental Council has explicitly tied that trend to agricultural pollution.
Pesticides, high-nitrogen fertilizers and hog-manure lagoons have laced the majority of Iowans' drinking water with unsafe contaminants.
The average farmer now makes less than 15 cents of every food dollar consumers spend.
Agribusiness spent about $224 million on lobbying last year — often outspending defense and oil and gas.

"When you live in these areas, you're living in a crisis," Frerick says. Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer and president of the Iowa Farmers Union, puts it this way: "We have hit a level of corporate control that we've never gone through before."

That's why Lahn's pitch works. The grievance is genuine. The question is whether the messenger will act on it.

The test he's already failing

Here's the cleanest way to judge whether Lahn will actually take on the powerful: watch what he says about the administration he's tied himself to.

Because on the specific issue at the center of his campaign — glyphosate, the weed killer in Roundup that Lahn says the EPA won't admit causes cancer — the Trump administration has gone the other way, repeatedly:

Trump signed an executive order declaring the production of glyphosate critical to U.S. national security.
The nation's top pesticide regulator and its undersecretary for food safety are both former Big Ag lobbyists.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot sue Bayer, glyphosate's producer, over failing to warn consumers about the herbicide's alleged dangers.

Lahn accepted Trump's endorsement as a "patriot." He has not, so far as the reporting shows, challenged any of it.

The same goes for the rest of what Washington has done to Iowa farm country: tariffs crushing farmers, fertilizer costs climbing as the war in Iran drags on, DOGE's cuts to USDA services and regenerative farming programs, and the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in Trump's budget bill that agricultural communities increasingly rely on.

One Iowa soybean farmer told Mother Jones what he wants: "We need a governor who will stand up for Iowa when our Iowa interests are being ignored" — including, he added, by the president.

Who's paying for the anti-corporate campaign

Lahn deserves credit for one thing: unlike his primary opponent and his general-election rival, he didn't fund his primary campaign with big checks from Big Ag. He put in roughly $2.5 million of his own money.

But the money coming in now is not grassroots either. A PAC associated with the Republican Governors Association contributed $5 million. Steak 'n Shake CEO Sardar Biglari gave $25,000.

The party establishment does not write $5 million checks to candidates it expects to break up its donors' companies.

The rest of the platform

Lahn's anti-corporate message travels with positions that have nothing to do with fertilizer monopolies:

He's vowed to pull mRNA Covid shots off the market and end every childhood vaccine requirement in Iowa schools — during the worst measles year since 1991.
He's pushing a life-at-conception law, which would effectively end abortion access in Iowa.
He promises to drive "Marxists" out of Iowa schools, after running a school with no accreditation, no state tests and no licensed teachers.
He accepted an endorsement from former Rep. Steve King, who lost his seat in 2020 after questioning why "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" are offensive terms.

And the man presenting himself as a sixth-generation Iowa farmer didn't register to vote in Iowa until October 2024 — barely clearing the state's two-year residency requirement — as the Wall Street Journal documented. The Des Moines Register reported in May that he still flies to Kansas about once a week. The Daily Beast reported he has never claimed the Belle Plaine farm as his primary residence.

Lahn's campaign declined Mother Jones' interview request, and declined to answer questions about his role in the farm's day-to-day operations.

Lahn rails against out-of-state owners of Iowa farmland, and his critics note that he was one of them until recently. Silvia Secchi, a natural resources economist at the University of Iowa, put it this way: "It takes one to know one."

What Iowa should ask

Iowa farmers are right to be furious, and they are right that nobody has been fighting for them. If Lahn has genuinely changed his mind about the Kochs, monopolies and corporate power, that would be worth something.

But a conversion is proved by what you give up, not by what you say. Lahn is still on the board of a Koch-financed school. He has not criticized a president who declared glyphosate a national security priority. And on Medicaid he has not moved: he campaigned against expansion in Montana, and he is defending Iowa's privatized system now.

Iowa deserves a governor who fought Big Ag before it was popular, not one who joined the fight after checking the polling.

Source

Zach Lahn Is MAHA's Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be? — Teresa Cotsirilos, Mother Jones, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, August 18, 2026. Top image illustration by Mark Harris.

Gabe Evans Keeps Posing for Photos at Colorado Businesses. He's Voted Eight Times to Protect the Tariffs Hurting Them.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:44:16 +0000

On August 3, Gabe Evans sent his constituents a newsletter about visiting the Five Rivers Kuner Feedlot in Weld County. There was a photo with the executives. There was a line about how "agriculture remains one of Colorado's greatest economic engines, and I'll continue fighting to keep it strong."

Six months earlier, on February 10, Evans had voted twice to keep the House of Representatives from voting on the tariffs driving up that feedlot's costs. Three Republicans broke ranks and killed the attempt. When the vote finally happened the next day, Evans voted against ending the tariffs.

The votes you can look up yourself

On February 10, 2026, Republican leadership put a provision at the end of a procedural rule, H.Res. 1042. Section 4 said that no day between February 10 and July 31, 2026 would count as a "calendar day" under the National Emergencies Act — the clock that forces the House to vote when a member moves to end one of Trump's tariff emergencies. It named four of them, including the February 1, 2025 emergency behind the tariffs on Canadian goods.

In plain terms, the rule would have switched off the House's obligation to vote on the tariffs until August.

Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) tried to strip it out. "If we defeat the previous question," he told the House, "I will offer an amendment to the rule to strike section 4, which would stop an attempt by Republican leadership to block the House from taking up-or-down votes on President Trump's disastrous tariff policies through the end of July."

The previous question is the parliamentary tool that shuts off any chance to amend a rule. It carried 216 to 214, according to the official House roll call. Two votes was the entire margin.

Gabe Evans voted yes.

Then Evans voted for the rule itself — and lost. It failed 214 to 217, because three Republicans refused to go along: Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Section 4 never took effect.

Minutes later, with the rule dead, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast asked unanimous consent to make the tariff resolution in order at any time. There was no objection.

So the House got its vote. On February 11 it passed the resolution ending the emergency behind the Canadian tariffs, 219 to 211, with six Republicans voting for it.

Gabe Evans voted no.

Eight votes, one direction

The Colorado Times Recorder went through Evans' record and counted eight votes since he entered Congress that supported Trump's tariffs or blocked Congress from touching them:

In February 2026, he voted against a symbolic resolution to end the national emergency used to justify tariffs on Canadian goods — a resolution that passed anyway, with six Republicans voting for it. Evans was not one of them.
He was on the losing side of a February vote to delay a vote on cancelling the tariffs.
He twice voted to block joint resolutions that would have terminated the tariffs.
He cast the February 10 previous-question vote above.
In 2025, he voted four times to stop Congress from challenging or even considering the tariffs.

Evans has never voted against a tariff measure, and has offered essentially no public criticism of the policy.

The businesses in the photos disagree with him

This is what makes the newsletters uncomfortable reading. Evans keeps showing up at businesses whose own leaders have said tariffs hurt them.

Queso Campesino, a cheese importer in his district, got a newsletter mention last year. Its owner, Gabriel Robles, told the Colorado Times Recorder at the time that Trump's tariffs were hurting his business — and that it made him question whether he'd support Republicans in the next election.

The Colorado Association of Home Builders got a June 16 newsletter, in which Evans wrote about making "the American Dream more attainable for Colorado families." Its national parent, the National Association of Home Builders, states flatly on its website that tariffs "act as a tax on American builders, home buyers, and consumers," and says more than 60% of builders it surveyed have reported higher costs because of them. NAHB wrote to Trump asking him not to raise tariffs on Canadian and Mexican building materials. He raised them anyway, more than once.

Leprino Foods in Greeley — the world's largest mozzarella producer — got two visits, in September 2025 and again on August 3. In 2022 congressional testimony, Leprino CEO Mike Durkin said the opposite of what Evans votes for:

"If we do not build our globally competitive market access now through reduced tariffs, competitive prices, and consistent shipping, our producers will be unable to grow. There is hardly a more critical priority for the U.S. dairy industry than trade."

The feedlot. Farmers, ranchers and feedlots have seen the price of fertilizer, machinery and feed pushed up by tariffs and by the uncertainty around them.

The pattern is the same every time: Evans arrives, poses, publishes a newsletter about fighting for them, and then votes to keep in place the policy they've said is hurting them.

"Absolutely confident"

In a telephone town hall with constituents last year, Evans was asked about the tariffs. His answer:

"It seems like everything's in flux, but at the end of the day, I am absolutely confident that by getting back to free and fair trade practices … that will ultimately bring down the prices of goods for all Americans."

That was the prediction. Here is the scoreboard since: about 100,000 American manufacturing jobs were lost during the first year of Trump's second term amid rising material costs and tariff uncertainty. Congressional Democrats estimate tariffs will cost the average American family $2,500 in 2026. Grocery prices have been widely blamed on them.

Evans' office did not respond to a message asking whether he still believes the tariffs will bring costs down.

Why this pattern matters in the 8th District

Paul Teske, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, put the political problem plainly:

"These tariffs, contrary to Trump's assertions, are paid by American businesses and consumers, including those in CD8. So, for a candidate who wants to seem 'pro-business,' these tariffs and their impacts are an issue about which Democrats should be able to gain some traction."

But this isn't only a campaign problem. It's the same shape as the rest of Evans' record in a district that can't afford it:

He said his Medicaid vote would protect "the people who need it most" — and now 12 Colorado hospitals are at risk, with an estimated 29,262 people in his district projected to lose health coverage.
90,000 people in his district get food assistance. He voted to cut it and won't say how many lose out.
DOGE cut more than $15.7 million in federal programs from his own district, including $238,000 in school lunch funding from the Greeley-Evans School District. He called it "right-sizing government."

Each time, the press release faces one direction and the vote faces the other.

What the 8th District should ask

There is nothing wrong with a congressman visiting a feedlot or a cheese plant. That's the job.

The job is also to do something for them once you get back to Washington. In February, Evans had three chances in two days to side with the businesses in his newsletters.

He voted to shut off the tariff vote. He voted for the rule that would have kept it shut off until August. And when three of his own colleagues refused to go along and the vote happened anyway, he voted to leave the tariffs in place.

Three chances. Three votes the other way.

Colorado's 8th District deserves a representative whose votes match his photo captions.

Sources

Say Cheese: Evans Has Voted 8 Times for Trump Tariffs While Staging Photo Ops at Businesses Hurt by the Tariffs — Jason Salzman, Colorado Times Recorder, August 17, 2026.
House Roll Call 59, H.Res. 1042, February 10, 2026 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. Ordering the previous question, 216–214.
House Roll Call 60, H.Res. 1042, February 10, 2026 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. The rule itself, failed 214–217.
House Roll Call 65, H.J.Res. 72, February 11, 2026 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. Ending the February 1, 2025 national emergency, passed 219–211.
Congressional Record, February 10, 2026 — Rep. Neguse on the blocked tariff votes; the text of section 4; and Chairman Mast's unanimous-consent request after the rule failed.

Border Patrol Swept His Valley and a Grower's 30-Person Harvest Crew Came In at Five. David Valadao Asked for Better Communication.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:14:07 +0000

In the first week of January 2025 — before Donald Trump had even been sworn in — Border Patrol agents from the El Centro sector drove several hundred miles north into California's San Joaquin Valley and spent three days making arrests.

They called it Operation Return to Sender. Agents in unmarked SUVs picked people up outside a Home Depot in Bakersfield and at a gas station where field workers eat breakfast. The agency said it made 78 arrests and touted the capture of two alleged child rapists and more than 30 pounds of marijuana. Community groups disputed the number.

Border Patrol usually works within 100 miles of a border, and the interior is normally ICE's job. Customs and Border Protection told Valley Public Radio that its jurisdiction runs all the way to the Oregon border. As Bruno Huizar of the California Immigrant Policy Center told the station, "The border patrol often ignores that 100-mile boundary and rejects any geographic limitation on the agency's authority."

The effect on the farms was immediate. Peter Belluomini, who grows lemons, mandarins and navel oranges east of Bakersfield and was mid-harvest on all three, watched his contracted crew evaporate. "Instead of 30 people, there were like five," he said. "The rest were hiding at home."

A landscaper named Ernesto Campos was detained for four hours. Video shared by KGET shows an agent threatening to break his truck window — "I'm going to have to break the window. It's your fault." Campos is a U.S. citizen. He was held until agents confirmed it.

The United Farm Workers said two of its members were detained, neither with a criminal record.

What the congressman said

David Valadao represents parts of Kern, Tulare, and Kings counties. He put out a statement that week:

"I think we can all agree known criminals should be expelled from the United States, but it is crucial that future operations are communicated clearly to avoid causing any further alarm among our farmworkers."

Read the ask. It is not that the raids stop. It is not that agents identify themselves, or carry warrants, or stay out of the parking lots where people wait for work. It is that future operations are communicated clearly — that somebody give the district a heads-up.

He calls them "our farmworkers." He asked for a better-run version of the thing that scared them.

Who he is, and why this is his fight if it's anyone's

Valadao is not a generic Republican on immigration. He is, by his own description, the only dairyman in Congress, and his own family's story is an immigration story.

His father Eduardo grew up in the Portuguese Azores, the youngest of eight, working his family's dairy. A few years after immigrating to California, Eduardo and his wife Maria bought their first cows, and later their own land in Hanford. David grew up bucking hay and feeding the cows before school.

More than 65% of his district is Latino, according to the California Target Book. His district's economy is farm labor. His first television ad this year shows him walking through a tree-nut farm under the words "David Valadao is on our side."

The people who milk the cows and pick the mandarins are the people Border Patrol was loading into vans.

The bill he signed

To his credit, Valadao has never joined the deport-everyone caucus. He has put his name on the bills that would actually fix this. Two of them, in this Congress alone.

On May 7, 2025, he cosponsored H.R. 3227, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2025 — the bill that would give farmworkers already doing the work a legal way to keep doing it.

On July 15, 2025, he cosponsored H.R. 4393, the DIGNIDAD Act — a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants who've been here for years, paired with tougher border enforcement and work requirements.

Now look at what has happened to them.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act was referred to committee on the day it was introduced. Congress.gov shows no action since. Fifteen months. It has 11 cosponsors.

The Dignity Act went to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement on July 16, 2025. Nothing has happened to it since — no hearing, no markup, no vote, in thirteen months, in a chamber his own party controls. It has 39 cosponsors out of 435.

Cosponsoring a bill costs nothing. It is a signature on a list. Neither of these bills has ever been scheduled for so much as a hearing by the Republicans who run the committees.

The bill he passed

Eleven months later, a different immigration bill moved.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2, the Secure America Act — roughly $70 billion for Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and ICE, available through September 30, 2029. The two biggest lines in it are $31 billion for ICE and $13 billion for CBP, both written for immigration enforcement.

It passed 214 to 212. Not one Republican voted no. At that margin every single Republican yes was a deciding vote — including Valadao's. The next day it became Public Law 119-98.

That is the whole comparison. The bill that would legalize the people who work his valley's fields has sat in a drawer for over a year. The bill that pays for the agents who raid them took one afternoon and passed by two, with his vote.

"Communicated clearly"

Go back to what he asked for in January 2025 and measure it against what came after.

He wanted advance notice of enforcement operations. What Congress funded instead was a much larger version of the operation, with money that runs to the end of fiscal 2029. The same agency is already paying contractors to scan what people post.

None of that comes with a phone call to the Kern County Farm Bureau.

Valadao's Democratic opponent this year, Randy Villegas, is the son of Mexican immigrant farm laborers. He put the argument this way: "Everybody and anybody knows somebody who works in agriculture in the valley. And anybody in the valley will tell you that workers and agriculture are struggling right now because of Valadao and this administration."

Valadao has consistently declined CalMatters' interview requests, and his spokesperson said he was not available to answer questions for its July 2026 story on his race.

He is not the loudest Republican on immigration. He may be the most consequential one, because in a district where more than two in three people are Latino and the economy runs on farm labor, he keeps casting the vote that decides.

Source

Joshua Yeager and Cresencio Rodriguez-Delgado, "In wake of border patrol raids in California's Central Valley, a clearer picture emerges," Valley Public Radio (KVPR), January 16, 2025 — the source of Valadao's statement and the arrest figures. Raid tactics from Sergio Olmos, "A surprising immigration raid in Kern County foreshadows what awaits farmworkers and businesses," CalMatters, January 10, 2025. Harvest impacts from Caleb Hampton, "Kern County immigration sweep halts citrus harvest," Ag Alert, republished by Valley Voice, January 16, 2025.

Indiana Farmers Lost $607 Million to the Trade War. Marlin Stutzman — a Farmer Himself — Told Bloomberg the Court Striking Tariffs Down Was the Bad News.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:07:14 +0000

Marlin Stutzman is not a lawyer or a career staffer. He is a fourth-generation farmer from Howe, in the Michiana corner of the state. His House financial disclosure lists a farm business worth between $1 million and $5 million, a farm mortgage he has carried since 2012, and stakes in a meat processor, a truck manufacturer and a lawn-and-garden company. Northeast Indiana sent a farmer to Congress.

So it is worth asking what that farmer has done for Indiana farmers.

$607 million, gone

North Dakota State University published a one-year retrospective on China's retaliatory tariffs in 2026. Indiana's share of the damage, between March 2025 and February 2026:

$607 million in lost agricultural exports
$347 million of it in soybeans
$104 million in corn

Indiana was among the states the report found most affected — ninth on its list, behind Iowa, California and Illinois at roughly $1.2 billion each. Nationally, China's retaliation cut U.S. agricultural exports by about $14.9 billion in that same twelve months.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette — the daily paper in Stutzman's own district — ran an editorial on it in June 2026, arguing the administration's trade policy was "hurting America and, especially, its farmers." It quoted Todd Davis, chief economist of the Indiana Farm Bureau:

"Our farmers are looking at the fourth consecutive year of losses, and it's hard to point your finger at one issue. There are a lot of contributing factors."

Four consecutive years of losses. That's not a rough patch. That's a business model coming apart.

What Stutzman said while it was happening

Go back to March 2025, right as the tariffs were landing. Stutzman went on NewsNation to talk about Trump's 25% auto tariffs. He acknowledged "there's some uncertainty," and then said this:

"But my hope is that these other countries will realize that they need us as a partner. But we're also going to look out for the American people and the America-first agenda that President Trump has laid out is really important for us."

"It's just going to take some time. And I would just say that these other countries really should be careful on how they respond to President Trump's tariff discussion and really start partnering with us rather than being adversarial."

He offered his constituents a theory: hold on, other countries will fold.

"We knew it was going to be a little rocky, but I think that in the long run, there's going to be deregulation coming from the Trump administration out of the bureaucracies in Washington. There's going to be tax policy that's going to be beneficial, and, of course, there's going to be energy policy that's going to be very positive for the United States. So there will be some offsets."

"A little rocky." "There will be some offsets."

China did not fold. China bought its soybeans from Brazil. Indiana farmers ate $607 million.

Then the Supreme Court threw the tariffs out — and he wanted them back

In February 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs Trump had imposed under a 1977 emergency law, ruling the statute never gave a president that power. The government wound up owing roughly $166 billion in refunds — money that went to Apple, Ford, Nike, Amazon and General Motors, the importers who paid it. Not to farmers. Not to anyone who paid more at the grocery store.

Stutzman went on Bloomberg TV the day of the ruling. Bloomberg's own description of the segment: he "discusses the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs and says it is not good for farmers in Indiana, and that he would be happy to help President Trump if Congressional help is needed."

Read that again with the numbers in front of you. Twelve months of trade war had just cost Indiana farmers $607 million in exports China stopped buying. The Court ended the tariffs that set the retaliation off. And Indiana's farmer-congressman's position was that the ruling was bad for Indiana farmers — and that he would be happy to help the president if Congress was needed.

He's not the only one

Other Republicans in farm districts are running the same script. Minnesota's Brad Finstad spent ten months calling the damage "short term". Michelle Fischbach got booed at Farmfest defending tariffs the Supreme Court had already thrown out. Michigan's John Moolenaar, who chairs the House China committee, wrote a bill to put tariffs of 35% to 100% on Chinese goods while his own state's soybean growers entered year three of losses.

What makes Stutzman's version different is that he farms. He knows what a fourth consecutive losing year does to a balance sheet, because he keeps one.

The rest of the bill

The trade war is not the only thing Stutzman has voted to send home. From the budget bill he voted for in July 2025:

An estimated 24,639 people in IN-03 are projected to lose health coverage from the Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts, according to the Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff — 12,939 of them on Medicaid.
23,057 households in the district rely on SNAP for groceries — in farm country, where the food comes from.

Rural hospitals, food aid, and export markets are the three legs a farm community stands on. He voted to weaken all three, and then asked farmers to be patient while other countries came around.

They didn't come around. The bill came due in Indiana.

Sources

Report: Indiana farmers lost $607M in exports during latest China trade dispute — Clayton Baumgarth, WFIU, via WFYI, June 10, 2026
China trade dispute predictably results in massive state, federal agriculture losses — Editorial Board, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, June 17, 2026
"There is some uncertainty," GOP lawmaker says of auto tariffs — Sean Noone, NewsNation, March 27, 2025. Photo: Hoosier Ag Today.

Moolenaar Wants Tariffs on China of Up to 100%. Michigan Has 10,000 Soybean Farms and Three Straight Years of Losses.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:46:22 +0000

John Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on China. It is the most visible job he has ever had, and he has used it to do one thing above all: push tariffs.

He backed Trump's tariffs the day after they were announced in April 2025. He wrote his own bill, the Restoring Trade Fairness Act, to revoke China's normal trade status and impose tariffs of 35% to 100% depending on the product. And in February 2026, when the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency law, Moolenaar's response was to demand Congress pass his bill instead:

"Tariffs on China level the playing field for Americans, and President Trump has demonstrated, since his first administration, that tariffs are one of the few meaningful tools in the U.S. economic security toolkit for confronting China."

Level the playing field for which Americans? Let's check with the ones he represents.

Year three of the losses

Michigan's 2nd District is farm country. Statewide, Michigan has more than 10,000 soybean farms generating over $1 billion a year, and Gratiot County — which sits entirely inside Moolenaar's district — is one of the state's leading soybean producers. Michigan's farm exports run about $2.6 billion a year.

Here is where that stands, as of February 2026:

Michigan farmers are in the third straight year of significant losses in the soybean market, per the American Soybean Association.
China — the largest buyer of American soybeans — stopped buying U.S. soybeans and switched to Brazil.
The reporting cited a 52% decline in soybean exports because of the trade war.
USDA forecast that 2026 wouldn't look much better than the two years before it.
As of August 2025, the average tariff rate on the inputs farmers buy had risen from 1% to 12%, according to North Dakota State University's Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies.

Read that last one twice. Farmers got hit on both ends: the stuff they buy costs more, and the biggest customer for what they sell walked away.

There was a bailout — a $12 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance program. Soybean growers got less out of it than rice and cotton growers did. That's the deal Michigan farmers were handed: lose the market, pay more for fertilizer and equipment, and stand in line behind other states for the check.

China has since started buying again. Under a deal reached in late 2025 it agreed to take 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans that year and at least 25 million metric tons a year through 2028, and exports to China from January through March 2026 were up 57% on the year before, USDA data shows — much of it soybeans farmers had been sitting on since the fall. It is a recovery, and it is not a restoration. "We are definitely not where we were in years past," the executive director of the Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council said in July 2026. "For most farmers out there, the big question in front of them is, will it get back?"

None of this is a surprise. It's the same thing that happened during Trump's first term, when China shifted its soybean buying to Brazil and never fully came back. Everyone in agriculture knew what retaliation looks like, because they had already lived it once.

Moolenaar's answer: more of it

The Supreme Court threw out Trump's emergency tariffs in February 2026, ruling that the 1977 law he used never gave a president that power. The government now owes roughly $166 billion in refunds — money going to Apple, Ford, Nike, Amazon and General Motors, the importers who paid the tariffs, not to the farmers who lost the export market and not to anyone who paid more at the store.

That ruling was a chance to reconsider. Moolenaar's take, issued the same day, was that Congress should quickly pass the Restoring Trade Fairness Act — his 35%-to-100% tariff bill — "to put American workers first."

He is entitled to that view. What he is not entitled to is pretending the bill is free. A tariff is a tax collected at the border, and China's answer to tariffs, every single time, has been to stop buying American crops. His own district is the proof.

Minnesota Republicans have been running the same play — Brad Finstad spent ten months calling the damage "short term" while southern Minnesota kept paying, and Michelle Fischbach got booed at Farmfest for defending tariffs the Supreme Court had already thrown out. Moolenaar's version is louder, because he's the one holding the gavel.

And then he went after the farm trade group

In April 2026, Moolenaar sent a letter to the United States Heartland China Association — a Midwest nonprofit whose work includes exactly the kind of thing farm groups do to keep an export market alive. His committee's own description of the letter lists what it was asking about: "agricultural roundtables, business seminars, student forums and trips to China hosting U.S. elected officials."

He asked for "verifiable assurances that the organization is not acting as an unregistered agent" of the Chinese government, demanded records going back to 2021, and told it to cut its partnerships:

"Heartland China should immediately terminate its relationship with all CCP United Front actors and cease serving as a pawn in the subnational influence operations of our foremost foreign adversary."

The organization says he has it wrong. Executive Director Min Fan told Domino Theory the group "look[s] forward to clarifying the committee's misunderstanding of our important work," and vice chair Susan Thornton said staff were working with attorneys "to dispel the Committee's misunderstanding of the organization's work."

No charges have been filed. No finding has been made. What exists is a letter from a committee chairman, and a nonprofit that now has to pay lawyers.

Whatever you think of the merits, notice the shape of it. A Midwest farm-state member of Congress spent April 2026 demanding five years of records from a Midwest group that ran agricultural roundtables with China — while Midwest farmers were still climbing out of three straight years of losses in the China market.

Who this is actually working for

Moolenaar sits on the House Appropriations Committee, including the subcommittee that writes the budget for agriculture and the FDA. That is real power over farm programs. Agricultural PACs fund him accordingly. Since he first ran in 2014, his campaign has taken $60,750 from the Michigan Sugar Company growers' PAC and $52,000 from the National Association of Chemical Distributors' PAC, with the Farm Credit Council and National Pork Producers Council PACs on the list too.

So he has the committee seat, the money, the gavel, and the national platform. What Michigan farmers have is three straight years of a closed export market behind them, inputs that cost twelve times more in tariffs than they did, and a bailout that shorted soybeans.

Moolenaar says tariffs level the playing field. Somebody should ask him whose field he means.

Sources

Soybean tariffs challenge Michigan growers — Madison Merrell, Capital News Service / Spartan Newsroom, February 20, 2026. Photo: Michigan Agricultural Council.
Moolenaar: "Tariffs on China Level the Playing Field for Americans" — House Select Committee on the CCP, February 20, 2026
Select Committee Investigates Heartland China Association — House Select Committee on the CCP, April 20, 2026
China resumes US soybean purchases under trade deal with Trump, but future for farmers remains "daunting" — Investigate Midwest, July 1, 2026

Steve Womack Fought to Keep the Rider That Stopped the Government From Protecting Chicken Farmers. Tyson Is Still His Second-Biggest Donor.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:36:00 +0000

In July 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it intends to scrap three rules written to protect chicken farmers and cattle ranchers from the giant meat companies they sell to. According to The New Lede, the rules on the chopping block are the Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity rule, the Transparency in Poultry Grower Contracting and Tournaments rule, and the Poultry Grower Payment Systems rule.

The biggest winners are four companies that between them control an estimated 85% of the beef market and 67% of the pork market. One of them is Tyson Foods, headquartered in Springdale, Arkansas — in Steve Womack's district.

Womack has said nothing about it. That's not surprising. He spent years helping to keep those protections from being enforced in the first place.

What the tournament system actually is

If you don't live near a chicken house, here's the deal that Arkansas poultry growers actually sign.

The farmer owns the long metal barn and the land it sits on, and takes out the loan to build it. The company owns the chickens — from egg to slaughter — and decides which chicks the farmer gets, what feed they eat, and what the farmer gets paid.

Then the company runs what's called a tournament. Growers are ranked against their neighbors on how much weight their birds put on. Farmers who come in above average get a bonus. That bonus money is taken out of the checks of the farmers who came in below average. As Food & Water Watch describes it, integrators "provide — and control — the chicks, the feed and the veterinary care," and then dock the below-average growers to pay the above-average ones: "The actual quality of a grower's work is not what determines their pay."

The Arkansas Times described the resulting bind in 2015: growers who spoke up said they were threatened with retaliation, and some said that if they complained, they got "scrawnier chicks to start with, which results in smaller chickens." OpenSecrets, writing up the same segment, noted that "according to a 2001 study, 71 percent of the farmers live below the poverty line."

The Obama administration wrote rules to fix this. They were finished. They were on the books.

They just weren't allowed to be enforced.

The rider

This is where Womack comes in.

For years, a small provision — known as the GIPSA rider, after the USDA's Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration — was slipped into the annual House agriculture spending bill. As OpenSecrets explained, the rider "defunds the Agriculture Department's effort to finalize rules meant to protect the farmers." Congress didn't repeal the protections. It just refused to pay for anyone to enforce them.

The Arkansas Times reported that Womack placed "a rider on the agriculture appropriations bill that forbids the USDA from enforcing already-written protections for the nation's poultry farmers." The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, which watched the markups year after year, described Womack as "a strong supporter of the anti-farmer rider" — the congressman Democrats on the committee had to argue with when they tried to take it out.

Two members of Congress, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Chellie Pingree of Maine, tried repeatedly to strip the rider out. OpenSecrets reported they were "stymied repeatedly by colleagues like Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.)" — noting that Womack sat on the Appropriations Committee and came "from the district where Tyson is headquartered."

Then it got on television

On May 17, 2015, John Oliver spent a segment of Last Week Tonight on exactly this — the contract system, the retaliation, and the rider. He named Womack. The Arkansas Times noted the congressman "gets plucked at around the 13:20 mark."

Something unusual happened next. OpenSecrets reported that weeks later, the House Appropriations Committee approved the following year's agriculture bill and, for the first time in years, it did not include the GIPSA defunding rider. Its headline put a question mark on it — "John Oliver 1, Big Chicken 0?" — and its verdict was careful: "Oliver's beef with the chicken giants may have made a difference."

Two members of Congress had spent years trying and failing to strip that rider out. A comedian on HBO spent one Sunday night on it. That is a fact about how Washington works, and it is not a flattering one.

Follow the chicken money

Womack has never had to explain the rider to Arkansas voters. The last in-person town hall on his own congressional calendar was in Harrison on September 3, 2019 — seven years ago. Since then he has taken questions down a phone line instead.

But you can check who's paying him. OpenSecrets' tally of Federal Election Commission filings for the 2025–2026 cycle puts Tyson Foods second on his list of top contributors at $30,750 — $23,250 from people connected to the company, $7,500 from its PAC. Only Walmart, also headquartered in his district, gave more.

That is the arrangement in one line. The company whose contract terms he helped shield from federal enforcement is his second-largest source of campaign money.

Big poultry didn't stop at donations, either. OpenSecrets reported in 2015 that the National Chicken Council had spent over $2.5 million on lobbying in the previous five years, and Tyson over $9 million in recent lobbying — and that both had "lobbied against GIPSA reform in some capacity."

The same fight, eleven years later

The rules finally got finished under the Biden administration. The transparency rule took effect in 2024, requiring poultry companies to tell growers things like how many flocks they can expect in a year and what other growers actually earn. The payment rule, published in January 2025, would have stopped companies from using the tournament to dock farmers' pay — bonuses only, no penalties.

That payment rule was supposed to take effect on July 1, 2026. USDA has now pushed it to December 31, 2027, and proposed rescinding it and two others entirely.

So the same protections Womack helped keep from being enforced in 2015 are being killed outright in 2026. Contract growers in Arkansas — the ones with a mortgage on a chicken house and one buyer for their birds — go back to the tournament.

Womack is still in Congress. He is still on Appropriations. He has put out press releases titled "Womack Votes to Rein in EPA, Support America's Producers." He has not said a word in defense of the producers in his own district who raise chickens for a living.

What he says he cares about

Womack knows how to speak up when his district's companies are hurting. In August 2025 he told Talk Business & Politics that tariffs were "the single biggest issue that has come to me" from local employers and that "we'll engage the administration in trying to get some relief" for them. Back in March 2018 he put out a statement saying he was "extremely concerned" about Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs.

He can find his voice for what his district's job creators pay for steel. He can't find it for the farmer's paycheck.

This is the same pattern we've documented across the farm economy — from splitting the Farm Bill so food aid and farm aid could be cut separately to Republicans defending tariffs that are wrecking the people who grow things. The people who own the land and take the risk are always the ones asked to absorb the loss.

The bottom line

Contract chicken growers are in a bind with no good name for it. They aren't employees, so they get no labor protections. They aren't really independent businesses either, because one company sets the price, supplies the birds, and can cut them off.

The one federal rule written to give them a fair shake sat unenforced for years because of a rider on a spending bill — and the congressman who represents Tyson's headquarters was one of the people who kept it there.

We deserve a representative who works for the farmer, not the processor.

Source

The New Lede, "USDA to remove rules protecting livestock farmers from discrimination and deception", July 13, 2026. Photo: The New Lede.

For 50 Years the Farm Bill Fed Farmers and Hungry Families Together. Frank Lucas Called Splitting Them Up "Fortunate."

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:33:37 +0000

For more than half a century, the farm bill worked because of one deal.

Farm country needed crop insurance, price supports and disaster aid. Cities needed food stamps. Neither side had the votes alone. So Congress bundled them into a single bill, and rural Republicans and urban Democrats each voted for the other guy's half to get their own. That's not a theory about how the farm bill worked — that is how it worked, every five years, for fifty years.

Frank Lucas has been in Congress for that entire modern era of it. He was first elected in 1994. Oklahoma Watch describes him as a 19-term representative and a longtime member of the House Agriculture Committee; he currently chairs its Subcommittee on Conservation, Research and Biotechnology. Few people in the House have spent more of a career inside that bargain than he has.

In January 2026, he was asked what he made of the bargain falling apart. Here is what he said:

"Fortunately, most of what typically gets passed in a Farm Bill was included in the recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill, like updating the commodity support programs. This puts us in a much better position as we look towards passing what's left in a 'Skinny Farm Bill.'"

Fortunately.

What actually got split, and who got which half

Here's what the split did, laid out plainly.

The farm half — crop insurance, Price Loss Coverage and Agricultural Risk Coverage, disaster assistance, animal health money, trade support, and tax breaks for farm estates — went into Trump's budget bill, H.R. 1. Locked in over a ten-year window.

That bill did not go through the Agriculture Committee. It did not need 60 votes in the Senate. It moved through a special fast-track budget process called reconciliation, which lets a bill pass on a simple majority — so Republicans didn't need a single Democratic vote, and didn't get many.

The food half went in too. And it came out $187 billion smaller.

H.R. 1 rewrote SNAP: new cost-sharing rules that push bills onto states based on their payment error rates, more state responsibility for administrative costs, expanded work requirements, and changes to how benefits are calculated. The Food Research & Action Center calls the $187 billion figure the historic cut it is.

So the two halves of the old deal both moved — but only one of them got paid.

As Oklahoma Watch reported in the story where Lucas's "fortunately" line appears, that decision "effectively decoupled nutrition from agricultural policy." Analysts at the Oklahoma Policy Institute warned it weakens one of the last bipartisan coalitions in Congress and dumps new costs on states.

We've written about what that cost-shift looks like on the ground: states now on the hook for billions in food stamp costs for the first time ever, and four million Americans already off the program while unemployment hasn't moved.

Then he voted for a farm bill that doesn't fix any of it

On April 30, 2026, the House passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 — the "skinny" farm bill — 224 to 200. Republicans voted 209 to 3 in favor. Lucas voted yes.

That bill had one obvious job available to it: put the food aid back.

It didn't. FRAC's read of the committee text was blunt — the mark "fails to include funding to restore the historic $187 billion in cuts to SNAP." It doesn't reverse the expanded time limits. It doesn't reverse the cost shift onto states. It doesn't restore benefits for the caregivers, veterans, older workers and homeless people who lost them.

What it does instead is write the new, smaller SNAP into standing farm law — the permanent statute the program runs on. The cuts stop being a line in a budget bill and become the baseline everything else gets measured from.

45,277 households in his own district

This is not an abstraction in Oklahoma's 3rd District.

45,277 households there — about 15% of every household in the district — use SNAP to buy groceries. That includes 21,027 households with children and 14,920 with someone 60 or older in them, according to USDA's own data.

His district is rural and enormous — it stretches from the Panhandle to the western edge of the Tulsa suburbs. It is exactly the kind of place the old farm-bill bargain was built to cover on both ends at once: the people who grow the food and the people who can't afford it.

The farmers in that district got their ten-year certainty. Charlcey Plummer, an Oklahoma cotton grower quoted by Oklahoma Watch, described 2025 as the best cotton crop her family ever grew and the least money they ever made on one — "Every input on the farm is higher." She's right, and crop insurance and updated reference prices genuinely help her.

The grandmother two counties over who lost part of her food budget got nothing. There was no second bill for her. Lucas's word for that arrangement was fortunately.

The pattern in one bill

The same farm bill Lucas voted for on April 30 carries something else with his fingerprints on it: language that would permanently block the return of Fort Reno to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, by deleting the expiration date on an 18-year-old ban.

That's the through-line. When Frank Lucas has real power over a bill — and after 32 years, he has as much as anyone in that room — the things that get locked in permanently are the ones that take something away.

The bill is with the Senate now. The food aid can still go back in.

We deserve better.

Source

Oklahoma Farmers Face Uncertain Future as Comprehensive Farm Bill Splinters — Stephen Martin, Oklahoma Watch, January 30, 2026. Photo: Oklahoma Watch.

Frank Lucas Has Blocked Fort Reno's Return for 18 Years. His New Farm Bill Would Make It Permanent.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:28:19 +0000

There is a stretch of land west of Oklahoma City — about 6,700 acres of grass and hay bales and old brick buildings — that the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes have been trying to get back for more than 150 years.

It was part of their reservation. In 1883, President Chester A. Arthur carved 9,493 acres out of that reservation and made it a military post called Fort Reno. The Army bred cavalry horses there, then mules for two world wars. When the Army was done with it in 1948, Congress didn't give it back. It handed the land to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which turned it into a research station.

The tribes have never stopped asking for it. And for the last eighteen years, the thing standing in the way has been a single provision tucked inside the farm bill — the sprawling piece of farm and food legislation that Frank Lucas has spent his career writing.

In March 2026, the House Agriculture Committee released its new farm bill. Buried inside the 800-plus pages was a change to that provision. Not a repeal. The opposite.

It deletes the expiration date.

What the provision actually does

Since the 2008 farm bill, federal law has barred the USDA from declaring the Fort Reno research facility "excess property" or transferring it to anyone else. Congress has renewed that ban over and over — through farm bills, through spending bills, through a disaster relief package.

Every one of those versions came with a sunset. The most recent extension, attached to the American Relief Act of 2025, ran the prohibition through September 30, 2025. That sunset is why the question kept coming back: every few years, Congress had to look at Fort Reno again and decide.

The Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 removes the end date. If the language survives, the ban on transferring Fort Reno becomes a permanent feature of federal law — in place indefinitely unless some future Congress votes to take it out.

Lucas represents Oklahoma's 3rd District, which includes Fort Reno. He chairs the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation, Research and Biotechnology. And as NonDoc reported, he has been the most visible federal lawmaker attached to this language for years.

His spokesman's answer is that prior federal settlements already resolved the tribes' claim, and that Congress needs to keep acting to protect the research at the site.

The committee approved the bill 34-17 in the early hours of March 4, after a markup that ran more than 20 hours. The full House passed it 224-200 on April 30.

"They say that we were paid for it. We haven't been paid for it."

That's Reggie Wassana, governor of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, in an interview with NonDoc.

The "we already paid you" argument is the whole federal case, and it rests on two payments. One came from treaty-era agreements over reservation land the tribes gave up in the late 1800s. The other came in 1965, when the government settled with the tribes for $15 million over lands ceded in 1891.

Here is the problem with using the 1965 settlement to close the book on Fort Reno. That settlement came through the Indian Claims Commission — and the Commission's authority only covered claims through 1946. Fort Reno wasn't transferred to the USDA until 1948.

The tribes aren't the only ones who noticed. The U.S. Department of the Interior looked at this and concluded the tribes hold a "credible, equitable claim" to land that wasn't included in the earlier settlements.

Wassana submitted written testimony to a House subcommittee in March 2026 — he was scheduled to appear in person but got caught by travel problems, so his statement went into the record instead. In it, he wrote that Fort Reno "sits on land taken from the Cheyenne and Arapaho by federal action," and that returning it would "acknowledge and remedy that dispossession."

"Returning Fort Reno to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes is a concrete, lawful and moral step Congress can take to repair historical wrongs, restore tribal stewardship of ancestral lands and strengthen cultural and economic ties across Oklahoma," Wassana wrote.

This isn't a new idea, either. In 1949, Oklahoma Congressman Toby Morris introduced a bill to return roughly 6,900 acres to the tribes once the Army left. It passed the House in 1952 and died in the Senate. At the hearings, a 93-year-old Cheyenne man testified that tribal members had always believed the land would come back when the military no longer needed it.

That was 74 years ago. The land still hasn't come back.

Nobody is trying to take the research station away

The defense of the provision is that the science at the Oklahoma and Central Plains Agricultural Research Center is irreplaceable. A House Agriculture Committee aide said the center's work "cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world."

Maybe so. But that's an argument for keeping the research going — not for keeping the deed.

Wassana has said publicly that he's offered exactly that trade: the USDA keeps doing its research, the tribes get ownership, and the two work together — including on bison studies. In a September 2025 interview, he described the sticking point differently:

"We've offered everything and tried to do everything and bend as much as we can, but nothing is ever good enough for him to say, 'Yeah, let's work the deal together, we can be partners.'"

And this is the part that should bother anyone in Oklahoma's 3rd District, tribal member or not. As NonDoc laid out, there is no bill pending to transfer Fort Reno to the tribes. There is no legislation Lucas is defending the research station against. The only recurring legislative action on Fort Reno for eighteen years has run in one direction — inserting language to stop the USDA from ever letting the land go.

You don't need a permanent, no-expiration ban to stop something nobody has introduced.

What the tribes say it would be worth

Wassana has pointed to what the land could do if it ever came back. Leasing. Cattle. Crops. Energy development — there's oil and gas production in the surrounding area, and he told NonDoc it's "more than likely" there are reserves under Fort Reno, though he was careful to say that would need real evaluation before anyone counted on it.

Meanwhile, Lucas has been asking Washington to spend more on the facility. He requested $16.6 million from the House Appropriations Committee for renovations at the research center in 2025 — up from roughly $1.3 million in each of the two prior years. The tribes read that jump as one more way to lock the status quo in place.

"Keeping some type of research going, to me, it's more of a control issue than it is doing what's right for the general public," Wassana said.

Lucas's office did not respond to that reporter's requests for comment.

Thirty-two years, one answer

Lucas has been in Congress since 1994. He has led farm bills for years, and he sits on both the Agriculture Committee and the Financial Services Committee — the two committees whose industries make up almost his entire donor list.

When a member of Congress has exactly one recurring piece of legislative business with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, and that business is an eighteen-year-old provision keeping their land out of reach, that's a choice he keeps making.

The 2026 farm bill now sits with the Senate. The Fort Reno language can still be pulled out. As NonDoc put it, what happens next is "less a single decision point than a recurring legislative loop" — and Lucas has controlled which way that loop turns for a very long time.

He has never had to explain it at a town hall, either. His congressional website's Town Halls page still tells visitors that "The 2024 Town Hall schedule will be posted after the New Year."

We deserve better.

Source

Farm bill draft would permanently block return of Fort Reno to Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes — Stephen A. Martin, NonDoc, March 20, 2026. Photo: Fort Reno, Oklahoma, 1891, via Tribal Business News.

The Farm Bill Failed by One Vote. Tommy Tuberville Was at the Meeting — Just Not in the Room.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:25:35 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, the Senate Agriculture Committee tried to advance a farm bill. It failed by one vote.

Tommy Tuberville sits on that committee. He was at the markup. He was present for other parts of the meeting.

He was not in the room for the final vote.

How one empty chair killed it

The bill went down 10-11.

Tuberville did vote — by proxy, in favor. But proxy votes don't count toward the final majority in committee. You have to be in the room.

Republicans were already short. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been hospitalized and in rehabilitation since June. That was one seat Republicans couldn't fill no matter what.

Tuberville's was a seat they could have.

As the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported, "Republicans were without a majority in the room" because of McConnell's absence, and Tuberville "was also not present during the final vote on the bill, allowing Democrats to win the vote against the bill by one vote."

His office did not respond to requests for comment.

What Alabama lost when the bill died

This is not a procedural footnote. The farm bill sets the rules for crop insurance, disaster payments, conservation programs, marketing assistance, and rural development.

It has not been reauthorized since 2018. Farmers have been operating on extensions for years.

The bill that died on Thursday included things farm groups had been fighting for. The National Corn Growers Association said it was "extremely disappointed," calling it a bill that "was particularly important to corn growers," and warned: "We are running out of time in this Congress."

American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said the "stakes are too high" for another year without a farm bill.

Chairman John Boozman, the Arkansas Republican who wrote the bill, said struggling farmers were being held "hostage." He also warned exactly what failure would mean:

"Should this legislation be defeated today, current law will remain in effect, and states who poorly administer SNAP programs will begin to pay for the portion of the benefit cost next year."

Remember that sentence. It matters enormously for Alabama, and Tuberville knows it better than almost anyone in that room.

The bill he skipped was about a bill he voted for

The whole fight was over SNAP — food assistance.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states with SNAP payment error rates above 6% have to start paying a share of their residents' food benefits. Democrats wanted a two-year delay so states could get ready. Boozman offered one year as a compromise and called it his "best and final offer." Democrats said no. The bill died.

Here's the part Alabamians should sit with.

Tuberville voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 1, 2025. That's the law that created this cost-shift in the first place.

And Alabama is one of the states it hits hardest. According to Alabama Daily News, Alabama's SNAP error rate for fiscal year 2025 was 9.52% — up from 8.32% the year before. That puts the state in the 10% cost-share tier. Beginning October 1, 2027, Alabama would owe roughly $174 million to cover its share of food benefit costs.

About 670,000 Alabamians get SNAP. 300,000 of them are children.

So: Tuberville voted for the law that put a $174 million bill on Alabama's desk. Then he sat on the committee handling the relief. Then he wasn't in the room when the vote came.

And he's running to be the one who pays it

Tuberville is not running for re-election to the Senate. He is running for governor of Alabama.

If he wins, he is the person who has to find that $174 million. He would be governor when the bill comes due.

His plan for fixing Alabama's error rate, per Alabama Daily News, is to use AI. He said he and his team plan to use artificial intelligence to bring the rate down to around 5%. The reporting notes he offered no implementation details and no evidence of coordination with the state Department of Human Resources.

That's the plan. Artificial intelligence, no details, for a number that just went the wrong direction two years running.

This is the job, and he keeps not doing it

Skipping the vote is not a one-time thing with Tuberville. It's the shape of his entire Senate career.

In 2023 he spent ten months holding up more than 450 military promotions — generals and admirals included — to protest an unrelated Pentagon policy. He dropped the holds without winning a single policy change.

He has told Alabamians that Social Security is a scam, which we wrote about when he called it a "Ponzi scheme" while collecting about $93,000 in benefits from it.

He has been caught voting in Florida while claiming to live in Alabama.

Now the farm bill — the single most important piece of legislation for the state he wants to govern — failed by one vote, in a room he had walked out of.

What happens next

The committee recessed rather than adjourned, so it can take the bill up again when the Senate returns from its August recess. Ranking member Amy Klobuchar said she is "committed to continuing to work on the bill."

Meanwhile, current law stays in effect. The cost-share requirement is still coming. Alabama farmers still have no farm bill. And 670,000 Alabamians on SNAP, including 300,000 kids, are still in the middle of a fight their senator declined to show up for.

Alabama deserves a senator who is in the room.

Update, August 22: Alabama's food banks asked him by name. He didn't answer.

Thirteen days after Tuberville missed that vote, the people who have to catch Alabamians when they fall came to a microphone and asked him for help.

On Wednesday, August 19, at the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama in Bessemer, all eight of Alabama's food banks and their partners publicly called on Tuberville and Sen. Katie Britt to win the state a two-year waiver — a delay of the $174 million cost share until fiscal year 2029, the same relief other states already got.

Their ask is not for money. It is for time.

Michael Ledger, CEO of Feeding the Gulf Coast, explained what the penalty is actually punishing:

"I want to be clear about what that score means. We are talking about penalties to states because of administrative errors. Administrative errors are not fraud. Fraud only runs 1% to 2%."

That is the whole thing in two sentences. Alabama is not being fined for cheating. It is being fined for paperwork.

Ledger also gave the line that became the headline:

"I like to think of SNAP as a dam and we're dealing with the overflow. If the dam breaks, we're in big trouble. For every one meal our food bank provides, SNAP provides nine."

Nine to one. That is the ratio anyone should keep in mind who thinks charity can absorb this. Alabama's food banks are not a backup system for SNAP. They are the overflow channel, and they are already running full.

Nicole Williams, CEO of the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama, put the same point to WSFA:

"We are a critical safety net, but we were never built to replace the federal nutrition support that lets families buy groceries consistently and with dignity."

One of Alabama's two senators can actually do this. It isn't Britt.

Here is the part that turns this from a policy story into an accountability story.

Any waiver has to be written into the 2026 farm bill. AL.com asked both senators about it.

Britt's office answered — and its answer was, in effect, not my committee:

"Senator Britt does not sit on the Senate Agriculture Committee and therefore will have no opportunity to offer amendments to the farm bill until it advances to the Senate floor."

That happens to be true. Britt is not on Agriculture. She cannot offer an amendment in that room.

Tommy Tuberville is on Agriculture. He is the one member of Alabama's Senate delegation who sits in the room where this amendment would be written, offered and voted on.

AL.com asked him for comment. He did not respond before publication.

So the tally now reads: he voted for the law that created the $174 million bill. He was absent for the committee vote on the fix. And when Alabama's food banks called on him by name, his office said nothing — while the senator who can't help was the one who bothered to reply.

Alabama is being penalized for not being bad enough

Here is the part of this law that ought to make anyone angry, whatever they think about food stamps.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act sets the state's share of SNAP costs on a sliding scale tied to its payment error rate:

6% to 7.99% → the state pays 5% of benefit costs
8% to 9.99% → the state pays 10%
10% or higher → the state pays 15%

CBPP's state-by-state table put Alabama's projected bill at $172 million a year, based on its 2024 error rate. Alabama's own legislative analysts put the current figure at $174 million. Either way, the state is nowhere near the 6% line that would keep it at zero.

But the law also wrote in an escape hatch — and it only opens for the states with the worst records. A state whose error rate was 13.33% or higher in 2025 gets its bill pushed back to 2029. Alaska, whose rate topped 23%, got the delay. So did Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, D.C.

Alabama's rate was 9.52%. Too high to avoid the penalty. Too low to qualify for the grace period.

The state is being charged $174 million a year because it administers SNAP better than Alaska does.

This is not a hostile reading of the law. It is what budget analysts across the spectrum say it does. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, walking through the provision, put it flatly:

"In effect, this rewards states with the worst payment accuracy while penalizing states with lower error rates. As some critics have noted, this could even temporarily encourage states to make more mistakes."

Tuberville voted for that law.

The government is driving the error rate up, then billing Alabama for it

Michael Ledger said the penalty punishes administrative errors, not fraud. He's right, and it goes further than that: more than half the dollar value of SNAP errors in 2022 was the fault of the state agency, not the participant. These are data-entry and eligibility-system mistakes.

Here's what makes the timing indefensible. Alabama's bill will be set by its fiscal 2025 and 2026 error rates — years in which the federal government made errors dramatically more likely:

USDA treated the megabill's sweeping SNAP changes as effective the day it was signed, July 4, 2025 — but waited nearly two months to tell states that. The 120-day grace period for errors caused by a change in law was already running, and states didn't know.
On the new immigration eligibility restrictions, USDA didn't give states the information they needed until October 31, 2025 — then informed them the grace period ended the next day. A federal judge found that so unreasonable he extended the hold-harmless period by injunction.
Then the 43-day government shutdown hit. For the first time ever, households didn't get their November benefits. States were ordered not to issue benefits, then ordered to issue partial ones, then handed a corrected formula the following day — after at least one state had already paid out on the wrong math.
And starting October 1, 2026, federal reimbursement for state administrative costs — including the money states would use to fix their error rates — gets cut from 50% to 25%.

One more thing worth knowing: the error rate counts overpayments. It does not count cases where a state wrongly denies or cuts off an eligible family, and there is no penalty for that at all. So the only pressure the law creates runs one direction — toward more paperwork, more denials, fewer people fed.

Which is exactly what Alabama is seeing.

The damage has already started

The cost-share doesn't hit until October 2027. The rest of the law is hitting now.

Between July 2025 and May 2026, 81,800 Alabamians lost their SNAP benefits — an 11% drop in enrollment, according to the Alabama Political Reporter. 23,300 of them were children.

And the state has no plan for the bill that's coming. Kirk Fulford, deputy director of Alabama's Legislative Services Agency, said it in nine words:

"We don't have $174 million."

That figure is more than $20 million larger than the entire annual budget of the Alabama Department of Human Resources — the agency that runs SNAP. If the state has to pay, lawmakers have to find it in the fiscal year 2027 budget.

Food bank leaders laid out the three ways this ends: Congress grants the two-year extension, Alabama finds $174 million, or Alabama loses its SNAP program.

Meanwhile, hunger in the state is already going the wrong way. Feeding America counted about 919,000 Alabamians — roughly 1 in 5 residents — as food insecure in 2024. For children it was 1 in 4. All 67 counties were affected.

At Leaf Pantry and Urban Farm in Midfield, executive director Veronica Smoke is watching it arrive:

"The SNAP benefits are reduced. We see it. The need doesn't disappear. It just shifts."

Her pantry served 1,850 people a month last year. This year it is serving more than 3,000.

It would take grocery stores down with it

The part of this that has gotten the least attention is what happens to the businesses on the other side of the checkout counter.

Ellie Taylor, president and CEO of the Alabama Grocers Association, told the press conference her group has identified 117 Alabama grocery stores at risk of closing if the state's SNAP program isn't funded. 61% of them are in low-income areas. 68% are in rural communities.

The math is not complicated. Many independent grocers take 20% to 40% of their retail sales through SNAP. For some it runs as high as 60%. Take that away and the store doesn't shrink — it closes.

And in much of rural Alabama, that store is the only one.

"Once a grocery store closes in rural Alabama, it is extremely difficult to replace. We should not be creating new food deserts while trying to improve the administration of a nutrition program," Taylor said.

Read that last clause again, because it is the cleanest description of what this law does. To fix a paperwork error rate, it threatens to close the only grocery store in a hundred-odd Alabama towns.

This is a farm bill problem, in a farm state, in front of a senator who sits on the Agriculture Committee and wants to be governor.

What's actually being asked of him

Strip away the acronyms and the fiscal years, and the request from Alabama's food banks is small.

They are not asking Tuberville to repeal the law he voted for. They are not asking him to defend food stamps. They are asking him to get Alabama the same two-year delay that seven other places already have, in a farm bill his own committee is still writing — and to be there when it's voted on.

He is asking Alabamians to make him governor. If he wins, he is the man who has to find the $174 million he voted to charge them — in the same budget year the bill comes due.

Eight food banks, a grocers association and a Midfield food pantry have now said out loud what they need from him. His colleague who cannot help them answered the phone. He didn't.

The committee comes back after recess. The amendment has to be offered by someone who sits on it.

That's him.

Source

Alex Angle, "Senate panel, with Tuberville absent, fails to advance farm bill amid SNAP stalemate," Alabama Daily News, via The Decatur Daily, August 8, 2026. Additional reporting from Cami Koons, Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Update sources: "If the dam breaks, we're in big trouble": Tuberville, Britt urged to back Alabama SNAP waiver — AL.com, August 21, 2026, by Michaela Yielding; "We're asking for equal treatment": Food bank leaders ask for more time to lower SNAP error rate before fees take effect — WSFA, August 19, 2026; Katie Bergh and Dottie Rosenbaum, "Congressional Delay of SNAP Cost Shift Urgently Needed to Protect Food Assistance for Low-Income Families" — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 8, 2026; "81,800 Alabamians dropped from SNAP as state faces potential funding crisis" — Alabama Political Reporter, July 23, 2026.

Michelle Fischbach Sits on the Trade Subcommittee. At Farmfest, She Defended Tariffs the Supreme Court Already Threw Out.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday, August 4, 2026, Michelle Fischbach stood on a stage at Minnesota Farmfest in Morgan and defended President Trump's tariffs to a room full of farmers.

A member of the front-row audience started booing.

She kept going. There have been "20 agreements" on trade under this administration, she told them, and "usually ag is a winner" in them.

Why that landed badly in a room full of farmers

Six months ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's tariffs were illegal — that the 1977 emergency law he used to tax nearly everything coming into the country never gave a president that power.

The government now owes $166 billion in refunds. As we wrote last week, that money is going to Apple, Ford, Nike, Amazon and General Motors — the importers who legally paid the tariffs. Not to the farmers who lost export markets. Not to anyone who paid more at the register.

Fischbach's opponent, DFL-endorsed candidate Erik Osberg, put the question to her directly:

"If these tariffs have been so helpful, why did the Supreme Court have to create a $160 billion refund that is going to the importers? We need Congress to act as the Constitution said in Article 1, Section 8."

That's the part that should stick.

Article I, Section 8 is her job description

The Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and to lay duties. Tariffs are a congressional power. The Supreme Court just said so in the most expensive way possible.

Fischbach sits on the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee. That is the specific committee, in the specific chamber, that holds that specific power.

She has spent that seat defending an executive tariff program the courts struck down, rather than exercising the authority the Constitution assigns to her. When farmers asked what Congress would do, her answer was to describe what the administration had already done.

The farm payments question

The forum opened with the moderator asking about the recurring need for ad hoc farm payments — the emergency checks Washington keeps writing to keep farms afloat.

Fischbach said Congress needs to "provide more stability and more clarity," and that farmers want strong markets, not payments.

Osberg agreed on the diagnosis and disagreed on the cause: bridge payments are "throwing billions of dollars at a problem" that needs a long-term fix, he said, adding, "It'd be nice and stable if Congress would stand up against the unconstitutional tariffs and take that back."

That's the loop farmers are stuck in. Tariffs close export markets. Closed markets crater prices. Washington writes emergency checks to cover the hole it made. Fischbach wants credit for wanting stability while defending the thing destabilizing it.

USMCA and the "very well" answer

On the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — which the Trump administration has decided not to extend — Fischbach pointed to her access to the chief U.S. agricultural negotiator and said talks with Mexico were going "very well."

"We have the base of it, and we are taking a look at what's going on in the USMCA, what we can improve on, and there's obviously things we can improve on."

Osberg's answer was the one the room could measure against their own experience:

"One of the improvements we could make is looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, 'Are we a reliable trade partner right now?'"

He then quoted a young farmer on a committee he convenes: "I wouldn't run my farm the way we're running this country right now."

"She is out here"

The forum also covered USDA's plan to move Washington-based staff into regional hubs. Osberg described the effect on the ground — local food producers who have waited three years just for permission to accept food stamps — and called it "chaos and uncertainty and dysfunction."

Fischbach's rebuttal was that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had been at Farmfest a few hours earlier.

"(Rollins) is out here. She is listening to people. She is talking to the people that are actually farming, the people with boots on the ground."

A cabinet secretary attending a farm show is not a response to a producer who's been waiting three years for a permit. It's evidence that someone showed up.

What Minnesota farmers are actually carrying

Tariffs hiked Midwest household costs and slashed jobs, according to a report published in July. The Minnesota Senate has compiled its own record of how the tariffs hit Minnesota businesses.

Fischbach closed the forum on her record: estate tax relief, crop insurance improvements, year-round E15.

Osberg closed with a question.

"Are farmers better off today than they were two years ago?"

The booing from the front row was one person's answer. The $166 billion in refunds going to Apple and Amazon instead of Minnesota grain farmers is a bigger one.

Source

West Central Tribune, "Fischbach, Osberg clash over tariffs, USDA shakeup in Farmfest candidate forum," by Noah Fish, August 5, 2026. The booing was also covered by Courier Minnesota.

Mike Lindell Got Two Minutes in Front of Minnesota Farmers. He Used Them on Satan and 2020.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:52:00 +0000

Farmfest is Minnesota's summertime farm industry convention, held in Redwood County, and it's where the state's farm economy goes to be heard.

On Wednesday, August 5, four candidates for governor sat on stage there: U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, House Speaker Lisa Demuth, businessman Kendall Qualls, and Mike Lindell. It was the first and last time Klobuchar shared a stage with all three Republicans. Republicans pick their nominee this coming Tuesday, August 11 — so this was the last chance any of them would get to make a closing argument to a room full of farmers before the votes are counted.

Each candidate got two minutes.

Klobuchar used hers on a rural plan — markets, hospitals, housing, workforce. Demuth used hers on her record as speaker of a tied Minnesota House. Qualls used his on how many candidate forums he'd won.

Lindell used his on a satanic statue and the 2020 election.

What he actually said

You can watch it on the full forum video. After a minute of biography — walking beans on his uncle's farm, church on Sundays, addiction, MyPillow — he pivoted:

"This is a spiritual battle of evil and good of biblical proportions. We have a governor that put a satanic statue in the … capitol. Put the satanic statue in there. All the evil and the horrific things that we've seen happen as we watch our state just crumble."

Then he turned to Klobuchar, sitting three seats away:

"Amy on this stage and we agreed, we agreed in 2020, and we came into a historical agreement on the election fraud. She went after the machines. She named them in the movie Kill Chain. She named them and she went after this fraud. But then she stopped after the 2020 election. What did Mike Lindell do since then? I spent $80 million trying to secure our elections in this country."

And he closed with this:

"What did Amy do since then? Amy went to Washington, brings back $20 billion to our state, only to have it shipped off to Somalia. That's not a good steward of our money."

That was the whole thing. Two minutes, in front of farmers, five days before a primary. Not one word about tariffs, soybeans, input costs, land prices, or rural hospitals.

The satanic statue wasn't the governor's

Start with the easy one, because it's the kind of claim that sounds damning until you look it up.

In December 2024, a Minnesota satanist group put up a holiday display in the State Capitol — a phoenix with a pentagram — alongside the building's Christmas tree, nativity scene, and Hanukkah menorah. The permit came from the Minnesota Department of Administration, which handles all Capitol displays. A spokeswoman for that agency said a permit "does not imply an endorsement by the state."

Gov. Tim Walz had nothing to do with it. His office said so directly at the time:

"The governor does not agree with the display and did not approve it. But the First Amendment means that he does not police speech in the State Capitol. That's true whether it's a religious display, a political protest, or a Minnesotan advocating for a policy."

The group behind it says it doesn't worship Satan or believe he exists.

So the "governor put a satanic statue in the capitol" line has one accurate word in it: capitol. A candidate for governor either doesn't know how permits at his own future Capitol work, or knows and said it anyway.

The Kill Chain claim is false — and the irony is enormous

This is the part worth slowing down on, because Lindell told a room full of people that a sitting U.S. senator once agreed with him that the 2020 election was stolen. She didn't. And the movie he cited proves it.

"Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections" is an HBO documentary. It premiered on March 26, 2020 — seven months before the 2020 election. HBO's own announcement describes it as arriving "in advance of the 2020 Presidential election" and taking "a deep dive into the weaknesses of today's election technology."

It is a film about preventing an attack that hadn't happened, not about proving one that did. Its argument is that America should use paper ballots and audits so results can be checked. HBO's announcement lists Klobuchar as one of four senators interviewed — alongside Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, plus Mark Warner and Ron Wyden. Sitting for a pre-election documentary about voting-machine security, next to a Republican, is not "a historical agreement on the election fraud." There was no agreement, historical or otherwise.

Now the irony. The film Lindell invoked as his own evidence follows one central figure: Finnish hacker and security researcher Harri Hursti, who travels the country demonstrating how voting equipment can be broken into.

In August 2021, CNN brought Harri Hursti to Lindell's Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls specifically to examine the data Lindell said would prove the election was hacked. Hursti looked at it and told the Washington Post the whole event was "a big fat nothing and a distraction." We wrote about that symposium three days ago — the promised proof never arrived, and the $5 million challenge Lindell built the event around ended with a federal judge ordering him to pay a Trump supporter who won it.

Lindell stood on a stage at Farmfest and named a documentary as his corroboration. The star of that documentary examined Lindell's evidence in person and called it nothing.

The $80 million he says he spent — while telling judges he's broke

"I spent $80 million trying to secure our elections in this country."

Set aside that the number keeps growing — he told CNBC in 2021 it was $25 million. Take him at his word today and just ask what an $80 million election crusade bought, and who paid for it.

What it bought: a Denver jury finding that he defamed a former Dominion executive, and $2.3 million in damages. A federal judge in Minnesota ruling that he defamed Smartmatic with false claims about voting machines. A separate federal judge ordering him to pay $5 million to the software expert who debunked his data. Zero overturned results, in any state, ever.

Who paid for it: the people MyPillow owes. Creditors are chasing the company for more than $25 million in unpaid bills, including an $8.8 million judgment to FedEx. Lindell has spent years fighting the IRS over a $6 million tax debt that put a lien on his Texas house and garnished half his paycheck. "I have no assets," he said under oath in 2024. "There's nothing left." In 2025 he told a federal judge, "I'm in ruins."

Jim Furlong, his longtime friend and MyPillow's former president, tried to warn him at a 2016 board meeting. "I thought it was a terrible mistake," Furlong said in a 2024 deposition, of Lindell taking the company political. Lindell's answer, per Furlong: "Mike said he was going to do it, and if we didn't like it, that was just too bad."

The day before Farmfest, Lindell stepped down as MyPillow's CEO and dropped to a minority ownership stake. His replacement is Jim Furlong.

And one more thing about the man who says he spent $80 million on election integrity: until the third week of July — about two weeks before this forum — he wasn't registered to vote in Minnesota at all.

"$20 billion … shipped off to Somalia"

This is the line he chose to end on, and it's the one he backed with the least.

He didn't say what $20 billion. He didn't name a program, a bill, an appropriation, an audit, or a case. He didn't explain what Klobuchar had to do with it or who did the shipping. He said it, the crowd reacted, and the moderator called time.

Minnesota's fraud scandal is real, and it is genuinely enraging. Feeding Our Future was a scheme that stole from a federally funded child nutrition program by opening more than 250 fake meal sites and billing for meals never served. On May 22, 2026, the Justice Department announced that its ringleader, Aimee Bock, had been sentenced to 500 months in prison — over 41 years. The judge told her, "This was a fraud vortex and you were at the epicenter of it."

DOJ puts that scheme at $250 million. That is a quarter of a billion dollars of children's food money, and every Minnesotan has the right to be furious about it. It is also not $20 billion, it wasn't money Klobuchar "brought back," and Lindell offered nothing to bridge the gap between the number prosecutors use and the one he shouted at a farm show.

Earlier in the same forum, asked what he'd do about fraud, Lindell had called it "the biggest blessing our state's ever had, because it's opened our eyes to get rid of the current government we have."

That's a strange thing to call stolen food money.

What he skipped

Here's what the farmers in that room are actually living through, and what Lindell didn't spend a second of his two minutes on.

Trump's tariffs raised input costs and cost Minnesota its biggest customer — China booked no orders at all for the state's soybean harvest, sending growers to Washington to beg for a bailout. Soybeans are Minnesota's single biggest agricultural export. The war in Iran drove up fertilizer and fuel costs. Trump's approval among rural Americans fell from 60% to 50% between the start of his second term and June, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Klobuchar used part of her closing to name it directly: not one of the three Republicans on that stage had objected to the tariffs, or to the war in Iran, or to the megabill that cut Medicaid for rural hospitals. "We do not need a governor who is a rubber stamp of Donald Trump," she said.

None of them stood up to argue otherwise. Lindell went next, and talked about Satan.

Meanwhile the bill he's never criticized is still landing. Congressional Republicans let the Affordable Care Act tax credits expire, which raises premiums for a projected 89,000 Minnesotans — a lot of whom are farmers and ranchers buying insurance on the individual market, exactly the people sitting in that building.

The Rose Garden story, for the record

One small thing, since he brought it up himself. Lindell told the crowd he was at the Rose Garden "right before the pandemic," where he said a nation had turned its back on God.

He was at the Rose Garden on March 30, 2020. It was a White House coronavirus task force briefing, more than two weeks into the national emergency, and Lindell was there because MyPillow had retooled to make masks. He used his turn at the podium to tell Americans to read the Bible. Trump, standing behind him, said afterward: "I did not know he was going to do that."

That's the pattern, and it hasn't changed in six years. Give Mike Lindell a microphone at an event about something urgent and specific, and he'll use it for something else.

Minnesota Republicans vote Tuesday.

Source

Aaron Rupar posted the clip of Lindell's closing statement on Bluesky. Quotations here are transcribed from the full forum broadcast, linked above. Additional reporting from the Minnesota Reformer, also linked above. Photo of Lindell signing his book at Farmfest by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.

Kelly Ayotte Says She Disagrees With Trump's Canada Tariffs. She Refused to Sign the Letter New England's Other Governors Sent.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:10:00 +0000

Bohanan Farm in Hopkinton has been in operation since 1907. Five generations. Today it runs more than 120 dairy cows and 180 acres of corn, and bottles about 128,000 fluid ounces of milk a day as Contoocook Creamery.

Jamie Robertson can trace most of what it costs to run that farm back to Canada — the grain, the fertilizer for the cornfields, the diesel in the tractors and delivery trucks.

On August 19, a 50% tariff on a range of Canadian goods takes effect.

"If we can't cover our costs, it's not going to be a good picture," Robertson told the Concord Monitor.

Kelly Ayotte's response, as governor of the state this farm sits in:

"As I have said before, I disagree with tariffs on Canada because they simply are not good for New Hampshire."

She added that she will "continue to urge the administration to resolve this dispute with one of our state's largest trading partners as quickly as possible."

Urging. That is the whole plan.

The part that should make a dairy farmer furious

Here is what the White House says these tariffs are for.

Trump signed three proclamations on July 20 under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — an authority no president had used in at least 70 years. The White House fact sheet says Canada discriminates against U.S. exports in three sectors: motor vehicles, alcoholic beverages, and dairy.

From the fact sheet itself:

"As part of its complicated and protectionist dairy system, Canada established tariff-rate quotas on U.S. cheese that are much more restrictive than the tariff-rate quotas imposed on similar imports of cheese into Canada from the EU."

So: a policy sold as standing up for American dairy farmers is about to raise the price of grain and fertilizer for an American dairy farm in Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

The tariffs cover roughly $20 billion in imports and hit goods that were previously protected under the USMCA — the trade agreement Trump himself signed in his first term. Energy, potash, fish, and critical minerals are exempt. Grain and fertilizer are not.

Robertson has already been squeezing what he can. The creamery switched from glass bottles to plastic to hold costs down. There is not much left to trim before the milk price moves or the farm doesn't work.

"I disagree" is not a policy

Give Ayotte this much: unlike many Republicans, she has not pretended the tariffs are good. She said in April 2025 that Canada is New Hampshire's number two trading partner and the tariffs were "not helping." She took a trade mission to Canada in the summer of 2025.

But every time saying so would have cost her something with Trump, she has passed.

When New England's other governors sent a joint letter to Canada's eastern premiers, Ayotte refused to sign it — and skipped the meeting with their Canadian counterparts, sending a representative instead. The Globe's characterization of her posture was that she was "holding her breath and hoping for the best."
Asked about a state gas tax suspension to give people immediate relief at the pump, she said in May she'd continue to monitor gas prices and did not embrace the idea.
When she criticized the earlier 25% tariffs, she paired it with saying she "appreciated the concerns" Trump had about the border.

A governor has real tools. She can join other states in a formal position. She can suspend a state tax. She can put money into the state Department of Agriculture. She can say plainly that a specific policy by a specific president is hurting a specific farm and demand it stop.

What she has chosen instead is a sentence that expresses disagreement and commits to nothing — delivered about a policy that takes effect in under two weeks.

What the farmer actually asked for

Robertson wasn't asking anyone to save him with a bailout. He asked the state to stop hollowing out the things that keep farms viable:

"We just can't keep cutting and cutting those things out. We've got to keep some infrastructure to be able to keep farms rolling."

He named the state Department of Agriculture and the university system — extension services, research, the unglamorous public backbone under a working farm.

That is a request aimed squarely at a governor's budget. It is answerable. Ayotte has not answered it.

This is the pattern

New Hampshire has already paid for the tariffs in ways that have nothing to do with a dairy barn. Canadian travel to the state is down about 30% according to state officials, gutting tourism towns like North Conway. A toy company in Keene faced a 145% tax on every toy it imports from China, with its CEO saying they had to "cut your overhead… do something to survive."

Ayotte's approach to Trump has been consistent across issues, not just this one. When the administration announced federal monitors at the polls in Manchester and Nashua, she said she'd "welcome anyone" — in the same press conference where she vowed to fight the DNC over New Hampshire's primary. She is willing to pick fights. She picks them with people who aren't Trump.

And she is not alone in treating the cost of living as a communications problem. This week the House Majority Whip went on television and claimed eggs cost 78 cents and milk was under $2, when the government's own data put them at $2.14 and $4.32.

At least Ayotte concedes the tariffs are bad. She has simply decided that saying so is the entire job.

The math on August 19

In under two weeks, the cost of grain and fertilizer at a farm that has operated since 1907 goes up, because the President decided Canada is unfair to American cheese.

The governor of New Hampshire disagrees with this. She has said so. She will continue to urge.

Jamie Robertson will pay it.

Source

Contoocook Creamery faces fuel cost hikes, concerned about tariffs — Concord Monitor, August 3, 2026. Additional reporting from the Union Leader and Granite Post. Photo: Concord Monitor.

The Man Trying to Seize Iowa Farmland for a Pipeline Just Threw Ashley Hinson a Fundraiser

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:25:00 +0000

If you farm in Iowa, there is a decent chance you have heard the name Bruce Rastetter — and not fondly.

Rastetter founded Summit Agricultural Group. His carbon capture pipeline venture, Summit Carbon Solutions, spent years working to run a pipeline across Iowa farmland, and in 2024 it won a permit from the Iowa Utilities Commission that came with the power of eminent domain: the legal authority to take a farmer's land whether the farmer agrees to sell or not.

On August 5, Rastetter co-hosted a fundraiser for Ashley Hinson's U.S. Senate campaign.

Who was on the invitation

Iowa Starting Line obtained the invitation. Rastetter — described in Iowa political circles as the "kingmaker" — is listed as a host, alongside Summit CEO Justin Kirchhoff.

The sponsorship tiers ran from a $500 "believer" level up to $2,000 to join the host committee.

This is not a first date. Federal Election Commission records show Rastetter has been funding Hinson's career for years:

Date	Amount	Committee
June 2019	$2,800	Ashley Hinson for Congress
September 2020	$2,800	Ashley Hinson for Congress
June 2021	$5,800	Ashley Hinson for Congress
March 2023	$6,600	Ashley Hinson for Congress
November 2025	$7,000	Ashley for Iowa
April 2026	$17,000	Team Hinson

That is $42,000 from Bruce Rastetter personally — including a $17,000 contribution in April to Team Hinson, the joint fundraising committee that lets a single donor write a much bigger check than campaign limits normally allow.

What the money is attached to

Here is why this matters more than a normal donor relationship.

Eminent domain is the government taking your property. When a private pipeline company gets that power, the state has effectively handed a businessman the ability to condemn his neighbors' farms.

Iowa landowners fought it hard, and they have won ground:

In 2025, South Dakota banned the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines, and Summit abandoned that state entirely.
In May 2026, Summit unveiled a new route that removed eight Iowa counties, cut more than 200 miles, and took roughly 400 landowners out of the project's path — rerouting west through Nebraska instead.

But Summit's original 2024 Iowa permit and its eminent domain authority remain in effect, now under review in Polk County District Court. And in July 2026, the Iowa Utilities Commission loosened a procedural condition for breaking ground in Iowa.

In other words: the fight over whether an Iowa farmer can be forced to give up land is live right now — and the man on the other side of it is raising money for Iowa's likely next senator.

Hinson hasn't said where she stands

The most telling detail in the reporting is an absence. There is no statement from Hinson on the pipeline. There is no statement from Hinson on eminent domain for private carbon pipelines. There is no vote to point to.

Her primary opponent Jim Carlin was blunt about it, criticizing her for taking money from "the man who leads that charge to take away private property rights."

Plenty of Iowa landowners have made themselves heard on this — loudly enough to drive the project out of South Dakota entirely and knock eight counties off the Iowa route. But the candidate with $42,000 of Rastetter money in her accounts has managed to stay quiet.

That silence is the product being purchased.

This fits a pattern on Iowa farmland

The pipeline isn't the only fight where Hinson has ended up on the side of the people with money rather than the people with dirt.

She voted for Trump's budget bill, which repeals most of the clean energy tax credits that built out Iowa's wind industry. That is not an abstraction for farmers — many lease their land for turbines as a hedge against volatile crop prices. One northern Iowa livestock farmer told Vox he earns about $30,000 a year from four turbines: "This is the 401(k) that I never had."

Her environmental record is not a close call. The League of Conservation Voters gives Hinson a 0% score for 2025 and 8% lifetime.

Put the two together and a consistent picture emerges. Land use that pays farmers directly — wind leases — she voted to undercut. Land use that pays a megadonor — a pipeline running through those same fields under threat of condemnation — she won't criticize.

The bigger habit

Hinson has a track record of letting donors set the message. When Josh Turek won Iowa's Democratic Senate primary, her campaign hit him within the hour with an attack ad making three claims he had never supported. And she has previously drawn scrutiny for the company her donor list keeps.

Add the "kingmaker" to that list.

What to ask her

Iowa voters deserve three straight answers before November:

Do you support private companies using eminent domain to take Iowa farmland for carbon pipelines — yes or no?
Will you return the $42,000?
If a constituent's farm is condemned for Summit's pipeline, whose side are you on?

She has had years to answer the first one. She hosted a fundraiser with the man instead.

Source

Pipeline exec accused of buying influence is now bankrolling Hinson — Zachary Oren Smith, Iowa Starting Line, August 5, 2026. Contribution figures independently verified against FEC records. Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall.

Joe Mitchell Took $10,000 From the Pipeline Boss. Eight Days Later, He Was the Only Republican Who Voted Against Iowa Landowners.

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:29:41 +0000

On March 16, 2022, a committee of the Iowa House voted on whether to protect Iowa landowners from having their farmland taken by a private carbon pipeline company.

Republicans on that committee voted yes. All but one.

Joe Mitchell was the one.

Eight days earlier, Mitchell's campaign account had received a $10,000 check. It was his largest contribution of the reporting period, and it came from Bruce Rastetter — the CEO of Summit Agricultural Group and the founder of Summit Carbon Solutions, the company that wanted the land.

Now Mitchell is the Republican nominee for Congress in Iowa's 2nd District. Two of the counties Summit planned to cut through are in that district.

What the vote was actually about

Iowa farmers had been fighting the CO2 pipelines for a year. Summit's proposed route ran about 700 miles through 30 of Iowa's 99 counties. Landowners who said no were told it didn't matter.

Ted Junker, a landowner from Butler County, described the pitch to Iowa Public Radio:

"They're using a strong arm policy, I would say. And the first thing that comes out of their mouth after you tell them no, you're not interested [is], 'Well, we're going to get it by eminent domain anyway.' And that's their spiel. That's their negotiation."

So Republicans in the Iowa House tried to slow it down. Rep. Bobby Kaufmann took a bill about cosmetology and swapped its contents for a simple rule: private pipeline companies could not seek eminent domain before March 1, 2023. One year. A pause, so the legislature would be in session if Summit came for people's land.

It was not a radical bill. House Speaker Pat Grassley described it as a warning shot: "We just want landowners and…the companies trying to do this to know that the legislature just stands prepared to act if needed."

Democrats on the committee voted no because they thought one year was too weak — Rep. Molly Donahue said she'd have voted yes for a three-year moratorium. Every Republican voted yes.

Except Joe Mitchell.

The $10,000

The Iowa Standard, a conservative Iowa outlet, asked Mitchell why he voted the way he did. His answer:

"As gas prices are at record highs and our agriculture industry is under attack, it's extremely unfair to switch up the rules in the middle of a process that will support biofuels and benefit everyday Iowans. This is not about politics. This is about a fair process, supporting agriculture, and alleviating the energy crisis that is hurting our communities."

Two months later, the campaign finance reports came out. Eight days before that vote, Mitchell had taken $10,000 from Bruce Rastetter.

Rastetter is not a small donor. He is one of the biggest political givers in the state — more than $2.6 million in political contributions, including $163,902 to Kim Reynolds' campaign committee since 2015. He is an agribusiness magnate, and the pipeline was his project.

Mitchell said his vote was "not about politics." It was about a $10,000 check from the man whose company stood to gain.

He was already in business with the pipeline's lobbyist

There's more to the relationship than one contribution.

Terry Branstad — the former Iowa governor — was hired as senior policy advisor for Summit Carbon Solutions. Branstad is also the chairman of the advisory board of Run GenZ, the conservative nonprofit whose founder and president is Joe Mitchell. And Branstad, the Iowa Standard reported, was an early endorser of Mitchell in his own primary that year.

So when Mitchell cast the only Republican no vote against protecting Iowa landowners, he was doing it while the pipeline's top policy advisor chaired the board of his organization, had endorsed his campaign, and while the pipeline's owner had just written him his biggest check of the period.

He used the pipeline company's talking point

Look again at Mitchell's defense: it's "extremely unfair to switch up the rules in the middle of a process."

That is not a landowner's argument. That is the pipeline's argument. Four years later, when South Dakota's Republican legislature banned eminent domain for CO2 pipelines outright, Summit put out a statement complaining that the new law "changed the rules in the middle of the game."

Same line. Mitchell just got there first.

What happened to the Iowans he voted against

The one-year pause died. And what landowners feared happened.

In June 2024, the Iowa Utilities Commission granted Summit's project eminent domain rights. In 2025, the Iowa House passed HF 639 to sharply restrict eminent domain for CO2 pipelines. Twelve Republican senators refused to vote on the state budget until the Senate took it up. It passed the Senate 27–22.

Gov. Kim Reynolds vetoed it.

Bobby Kaufmann — the Republican who wrote the 2022 amendment Mitchell voted against — told Radio Iowa afterward: "Kim Reynolds has soiled her legacy and her legacy is now spitting in the face of landowners and being Bruce Rastetter's errand girl."

In January 2026, the Iowa House tried again and passed HF 2104, a flat ban on eminent domain for carbon pipelines, 64–28. Rep. Steve Holt, the floor manager, said on the House floor:

"The precedent we will set if we allow private property to be seized for a private economic development project will reverberate for decades to come, and could render property rights safeguards in our constitution meaningless for our children and our children's children."

Five years of this. In May 2026, a Shelby County landowner named Jann Reinig told the Iowa Utilities Commission: "We've tried to be Iowa nice for five years and that's running kind of thin."

Now he wants to represent the counties the pipeline was going to cross

On May 13, 2026, Summit filed to change its route, dropping eight Iowa counties — Shelby, Pottawattamie, Montgomery, Adams, Page, Fremont, Mitchell and Worth.

Mitchell County and Worth County are both in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District — the seat Joe Mitchell is running for. So is Cerro Gordo County, home to Clear Lake, where he runs a real estate company and where he changed his voter registration to a rental shortly before launching his campaign — having never lived in the district before that.

Colleen Tucker, a landowner in Mitchell County, asked the Iowa Utilities Commission to reject Summit's plan: "The question is, when will those landowners finally see an end to this nightmare that has been dragged on since 2021."

Joe Mitchell had a chance to help end it in March 2022. He voted the other way — alone in his party — eight days after the pipeline owner's check cleared.

"We don't plan on accepting PAC money"

Running for Congress this year, Mitchell told Iowa Public Radio his campaign doesn't plan on accepting PAC money and that he's willing to call out his own party.

The $10,000 that showed up eight days before that vote didn't come from a PAC. It came from a man. And Mitchell didn't call out his own party over the pipeline — he broke with it to help the pipeline. Every other Republican who voted in that committee voted to protect landowners.

Weeks after the Iowa Standard published the contribution, Mitchell lost his primary to fellow Republican state Rep. Jeff Shipley — redistricting had put both their homes in the same district — and he left the legislature.

He's back on the ballot in November, in a district where his own party's state legislators are still fighting to stop the pipeline he voted to shield.

Joe Mitchell chose the pipeline's owner over Iowa landowners. We deserve better.

Source

Days before voting against eminent domain protections, Mitchell received largest campaign contribution of the year from Summit CEO — The Iowa Standard, May 21, 2022. Photo: The Iowa Standard.

For Ten Months, Brad Finstad Called Trump's Tariffs a 'Short Term' Problem. Southern Minnesota Is Still Paying.

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:05:00 +0000

Agriculture is a $26 billion industry in Minnesota, and the southern part of the state is where most of it happens. When the price of fertilizer goes up and the price of soybeans goes down, that's the region where it shows up first.

Brad Finstad represents it in Congress. And for ten months, every time somebody asked him about Trump's tariffs, he gave them a version of the same answer: hang on, it's short term, it'll be worth it.

American Journal News pulled his quotes together this week. Lined up next to each other, they're something to see.

The same answer, over and over

April 2025, weeks after the tariffs landed, asked about fertilizer prices:

"In the short term, there's a lot of uneasiness and unknowns. That is tough to navigate, but it's my hope we'll come through this with better trade partners."

August 2025, to a room of small business owners. He admitted the tariffs were causing "disruption and uncertainty" — then framed that as the point, calling Trump "the ultimate disruptor in chief."

"I completely am sympathetic and aware, because we all feel and see it."

February 2026, on the Made in Minnesota podcast:

"The big lever of tariffs that the president pulled created a little bit of instability and uncertainty in the short term. But what it did is it brought people to the table and we're seeing opportunities we haven't seen before."

Ten months apart, and it's still "short term." At some point "short term" stops being a forecast and starts being an excuse.

What was actually happening to his farmers

While Finstad was describing "a little bit of instability," here's what the reporting from Minnesota looked like.

China — the buyer for the crop that southern Minnesota lives on — stopped buying. CBS Minnesota reported in September 2025 that Minnesota has about 26,000 soybean farmers, that roughly 60% of the state's crop is exported, and that China is the top buyer. In 2024, China bought $12.6 billion worth of American soybeans.

New Chinese orders in 2025: zero.

"Unfortunately, we're bearing a lot of this trade war," Darin Johnson, president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, told the station.

Then the cost side got worse too. KSTP covered the squeeze this spring: fertilizer that a farmer booked at about $560 a ton in January was running closer to $750 a ton — a 20 to 25% jump — while soybean futures dropped the daily limit, down 70 cents a bushel in a single session.

Ryan Mackenthun, vice president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association, put it plainly:

"It's going to be about survival. I mean, farmers might not be able to survive this."

Ed Usset, a grain market economist at the University of Minnesota, called it "the worst of both worlds" — fuel and fertilizer up, grain prices down, at the same time.

That's the thing about a farm. You can't wait out a bad year the way a business can trim hours. You buy the seed and the fertilizer in the spring, before you know what the crop will sell for in the fall. If input costs spike and prices collapse in the same season, you eat the difference — or you don't plant.

He didn't just talk. He voted.

Talking optimistically about a policy is one thing. Finstad had two chances in February 2026 to actually do something, and he used both of them to protect the tariffs.

February 10, 2026 — the House voted on a rule that would have shielded Trump's tariffs from a floor challenge. Finstad voted yes. Three Republicans broke ranks and the rule went down, 214 to 217. He wasn't one of the three.

February 11, 2026 — the House voted on a resolution to end the national emergency Trump used to impose 25% tariffs on Canada. Finstad voted no. Six Republicans crossed over and it passed anyway, 219 to 211. He wasn't one of the six.

So on the two days when a southern Minnesota congressman could have stood up for southern Minnesota farmers on the House floor, he voted with the tariffs both times.

The Supreme Court did what he wouldn't

On February 20, 2026 — nine days after that vote — the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the law Trump used, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, doesn't authorize a president to impose tariffs at all. The "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariffs were struck down.

The Court's answer to the policy Finstad had spent two years defending was that the president never had the authority to do it in the first place.

And winning in court didn't give farmers their money back. Fertilizer and machinery prices had already climbed, and they stayed high — the way prices do. The Iran war piled shipping disruptions on top of the fertilizer market.

Which brings up the other votes. Twice this year the House voted on resolutions to pull U.S. forces out of hostilities with Iran — the war driving up the diesel and fertilizer costs Finstad's farmers were already drowning in. He voted no on both of them.

What he was really saying

Strip the friendly language out of Finstad's quotes and here's the argument he made to his own constituents for two years:

Your losses are a negotiating tactic. Somebody has to absorb the cost of getting other countries "to the table," and it's going to be you. Be patient.

Farmers were patient. They were patient through a season of zero Chinese orders, patient through fertilizer going up a quarter, patient while their representative told a podcast they were "seeing opportunities we haven't seen before."

Finstad is running for a third term this fall. His constituents get to decide whether "short term" was ever going to end.

Source

American Journal News, Finstad backed Trump tariffs as Minnesota farmers paid the price (July 29, 2026), which collected Finstad's April 2025, August 2025 and February 2026 remarks.

What Wisconsin's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:42:19 +0000

Here's something Wisconsinites don't hear often enough: this state is doing pretty well. On the measures we track — health, crime, food security, education, and more — Wisconsin ranks 13th out of 50. Not perfect. But better than 37 other states, and a whole lot better than most of the states whose politicians Wisconsin's delegation votes with.

That standing wasn't built in Washington. It was built here, over decades, by people who paid for hospitals and schools and food programs and expected them to work.

Now look at what Wisconsin's six Republicans in the U.S. House have been voting for. Every one of them — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Tom Tiffany, and Tony Wied — voted for the budget law that cuts health coverage and food aid to pay for tax breaks. Every one of them voted twice to lock in DOGE's cuts. And every one of them just voted to keep the tariffs that are squeezing Wisconsin farms and factories.

You don't stay 13th by doing that. Here's what those votes cost.

270,000 Wisconsinites lose health coverage

An estimated 270,000 Wisconsinites will lose health care coverage under Trump's budget bill — and the new red tape and work requirements will cost Wisconsin taxpayers over $284 million more to administer.

Read that twice. The state pays more money, and 270,000 people get less care. That's not efficiency. That's paperwork designed to make people give up.

Two hundred seventy thousand is more people than live in Madison. It's parents who work jobs that don't come with insurance, seniors in rural counties where the nearest hospital is already thin, and kids whose coverage depends on a form their parents now have to file over and over to keep.

All six — Steil, Van Orden, Fitzgerald, Grothman, Tiffany, and Wied — voted for the bill that does it.

Food aid, in a state where 1 in 5 kids goes hungry

Here in Wisconsin, 1 in 5 kids faces hunger. About 693,100 Wisconsinites receive SNAP benefits every month — 11.6% of the state — to put food on the table.

The same budget law all six voted for cuts SNAP and pushes new costs onto the state. When you tighten the rules on food assistance, the people who fall off aren't fraudsters. They're the working parent whose hours got cut, the grandmother raising grandkids, the kid who eats at school because there isn't enough at home.

Wisconsin is a state that grows food for the world. Letting one in five of its children go hungry is a choice, and six members of Congress from this state just voted to make that choice harder to reverse.

The trade war is hitting America's Dairyland from both sides

Canada is Wisconsin's biggest customer. In 2024 the state exported roughly $8.5 billion worth of goods to Canada — more than to any other country. Wisconsin's economic development chief calls it the state's "single most important trading relationship."

That relationship is now the target. The Trump administration has announced 50% tariffs on Canadian goods including wine, dairy, and cement, taking effect in August 2026 — and Canada has been retaliating against American exports for a year and a half. A report from the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois found that in Wisconsin, the 2025 tariffs already pushed average household costs up $1,500 and cost the manufacturing sector 6,100 jobs.

On the farms it's worse, because the damage comes from two directions at once:

For nearly six months China refused to buy U.S. soybeans in retaliation for Trump's tariffs, leaving Wisconsin farmers with a bumper crop and no buyer while input costs climbed.
Wisconsin's dairy industry depends on immigrant labor for 60–90% of its workforce, so ICE raids like the one that scooped up 24 dairy workers in Manitowoc — most with no criminal records — have deepened a labor crisis on top of the tariff losses.

On February 11, 2026, the House got a chance to end it. A resolution to terminate the national emergency Trump used to impose the Canada tariffs passed 219–211. Six Republicans crossed over to vote for it.

Not one of them was from Wisconsin. Steil, Van Orden, Fitzgerald, Grothman, Tiffany, and Wied all voted no — to keep the tariffs on the country that buys $8.5 billion of what Wisconsin makes and grows.

DOGE bragged about $483 million. Wisconsin lost 2,400 jobs.

DOGE claims it "saved" Wisconsin more than $483 million. Here's what that looked like on the ground: under Trump and DOGE, Wisconsin lost 2,400 federal jobs — cutting services Wisconsin families rely on while federal spending actually went up.

That last part matters. The spending didn't go down. The staff did. Wisconsin traded 2,400 paychecks and the services those people delivered for a number somebody could post online.

And Wisconsin's delegation didn't just stand by for it — they voted to make it permanent. All six backed the Rescissions Act, first when it squeaked through the House 214–212 in June 2025, and again on final passage 216–213 in July, locking roughly $9 billion in DOGE cuts into law.

There were 382,000 layoffs in Wisconsin in 2025 — 13% higher than the year before. Wisconsin's members of Congress spent that year voting to add to the pile.

Who voted for this

These are the six members of Congress representing Wisconsin who voted for the budget law behind the health and food cuts, voted to codify DOGE's cuts, and voted to keep the tariffs on Wisconsin's largest export market:

Bryan Steil — 1st District
Derrick Van Orden — 3rd District
Scott Fitzgerald — 5th District
Glenn Grothman — 6th District
Tom Tiffany — 7th District, now running for Governor
Tony Wied — 8th District

Tom Tiffany is asking Wisconsin to promote him. Before anyone votes on that, it's worth knowing what he did with the job he has.

Wisconsin ranks 13th because generations of people here decided that hospitals, schools, and full lunch trays were worth paying for. Rankings like that are easy to lose and slow to win back — and 270,000 people losing coverage, 6,100 manufacturing jobs gone, and $8.5 billion in exports put at risk is how you start losing one.

In 2026, Wisconsinites decide whether the six people who cast those votes get to keep casting them.

Compare Wisconsin to Other States →

Trump's USDA Cuts Are Gutting Iowa's Small Farmers — In Mariannette Miller-Meeks's Own District

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:29:07 +0000

Lawrencia Rogers finally got her shot at farming this spring. The 33-year-old Iowan started a two-year fellowship in March, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on a plot of land at the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm outside Iowa City. It came with a living wage, health insurance, paid time off, and advisers who could teach her everything from irrigation to surviving a crop failure. "It was honestly like school for farmers," she told the Guardian.

Two and a half weeks later, she was laid off.

The Trump administration cancelled the $2.5 million grant that paid for the program, calling it "wasteful spending" that ran afoul of the White House's ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion. To Rogers — whose father is Egyptian, and who was hired, she says, because she was one of the best-qualified applicants — the DEI label felt like "an extra slap in the face."

Here's the part every voter in Iowa's 1st Congressional District should sit with: this happened in their district. The farm is outside Iowa City. The nonprofit that ran it, Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development, is based there. And the Republican who represents them in Congress, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, didn't lift a finger to stop it. She's been cheering the cuts on.

The Cuts Landed in Her Own Backyard

The USDA under Trump has laid off staff and dismantled programs built to help small producers. An analysis by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the public-policy firm Prospect Partners found the department has shed 20,000 employees nationwide since Trump returned to office — including 17% of its staff in Iowa. The administration also killed two programs, the Local Food Purchase Assistance program and the Local Food for Schools program, that paid food banks and schools to buy food from nearby farmers.

For the small farmers in and around Miller-Meeks's district, those weren't handouts. They were paychecks:

James Nisly, who raises chicken, vegetables, and dairy south of Iowa City, said he lost 20% of his cashflow and many of his buyers when the school- and food-bank purchasing program was cut.
Anna Pesek, who farms poultry, pigs, and flowers in eastern Iowa, estimated the cancellations cost her farm 10% of its income and nearly all of her large buyers.
Carly McAndrews, a vegetable farmer in Iowa City, went to her local USDA office to apply for a new $1 billion crop-assistance program and found nobody there even knew how it worked. "It was like a functionless program, in my experience," she said.

"I haven't seen any activity in the current administration that actually is beneficial for the small producer," Nisly told the Guardian. "All of the policy activity that I've seen is hugely beneficial to the very large corporations, and detrimental to the small-business operators."

That's what's happening on the ground in her district. Now look at what Miller-Meeks has been doing in Washington.

She Joined the DOGE Caucus — and Bragged About the Cuts

The USDA killed that farmer-training grant using one word: "wasteful." That's not a coincidence of language. Slashing federal spending in the name of "waste" is exactly the project Mariannette Miller-Meeks signed up to lead.

She joined the House DOGE Caucus — the group organized around Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" and its drive to gut the federal workforce and cancel federal programs. She didn't just go along with it quietly. She put out press releases touting her own hunt for what she calls "boondoggles" in federal spending.

So when the same "cut wasteful spending" machine she cheered on reached into her district and cancelled a program teaching new Iowans how to farm, she can't claim she didn't see it coming. This is the policy she asked for. The 20,000 USDA jobs, the frozen grants, the killed food programs — that's what "government efficiency" looks like when it hits a small farm instead of a spreadsheet.

Jason Grimm, who runs Iowa Valley RC&D, disputed the DEI label outright: "There was no requirement of a specific cultural or racial background to be able to participate in our programs." A federal judge apparently agreed the cuts went too far — last month a court ordered the USDA to reinstate $127 million in grants to Iowa Valley RC&D and groups like it. But by then the damage was done. The fellowship was on hold. Rogers was already gone.

Tariffs and War Made Everything Cost More

The USDA cuts didn't happen in a vacuum. Trump promised on the campaign trail to be a champion for farmers. Instead, his own policies have squeezed them from every direction — and Miller-Meeks has stood by him the whole way.

Trump's tariffs prompted China to buy fewer American soybeans. Iowa is the second-largest soybean producer in the country, so prices fell and farmers scrambled to find buyers. Then Trump's war with Iran drove up the cost of fertilizer, gasoline, and especially diesel — the fuel that runs the tractors and trucks holding the whole farm economy together.

The strain is already showing. Eighteen Iowa farms declared bankruptcy in 2025 — a 220% jump from the year before, and one of the highest totals in the country, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. Agriculture is a third of Iowa's economy and a fifth of its jobs. This is not a side issue in the 1st District. It's the whole ballgame.

Miller-Meeks likes to point to donors like POET, Iowa's ethanol giant, and Sukup Manufacturing, the ag-equipment maker, as proof she's on the side of Iowa farming. But the small producers actually losing money right now aren't the ones writing her checks.

And When Farmers Wanted to Talk, She Left

Here's how Miller-Meeks handles constituents who want answers. For most of 2025 she refused to hold an in-person town hall at all, telling local Republicans she'd do it "when hell freezes over."

When she finally held one in November, worried Iowans spent an hour booing, heckling, and shouting over her about Medicaid cuts, the economy, and immigration raids. After 50 minutes, she walked out.

It fits a pattern. She represents Iowa's 1st District, but in December 2025 — while running for reelection there — she changed her voter registration back to her Ottumwa home, which redistricting drew into a different district entirely. She won her last race by roughly 800 votes. She is now facing Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan for a third time.

Rogers, the laid-off farmer, put it plainly. "I have never had a decision on such a level impact my life literally overnight in such a drastic way," she said. "If that wasn't a rude awakening to pay more attention and maybe be more vocal or take more action, I don't know what could be."

That's the choice in front of Iowa's 1st District. The people growing its food are being wiped out by cuts their own representative asked for — and when they show up to say so, she leaves the room.

Source

Chris Stein, "'A slap in the face': small farmers say Trump is turning his back on them," The Guardian, July 11, 2026. Photograph: Danny Wilcox Frazier / The Guardian.

What Arkansas's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Out of 50 states, Arkansas ranks 49th on the measures we track — health, crime, food security, schools, and more. That's not an accident of geography. It's the result of choices, and a lot of those choices are made in Washington by the six people Arkansas sends to Congress.

Here's the honest version: these numbers describe where Arkansas already stands. The new part is what our own members of Congress just voted to cut on top of it — and who gets hurt when they do. Let's go through it.

They voted to gut the thing keeping rural hospitals open

Arkansas stands to lose an estimated $8.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade — about 11% of what Washington would otherwise have spent on the state's program. That money is what keeps the lights on at rural hospitals, and one report found the cuts could shut down more than half of the state's rural hospitals.

Arkansas is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for overall health, women's health, maternal mortality, infant mortality, obesity, and life expectancy. Researchers warn the proposed Medicaid cuts would hurt rural areas, including Arkansas kids, the hardest. When the nearest hospital closes, a heart attack or a difficult birth becomes a much longer drive. For a lot of families, that drive is the difference.

The hungriest state in America — and they cut food help anyway

Arkansas has the highest food insecurity rate in the country. Nearly 1 in 4 kids here faces hunger every single day. 240,000 Arkansans rely on SNAP — food stamps — every month, and a University of Arkansas report found that nearly 30% of Arkansans face food insecurity.

So what did our delegation do? They voted for a budget law that cuts SNAP and hits Arkansas's already-dwindling surplus. In the hungriest state in America, they made it harder for families to put food on the table. You can see what hunger already looks like in Arkansas — and the people who voted to make it worse represent the very towns where it's worst.

They picked a trade fight that's crushing Arkansas farmers

Farming is the largest industry in Arkansas, contributing over $24 billion to the state economy — about 14% of everything Arkansas produces. And right now, Arkansas farmers are getting squeezed.

The tariff fight has Arkansas soybean farmers reeling, watching their biggest export markets dry up. Then came a plan to send billions in aid to Argentina — a direct competitor — which sparked outrage among American farmers who are struggling to hang on. Our delegation backed the policies that started the squeeze, and Arkansas growers are paying for it.

DOGE bragged about cuts. Arkansas paid the bill.

DOGE claims it "saved" Arkansas $237 million — but look at what that actually meant on the ground. DOGE disrupted the federal response to the bird flu outbreak that directly hit Arkansas. And it destroyed USAID, which through its Food for Peace program normally buys around $2 billion of American crops a year to feed impoverished countries. Arkansas grows roughly 40% of all the rice in the United States — so when that buyer vanishes, Arkansas farmers lose a customer.

Meanwhile, there were 178,000 layoffs in Arkansas in 2025. Our delegation didn't stand in the way of any of it.

One of the most dangerous states — and all six took the gun lobby's money

Arkansas is one of the worst states in the country for violent crime, murder, and firearm deaths. After the mass shooting in Fordyce, Arkansas leaders offered thoughts and prayers. What they haven't offered is action — and there may be a reason. All six Arkansans in Congress accepted NRA donations.

Who voted for this

These are the members of Congress representing Arkansas who voted for the budget law behind the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, backed the trade policy hurting farmers, and stood by while DOGE tore through the state:

Tom Cotton — U.S. Senator
Rick Crawford — U.S. Representative
French Hill — U.S. Representative
Steve Womack — U.S. Representative
Bruce Westerman — U.S. Representative

Arkansas ranking 49th isn't destiny. It's the score so far. In 2026, every one of these seats is on the ballot — and Arkansans get to decide whether the people who voted to make a hard situation harder get to keep doing it.

Compare Arkansas to Other States →

Rick Crawford Said Trump's Tariffs 'Won't Be a Problem' for Arkansas. His Own State's Agriculture Officials Were Sounding the Alarm.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Rick Crawford has represented Arkansas's 1st District since 2011. That's 15 years in Washington — a long time to get to know someone. His district is full of farm country, working families, and small towns. So who has he actually been fighting for?

Here are 3 things to know.

1. He waved off the trade war that's crushing Arkansas farmers

Arkansas runs on agriculture. And Trump's tariffs and trade war with China have hammered farmers here — China was the biggest buyer of American soybeans, and that market dried up.

What did Crawford say about it? That tariffs "won't be a problem" — even as his own state's ag officials were sounding the alarm. He kept defending the tariffs and the trade fight while prices for the people back home kept climbing.

Then it got worse. The Trump administration handed Argentina — a direct competitor of American soybean farmers — a $40 billion bailout. Almost right away, Argentina cut its soybean export taxes and China bought up Argentine soybeans instead of ours. American farmers, meanwhile, were offered a much smaller $12 billion in aid. Our tax dollars went to help our farmers' competition. Crawford did nothing to stop it.

2. He works for big business

Want to know who Rick Crawford listens to? Follow the money. His top donors include some of the biggest corporations in the country:

Boeing
Koch Inc.
Lockheed Martin
Union Pacific
Caterpillar
Tyson

That's a long list of powerful companies — and a short list of regular Arkansans. The Koch network in particular has poured money into politics for years to get the policies it wants. When your campaign is paid for by giant corporations, it's not hard to guess whose phone calls get returned. You can see the full picture at Who Bought My Rep.

3. He blocks even basic gun safety laws

We all want our kids to be safe at school. In America, 125 people are killed with guns every single day, and a child or teenager is killed with a gun every few hours.

You can believe in the Second Amendment and still want common-sense steps to keep guns away from dangerous people. Most Americans do. But Crawford opposes a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons and says we should just "enforce current gun laws" instead of passing new safety measures. After every mass shooting, that's the same answer — thoughts and prayers, and no action.

One pattern, three examples

These aren't three separate problems. They're three versions of the same one: when it comes time to choose between Arkansas families and the powerful interests that fund him, Rick Crawford keeps choosing the donors. After 15 years in Washington, that's not a misstep — it's the whole job description. In 2026, Arkansas gets to decide whether it's still the job it wants done.

The Wall Street Journal Caught Zach Lahn: A Kansas Operative Pretending to Be an Iowa Outsider

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Zach Lahn wants to be Iowa's next governor. On the campaign trail, he sells himself as two things: a regular Iowa farmer and a political outsider who isn't part of the system.

A new Wall Street Journal investigation, flagged this week by the Iowa Democratic Party, found that neither one is really true. The Journal describes a millionaire political operative who barely qualifies to run in Iowa at all — a man who, as recently as 2022, was voting in Kansas.

The "outsider" who spent a decade inside politics

Lahn's whole pitch is that he's not a politician. The Journal tells a different story. It reports that Lahn has "worked in politics for part of a decade" — including years on campaign trails working for out-of-state politicians.

Part of that career was spent running fundraising operations for Americans for Prosperity, the dark-money group funded by the billionaire Koch network. That's not an outsider sticking it to the establishment. That's a paid operative for one of the most powerful political machines in the country.

So when Lahn stands in front of Iowa voters and says he's just a normal guy who got fed up and decided to run, that's not the full picture. He's been on the inside of big-money politics for years. He's just hoping you don't know that.

"Where do you actually live?"

Here's the part that should really stop Iowans cold.

To run for governor of Iowa, you have to have lived in the state for two years. The Journal reports that Lahn "barely met" that requirement. According to voting records, Lahn voted in Kansas in 2018, 2020, and 2022. He registered to vote in Iowa on October 17, 2024 — just in time to clear the two-year bar.

Think about that timeline. As recently as the summer of 2022, Lahn was casting a ballot as a Kansas voter. He co-founded a private school in Wichita, Kansas, where he served as "head of school." Now he's asking to lead Iowa.

The Iowa Democratic Party's Terra Hernandez put it bluntly: Lahn "can't even be honest about where he lives and how much time he spends in Iowa."

When you're running to be the leader of a state, telling the truth about whether you actually live there is about the lowest bar there is. Lahn barely cleared it.

The "farmer" Iowa farmers don't trust

Lahn introduces himself to crowds as a farmer. But the people who actually farm Iowa aren't buying it.

The Journal talked to real Iowa farmers, and "few believe Lahn will actually" deliver on his promises to take on big agriculture companies. Mark Mueller, president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, didn't hold back:

"Farmers don't love everything about Lahn... I'm not hearing vast support from the farming community for Lahn."

That skepticism makes sense when you look at Lahn's actual record. When Iowa farmers were getting crushed by Trump's tariffs, Lahn didn't stand up for them — he defended the tariffs, repeatedly telling farmers the tariffs were "not the issue." Meanwhile, an April 2025 report found those tariffs had already added nearly $90 million in new costs for Iowa farmers.

A real farmer's advocate fights for farmers when it counts. Lahn told them their pain wasn't real.

A millionaire writing his own checks

Lahn likes the everyman image. The money tells another story.

The Journal reports that Lahn has lent his own campaign $2.5 million. When asked directly whether he was a millionaire before he married his current wife, he dodged — but admitted he could have funded the campaign "solely from money I have made."

Some of that money came from an investment that became one of the strangest storylines of the race. In September 2021, Lahn put roughly $1 million into FirmTech, a Montana company that makes "wearable erection rings" and other intimate health devices. According to a 2025 SEC annual report, an LLC owned by Lahn held a 25% stake. A June 2023 SEC filing listed Lahn as one of the company's directors — identified by his day job, "head of school at Wonder."

There's nothing wrong with being successful or making investments. The problem is the gap between the image and the reality. Lahn campaigns as a humble outsider while sitting on enough money to bankroll his own run for governor — and while his record is full of the kind of details he'd rather voters never heard about.

The pattern: say one thing, be another

Step back and the picture is consistent. On nearly every front, who Lahn says he is doesn't match what the record shows.

He says he's a political outsider — but he spent years as a paid operative for the Koch network's Americans for Prosperity.
He says he's an Iowan — but he voted in Kansas through 2022 and only registered in Iowa in late 2024.
He says he's a farmer's champion — but Iowa's own corn growers say they don't trust him, and he defended the tariffs that cost them millions.
He says he's a regular guy — but he's a millionaire who loaned his campaign $2.5 million.

This is the same Lahn who ran an unaccredited private school while pushing to defund Iowa's public schools, who wants a total abortion ban, and who wants to ban mRNA vaccines and eliminate school vaccine requirements. The honesty problem isn't a one-off. It runs through the whole campaign.

The bottom line

Iowans get to decide who leads their state. They deserve a candidate who, at the very least, is honest about who he is and where he comes from. The Wall Street Journal's reporting shows Zach Lahn isn't the plain-spoken Iowa farmer he plays on the trail. He's a Kansas-rooted, Koch-connected millionaire operative who barely qualifies to run here — and who's been shading the truth from day one.

When a candidate can't be straight about something as basic as where he lives, it's fair to ask what else he isn't telling you. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by The Wall Street Journal, "The Koch-Connected Millionaire Populist Threatening Big Agriculture," as summarized by the Iowa Democratic Party.