Project 2025 urged farm subsidy cuts, but Republicans enacted increases

A claim circulating online says Republicans, through Project 2025, plan to cut crop insurance and eliminate the ARC and PLC farm programs so that family farms go bankrupt in bad years and private firms can buy them, in its reported wording, “for pennies on the dollar.” It adds, again in its reported wording, that Republicans “literally said they would do that.” The first half is an accurate description of what one Heritage Foundation chapter recommended, and House conservatives have proposed similar cuts in their own budgets. The rest is wrong. The chapter never mentions bankrupting farms or selling them to anyone, and the Republican Congress did the opposite of its farm-subsidy recommendations, raising ARC, PLC and crop insurance support by tens of billions of dollars. The claim has a point buried in it: the programs Republicans expanded pay their biggest share to the largest farms, and the Trump administration’s trade war cut deeply into farm exports to China.

Verdicts at a glance

• True

  Project 2025 proposes cutting crop insurance subsidies and eliminating ARC and PLC

  Chapter 10 says to “Ideally, repeal the ARC and PLC programs” and to cap the taxpayer share of crop insurance premiums at 50 percent. It proposes shrinking crop insurance subsidies, not ending crop insurance.

• False

  Republicans literally said they would push family farms into bankruptcy so private firms could buy them for pennies on the dollar

  The phrase “family farm” does not appear anywhere in the Mandate for Leadership. Republicans have proposed the program cuts, in Project 2025 and in Republican Study Committee budgets, but none of those documents states a bankruptcy or buyout aim. The farm chapter says subsidies should not create barriers to entry for new farmers and calls for a safety net for serious unforeseen losses.

• False

  Republicans are cutting crop insurance and eliminating ARC and PLC

  The 2025 reconciliation law extended ARC and PLC through crop year 2031, raised reference prices and premium subsidies, and CBO scored the farm-side changes at about $65.7 billion in added spending over ten years.

• Mostly True

  Republican farm policy in 2025 and 2026 favors larger operations

  Payments track acres and production. Large-scale family farms, 5 percent of farms, received 46 percent of ARC and PLC payments in 2024, before the new law, and that law raised payment limits. It also added premium help for beginning farmers, which cuts the other way. The same payment structure dates to the 2014 farm bill, and the 2018 farm bill passed the House 369 to 47 with majorities of both parties.^[13][33]

• Unproven

  Republican farm and trade policy in 2025 and 2026 is accelerating consolidation away from family farms

  The long consolidation trend is documented, and research ties subsidies to it. Whether 2025 and 2026 policy sped it up cannot be measured yet: the next Census of Agriculture counts 2027.

• Misleading

  Implied: Project 2025’s farm chapter is the Republican Party’s enacted agenda

  Republicans enacted several of the chapter’s food stamp recommendations and reversed every one of its farm-subsidy recommendations.

• False

  Implied: private firms are buying up distressed family farms for pennies on the dollar

  Farm real estate hit $4,500 an acre in 2026, up 3.4 percent. Farmland Partners, a publicly traded farmland REIT, says individual farmers are the most active buyers and estimates institutions hold under 5 percent of U.S. farmland.

• Mixed

  Implied: family farms are going bankrupt in large numbers

  Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies rose 45.8 percent in 2025, to 315, and kept rising into 2026. That rise started from 139 in 2023, and 2025 was still about half the 2019 level, during the first trade war.

What Project 2025 actually proposes

The agriculture chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership (Heritage is a conservative think tank) is Chapter 10, written by Daren Bakst. It begins on printed page 289, which is page 321 of the PDF.^[1] Its farm-subsidy section sits on printed pages 295 to 297. We read it directly from Heritage’s own PDF, not from summaries.

On the two programs named in the viral claim, the text is plain. On ARC and PLC it says: “Ideally, repeal the ARC and PLC programs.”^[1] It calls ARC “especially egregious” because it covers what the chapter calls shallow losses. On crop insurance it notes that taxpayers pay “about 60 percent” of premiums and says: “At a minimum, taxpayers should not pay more than 50 percent of the premium.”^[1] It also asks Congress to stop farmers from collecting both, “prohibiting farmers from receiving an ARC or PLC payment the same year they receive a crop insurance indemnity.”^[1]

Beyond those, the chapter says to “Repeal the federal sugar program,” to “Push legislation to repeal export promotion programs,” naming the Market Access Program, and on the Commodity Credit Corporation to “Refrain from using section 5 discretionary authority.” It adds that “Ideally, Congress would repeal the Secretary’s discretionary authority under section 5 of the Charter Act.”^[1] It also calls for the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program, and it notes that the Farm Service Agency “would be significantly smaller in size if the ideal farm subsidy reforms were adopted.”^[1]

Two figures that circulate wrongly

The crop insurance estimate the chapter cites is often misquoted. The chapter says a Congressional Budget Office analysis found “reducing the premium subsidy to 47 percent would save $8.1 billion over 10 years and have little impact on crop insurance participation or on the number of covered acres.”^[1] That is $8.1 billion over a decade, not per year. The acreage effect it cites is “a reduction in insured acres of just one-half of 1 percent,” not 1 percent.^[1]

The stated rationale

The chapter’s stated goal is one sentence: “The overall goal should be to eliminate subsidy dependence.”^[1] It says subsidies should not “create barriers to entry for new farmers,” and it argues that “Any safety net for farmers should be a true safety net” for farmers who have suffered serious unforeseen losses.^[1] The phrase market-based decisions, sometimes attributed to the chapter, does not appear in it.

We searched the full text of the Mandate for the words that would support the viral claim. The phrase family farm appears zero times in the whole document. Words built on bankrupt appear three times, all outside agriculture: once about public broadcasters and twice about the Dodd-Frank alternative to bankruptcy for large financial firms. The root consolidat- appears 93 times, and none of those passages concerns farms or farmland. Farmland comes up twice: once about idled land and once as something Communist China is buying.^[1] Nothing in the chapter describes farm sales, private acquisition or consolidation as a goal.

Not only Heritage

The program cuts themselves are not unique to Project 2025. The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of House conservatives with more than 160 members, proposed eliminating ARC and PLC in its 2022 “Blueprint to Save America,” saying that would save “more than $42.7 billion over ten years,” and proposed cutting crop insurance premium subsidies from 60 to 30 percent, according to DTN.^[35] Its fiscal 2025 budget proposed limiting ARC and PLC to farms with adjusted gross income below $500,000, subsidizing only catastrophic crop insurance policies, and capping crop insurance subsidies at $40,000 per farmer.^[34] It said the income limit “would ensure that commodity support payments are going to smaller farms.”^[34] So Republicans have written down the cuts. None of these documents describes bankrupting farms or selling them to investors, and the RSC framed its own limit as help for smaller farms.

What Congress enacted instead

Republicans wrote their farm policy into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, dated July 4, 2025.^[2] On every farm safety-net item in Chapter 10, the law went the other way.

It extended PLC and ARC through the 2031 crop year.^[2] It raised statutory reference prices starting with the 2025 crop year: corn to $4.10 a bushel, soybeans to $10.00 and wheat to $6.35.^[2] Under prior law those were $3.70, $8.40 and $5.50, so the increases are 10.8, 19 and 15.5 percent.^[4] It raised the market-price share used to calculate the effective reference price from 85 to 88 percent, and from the 2031 crop year reference prices rise by a factor of 1.005 a year, capped at 113 percent of the new statutory levels.^[2] It directs USDA to allocate up to 30,000,000 additional base acres, the historical acreage on which ARC and PLC pay.^[2]

On crop insurance, the law raised the premium-subsidy percentages at most coverage levels by 3 to 5 percentage points; at one level the rate goes from 48 to 51 percent.^[2] In the section on area-based coverage, it raised a coverage level from 86 to 90 percent and a premium-subsidy rate from 65 to 80 percent, and it lets individual coverage aggregated across multiple commodities go up to 90 percent.^[2] It struck the rule that barred crops enrolled in ARC from buying the Supplemental Coverage Option, so farmers can now stack those two. That runs directly against the chapter’s proposal to stop double payments.^[1][2] For beginning farmers, the law stretched eligibility from 5 to 10 years of experience and added 5 extra percentage points of premium subsidy in the first two years, 3 in the third and 1 in the fourth.^[2]

It raised the per-person ARC and PLC payment limit from $125,000 to $155,000, indexed it to inflation, and extended the payment-limit treatment that joint ventures and general partnerships already had to all qualified pass-through entities, a new category that includes partnerships, S corporations and LLCs not taxed as corporations.^[2] It kept the sugar program and set the raw cane sugar loan rate at 24.00 cents a pound for 2025 through 2031.^[2] It created a new trade promotion program with $285,000,000 a year from fiscal 2027.^[2] USDA says that money is in addition to the existing $234 million a year for the Market Access Program and Foreign Market Development.^[7] We found no amendment to the CCC Charter Act in it.^[2]

What it costs

We could not retrieve the Congressional Budget Office’s own estimate: cbo.gov returned a bot-block page to every tool we tried. The figures below are CBO’s as reproduced in a Congressional Research Service table.^[3] For fiscal 2025 to 2034, CBO scored the commodity program changes at +$53.060 billion, crop insurance at +$5.980 billion, disaster assistance at +$2.778 billion, and all non-nutrition agriculture provisions at +$65.690 billion.^[3] Commodity programs plus crop insurance come to $59.04 billion. The same title cut nutrition spending by $186.650 billion, so Title I as a whole reduces outlays by $120.960 billion.^[3] The farm safety net was the part of the bill that grew.

The votes

The Senate passed the bill on July 1, 2025, on a 50-50 tie broken by the vice president; 50 Republicans voted yes, while 3 Republicans, 45 Democrats and 2 independents voted no.^[6] The House agreed to the Senate version on July 3, 218 to 214, with all 218 yes votes from Republicans and the no votes from 212 Democrats and 2 Republicans.^[5] These were near party-line votes on the whole bill, not on the farm title alone.

What the administration has done

The one Chapter 10 item that is purely an executive call is section 5 of the CCC Charter Act, and the administration used it. On December 8, 2025, President Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced $12 billion in bridge payments, of which up to $11 billion went to the Farmer Bridge Assistance program for row crops.^[7] The program rule says “As authorized by Section 5(b) of the CCC Charter Act (15 U.S.C. 714c(b)), CCC is administering the FBA Program to provide $11 billion in one-time bridge payments.”^[8] Payments are a per-acre rate times 2025 planted acres, capped at $155,000 per person or entity, and unavailable to anyone whose average adjusted gross income exceeds $900,000.^[8] In June 2026 the White House asked Congress for another $10 billion for crops planted in 2026, plus $1.1 billion for Florida growers, according to DTN.^[11] We found no report that Congress had acted on that request by September 29, 2026.

Staffing is the one area where the administration has shrunk the machinery farmers deal with. On July 24, 2025, USDA announced it would move much of its roughly 4,600-person Washington-area workforce to five regional hubs, and said 15,364 employees had elected deferred resignation.^[9] Relocation is not a Chapter 10 recommendation. A June 2026 report by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (an advocacy group for small and sustainable farms) and Prospects LLC, a firm it worked with, as reported by DTN, found 650 Farm Service Agency county employees left in 2025, an 8 percent cut, and 42 FSA offices started the year with no staff.^[10] USDA Under Secretary Richard Fordyce told the House Agriculture Committee, “In some cases, we do have county offices that don’t have the staff in them.”^[10] Chapter 10 predicted a smaller FSA only as a result of subsidy repeal; the agency shrank while the subsidies grew. We found no GAO or inspector general measurement of whether the staff losses have slowed farm loans to small operators, so that effect is unmeasured.

Who the safety net pays

The viral claim is on firmer ground here. ARC and PLC pay on base acres and yields, so bigger operations get bigger checks. USDA’s Economic Research Service found that in 2024, large-scale family farms, those with gross cash farm income of $1 million or more, were 5 percent of farms and received 46 percent of the countercyclical payments, which are ARC and PLC. Small family farms received 20 percent.^[12] ERS gives the reason: “Because these payments are tied to commodity programs and risk management, farms with higher production volumes of eligible commodities and market exposure are likely to receive larger payments.”^[12] Crop insurance looks similar: ERS’s “large” family farms, those with $1 million to $4.99 million in gross cash farm income, were 18 percent of participants and received 45 percent of indemnities, and very large farms were another 2 percent of participants with 11 percent of indemnities.^[12]

The picture changes when every program is counted. Small family farms, 86 percent of farms, received 46 percent of all government farm payments in 2024, especially through the Conservation Reserve Program, where they got 73 percent.^[12] That is the program Chapter 10 wanted eliminated.

All of those shares are for 2024, before the new law took effect. The 2025 law tilts the commodity money further up the size scale. Vincent H. Smith of the American Enterprise Institute (a free-market think tank) writes that the payment-limit increase will “benefit only the largest farms producing crops eligible for subsidy (at most, the largest 3 percent of all farms).”^[13] The Environmental Working Group (an advocacy group that campaigns to cut farm subsidies) reports from its database that in 2025 the top 10 percent of farms received 59 percent of commodity subsidies and the smallest 80 percent of recipients got 22 percent.^[14]

Whether that money funds expansion is an older research question. A 2007 ERS study of five Censuses of Agriculture, 1982 to 2002, found that commodity payments per acre “displayed a strong positive association with subsequent increases in cropland concentration.”^[15] The same study found payments “positively and significantly associated with the observed lifespan of farm businesses.”^[15] Both findings are associations, and both matter here: subsidies appear to help farms survive, which supports the claim’s premise that repealing them would push more farms out, and they appear to help larger farms grow, which supports its worry about consolidation.

The trade war and farm finances

Farmers’ other big change in 2025 came from trade. U.S. agricultural exports to China fell to $8.27 billion in 2025, against a three-year average of $20.5 billion, and China ranked sixth among U.S. farm export markets, according to USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.^[23] Total U.S. agricultural exports were $171.5 billion in 2025, down from $177.2 billion in 2024, according to ERS.^[24] Farm income did not collapse: in September 2025 ERS projected net farm income up $48.8 billion from 2024, much of it from emergency aid payments, according to AEI’s summary.^[13] Under the November 2025 deal, the White House says China agreed to suspend retaliatory tariffs imposed since March 4, 2025, and to buy at least 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans in the last two months of 2025 and at least 25 million in each of 2026, 2027 and 2028.^[25]

The bridge payments are smaller than the first-term trade aid. USDA allocated $25.1 billion for the 2018 and 2019 Market Facilitation Program and paid out about $23.0 billion, according to CRS.^[22] The 2025 bridge package is $12 billion, and the June 2026 request would add $11.1 billion if Congress approves it.^[7][11] Bridge payments are paid per acre, so they follow the same size pattern as ARC and PLC.^[8]

Bankruptcies

Chapter 12, which requires most of a family’s income to come from farming, is the closest official measure of farm failure.^[21] U.S. Courts tables count 216 Chapter 12 filings in calendar 2024 and 315 in calendar 2025.^[17][16] That is a 45.8 percent increase, from a low of 139 in 2023.^[36] In the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, filings reached 336, up 19.1 percent from 282 in the 12 months ending June 30, 2025.^[18][19] For scale, there were 599 filings in 2019, during the first trade war, so 2025 was 47.4 percent below that year.^[20] The American Farm Bureau Federation (a farm lobby group) notes that farm families who earn most of their income off the farm do not qualify for Chapter 12 and may sell land or close instead, so filings undercount distress.^[21]

Who is buying the land

Consolidation is documented and long-running. The 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 1,900,487 farms, down 6.9 percent from 2,042,220 in 2017, while average size rose from 441 to 463 acres.^[26] The largest 2 percent of farms, those with 5,000 acres or more, controlled 42 percent of farmland in 2022, up from 35 percent in 2002.^[26] None of that is evidence of distressed farms selling cheaply. USDA puts average farm real estate at $4,500 an acre in 2026, up 3.4 percent from 2025.^[31]

Most land does not change hands through sales at all. Just over 60 percent of land in farms is owner-operated. In USDA’s last detailed ownership survey, of the land expected to change owners in 2015 to 2019, only about a quarter was expected to be sold to nonrelatives, and most was expected to pass through gifts, trusts or wills.^[27] About 30 percent of farmland belongs to landlords who do not farm, and retired farmers make up 38 percent of those landlords.^[27]

No federal dataset measures institutional ownership directly. The best available numbers come from the investors themselves and from foreign-ownership filings. Farmland Partners, a publicly traded farmland REIT, says in its 2025 annual report that “Individual farmers are the most active buyers of farmland” and that “institutional investors constitute a small fraction of the industry (less than 5% of total farmland in the United States).”^[28] That is an interested party’s estimate, not a measurement. The two public farmland REITs together owned about 170,288 acres at the end of 2025, 71,600 for Farmland Partners and 98,688 for Gladstone Land.^[28][29] That is about 0.02 percent of the 880.1 million acres the 2022 Census counted in farms, an approximate share because the two counts are from different years. Foreign persons held an interest in about 46 million acres as of December 31, 2024, 3.6 percent of privately held agricultural land, and 47 percent of that acreage was forest.^[30]

What the claim implies

Three things a reader takes from the viral post are not stated in it outright. First, that Project 2025’s farm chapter is what Republicans are doing. That is misleading: Republicans enacted several of the chapter’s food stamp recommendations, including tighter work rules, a Thrifty Food Plan re-evaluation and a narrower heat-and-eat utility allowance, and reversed its farm-subsidy agenda item by item.^[2] Second, that private firms are picking up failing farms cheaply. That is false on the available evidence: land values are rising, farmers are the main buyers, and the public investors that report their holdings own a sliver of the land.^[31][28] Third, that family farms are going bankrupt in large numbers. That is mixed: filings are up sharply for two years, but from a low base of 139 in 2023, and remain well below 2019.^[16][20]

The case for the viral claim

The strongest version of the claim does not need Republicans to have said anything. It runs: the absence of a stated plan is not proof of innocent intent, so judge them by what they do. That is a fair test, and applying it gives a split answer.

On the specific mechanism the post describes, the actions point the other way. A party trying to force farms into bankruptcy would not raise reference prices, add up to 30 million base acres, raise premium subsidies, spend $11 billion through the very CCC authority Heritage wanted retired, and ask Congress for $11.1 billion more. The 2025 law also set the estate tax exemption at $15 million per individual, indexed for inflation; USDA argues that without it far more family operations would face massive tax bills when an owner dies.^[7]

On effects, the claim has support. The Trump administration chose a trade policy under which farm exports to China fell to less than half their three-year average, and USDA used bridge payments to cover part of the gap. Congressional Republicans chose to send most new subsidy money through channels that pay by the acre and to lift the caps that limit what the biggest operations collect. And the Farm Service Agency lost county staff, mostly through USDA’s voluntary Deferred Resignation Program, while it was running new aid programs. Those choices do not show a plan to bankrupt small farms. In our reading of the ERS data, they do show a policy that pays large row-crop operations far more than small ones. That structure is bipartisan in origin: ARC and PLC date to the 2014 farm bill, and the 2018 farm bill passed the House with 182 Republican and 187 Democratic votes.^[13][33] The 2025 changes deepened it.

Implications

For anyone arguing about the midterms, the useful fact is that Project 2025, like the Republican Study Committee budgets, is a poor guide to what Republicans have enacted on farm policy. The House passed a new farm bill, H.R. 7567, 224 to 200 on April 30, 2026, and the Senate Agriculture chairman released a draft on June 23, 2026.^[32] EWG says neither would rein in subsidies; that is an advocacy group’s reading.^[14] The live question for farm policy is not whether Republicans will dismantle the safety net, but who the growing safety net pays and whether trade aid keeps substituting for export markets.

A forecast, labeled as such: the 2027 Census of Agriculture will be the first data able to show whether farm numbers fell faster after 2022. Until then, claims that 2025 policy accelerated consolidation, in either direction, are unproven.