Op-ed: Trump’s Disastrous First 100 Days for Food, Farming, and Fairness

Over the past 100 days, President Trump and his collaborators have taken a sledgehammer to the federal government and the U.S. scientific enterprise. Their sweeping actions are not about reform or improvement—they are about dismantling the institutions, expertise, and public safeguards that uphold democracy, protect health and the environment, and ensure that America’s farmers, workers, and communities can thrive fairly and securely.

The fiscal, social, and environmental costs of these actions will overwhelm any claim to efficiency. The cancellation and freezing of critical funding for climate resilience, equity programs, and research have sent shockwaves through the nation’s food and farm system. Combined with mass firings, these actions leave Americans more vulnerable to pollution, climate disasters, and corporate exploitation.

To understand the scale and implications of these actions, recall where we stood before Trump returned to office. After more than a century of agricultural policy dominated by corporate consolidation and environmental degradation, there were signs of transformation. Advocates, scientists, and farmers were successfully pressing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to support a fairer and more ecologically sound food system.

Modest, imperfect policies had begun to shift momentum. Equity-centered programs started to open long-closed doors for historically marginalized producers. Climate-friendly practices like cover cropping, managed grazing, and conservation tillage were gaining ground.

Copious scientific evidence was steering more research funding from extractive, chemical-heavy agriculture toward agroecological systems that nurture soil health and biodiversity. Initiatives supporting local and regional markets helped schools and food banks buy from nearby farms, keeping dollars in communities, strengthening regional food security, buoying small and midsize farms, and delivering healthy food.

All of this was taking shape within a system still dominated by large agribusinesses and monoculture commodity production. Yet these modest reforms offered hope. They represented a real, if fragile, shift away from policies that had long served corporate profits at the expense of rural communities, the environment, and food workers.

Enter the second Trump administration. Informed by Project 2025, this administration is determined to “get the government out of agriculture.” But government has always been in agriculture—from grants of Native Americans’ homelands to white settlers and facilitating slave labor, to ongoing subsidies for polluting commodity crops.

The farm bill, for example, incentivizes farmers to grow corn, wheat, cotton, and rice for export and encourages overproduction of livestock that strains natural resources and pollutes water and air. These policies favor large, corporate operations, while small and midsize farms are increasingly eaten up by a rapidly consolidating agricultural system.

The Trump administration’s so-called return to “free markets” is not just a rollback to the pre-Biden status quo; it’s an aggressive acceleration toward even deeper consolidation, climate vulnerability, and racial inequity. Truly competitive markets, meanwhile, are pushed farther away, for example, when Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins fast-tracked commodity subsidies and promised USDA bailouts to cushion tariff losses.

One of the most destructive acts is the dismantling of equity initiatives. The USDA removed the mechanism for reporting discrimination and froze crucial programs that assist Black, Indigenous, and people of color, beginning, and other underserved farmers in accessing farmland.

Many USDA grant recipients must strip diversity, equity, and inclusion language from proposals or lose funding, and diversity, equity, and inclusion scoring criteria are gone from USDA grant evaluations.