Bloodthirstily chanting Waste! Fraud! and Abuse!, Trump and his civil-society-wreckers have stripped funds from Medicaid, SNAP, and other social assistance programs.
But what about crop insurance? This week Judge Roberto Lange ordered Sully County farmers James and Levi Garrett to pay over $4 million in a civil judgment for crop insurance fraud committed in 2018 and 2019. That’s on top of the $1.7 million they had to pay back and time they had to spend in prison for claims they made on 2,200 acres of sunflowers and 47.5 acres of corn that they never planted. A Missouri farmer turned reality-TV figure is set to be sentenced in October for lying about his planting and underreporting his corn and soybean yields by hundreds of thousands of bushels. McBee’s fraud netted him crop insurance payments nearing $3.2 million, which appears to have subsidized his taste for fancy wristwatches.
A guy making $24,000 a year who tricks SNAP into giving him an EBT card makes off with maybe $292 a month. The Garretts and McBee lie on a couple forms and get millions. In our food-related social programs, producers stand to make more money off easy fraud than consumers. If I were a policymaker looking to get the highest return from my budget watchdoggery, I’d consider cuts to crop insurance before cuts to food stamps.
But while Republicans cut $186 billion and 2.4 million people out of SNAP, they are using Trump’s summer budget reconciliation bill to pour $66 billion more into the USDA, largely to dole out more crop insurance:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) announced the rapid implementation of significant enhancements to federal crop insurance programs…. RMA has delivered these transformative changes, demonstrating the Trump Administration’s unwavering commitment to putting American farmers first by expanding benefits for beginning farmers and ranchers, increasing coverage options, and making crop insurance more affordable and accessible across multiple insurance programs [USDA Risk Management Agency, press release, 2025.08.20].
Instead of targeting crop insurance, where a little bit of fraud can produce a lot of cash, Republicans are cutting USDA programs that support conservation, research, international food aid, and rural development.
That’s typical Republican policymaking: punching down at the little guys while helping bigger businesspeople take more than their share from the federal trough.