All I Want for Christmas is. . . . For Congress to Do Their Job.
If Congress doesn't pass a spending bill by tomorrow at midnight, the government will shut down, the Farm Bill expiration will continue, and rural America will suffer.
President-elect Donald Trump and his closest allies in Congress appear to have blown up a stopgap spending bill yesterday that would have pushed critical budget decisions into 2025 when Republicans gain control of both chambers of Congress. Elon Musk, a Trump advisor and the world’s richest person, assisted Trump in his effort to kill the deal.
If passed, the deal would have extended 2025 federal budget negotiations to March of next year. It would also have provided an extension of the 2018 Farm Bill, which is currently expired, to September 30, 2025. The bill also includes disaster assistance (farmers would receive $21 billion of this aid), $10 billion in farm payments, and various other items.
If Congress doesn’t pass this bill (which, admittedly, includes many terrible things) or negotiate something similar by Friday at midnight, the government will shut down, and the currently-expired Farm Bill will become a hard-hitting reality. Rural America will suffer, and lose tens of billions of dollars in the process.
Farm Bill programs don’t just benefit farmers. 71% of the bill goes to fund important nutrition assistance programs that help low-income people pay for groceries, school food programs, and support emergency food programs and food banks. The Farm Bill also funds the U.S. food safety system, the U.S. Forest Service and wildfire fighting force, pays for efforts to build high-speed internet services in rural America, and supports billions of dollars in rural infrastructure projects all over the country.
With respect to government shutdowns, there is also a lot at stake for rural America. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Service Agency (FSA) offices would shut down. FSA offices are responsible for handling government payments to farmers. More broadly, USDA says that 239 rural counties across the country have government-job dependent economies.
It’s a disaster, pure and simple.
There’s plenty of blame to go around here for the situation. House Republicans are completely dysfunctional. Many of them will stop at nothing to de-fund and destroy the federal government. They want to punish the poor by slashing food assistance programs for poor people. And while most of them would never say it out loud, they want to rip apart billions of dollars that rural communities depend on each year to pay for a variety of public services. Plus, all they would have to do is to stand up to Trump and go ahead and pass the budget extension bill.
The Democrats also played their role in getting to this point, but to a much, much, much, much smaller degree. They mostly bungled the Farm Bill debate, particularly in the Senate where retiring Senate Agriculture Committee lead Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) didn’t issue a draft until a few weeks ago when action was impossible. That’s incompetence to the highest degree.
The core problem here is that Congress refuses to do their jobs. They got a one-year extension on the now-expired Farm Bill and still didn’t get it done. Their Constitutional requirement is to pass an annual budget, yet they continually fail to perform that basic function. Perhaps it is time to just pass a law that extends the current budget for one year if they don’t act by the September 30 deadline. That might incentivize those government-hating deficit-hawk Republicans to actually get in the game.
The simplest solution is for Republicans who support the bill to just ignore Trump and Musk and pass the budget and Farm Bill extension deal, but that’s not gonna happen. Trump is threatening them with retaliation in the 2026 primary elections and they’d rather save their jobs than look out for their constituents and a functioning society.
Perhaps President-elect Trump and his allies in the Congressional Freedom Caucus will come to their senses before the Friday night deadline and pass something that puts a band aid on the problem. There’s zero evidence that that will happen, but it’s the only thing that would avert the tragedy ahead of rural America.
Plus, this is a scary reminder of what “leadership” looks like under Trump.
The Cocklebur covers rural policy and politics from a progressive point-of-view. Our work focuses on a tangled rural political reality of dishonest debate, economic and racial disparities, corporate power over our democracy, and disinformation peddled by conservative media outlets. We aim to use facts, data, and science to inform our point-of-view. We wear our complicated love/WTF relationship with rural America on our sleeve.
This is an excellent and concise article listing hard truths. Thank you for your insight into how government works, or does not work, for rural America but ultimately affecting all of us. Well done!