The downfall of America: food stamps

Project 2025 aims to unleash free market agriculture—and make food stamps more inaccessible

Project 2025 is the 920-page presidential transition playbook produced and published by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. The goal: implementing a decades-long plan of stripping away every remaining facet of the New Deal and incorporating a Christian nationalist government in America, in which total power goes to the president. A Republican loss in November won’t stop this project, as these conservative goals have been in motion for decades. I’ll be writing about Project 2025 in the coming months as the stakes are too high to ignore, as it has the potential to impact every facet of American life.

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Project 2025 isn’t a hidden agenda. You can download the document and clearly see that they want to implement the unitary executive theory if a Republican wins the presidency in November. Since that nominee is Donald Trump, and since he will gladly hand over bureaucratic responsibilities to an organization willing to crown him king, the stakes are unbelievably high.

For the next two Mondays, I’ll investigate the chapter on the Department of Agriculture, written by Daren Bakst, the Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for Energy and Environment and a Senior Fellow. 

CEI is a nonprofit libertarian think tank focused on regulatory policies steeped in climate change denial. One of the organization’s main objectives is to overturn regulations instituted as a result of the sixties-era environmentalism movement. Bakst is considered one of the institute’s “most effective advocates for Free Market Environmentalism,” the notion that the free market will solve all of our environmental problems.

Here’s CEI founder in 1992 discussing global warming: 

Most of the indications right now are that it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we’re moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture.

Incredibly, this mindset is still exhibited by some climate change deniers.

CEI’s long-standing goal is to recapture “the moral legitimacy of capitalism.” The intersection with Christian moralism isn’t a bug, but a feature: throughout this chapter, as well as the entire document, the notion that the Christian god’s directions are the only that matter is baked into every sentiment. Since Christian Nationalism and free-market capitalism are longtime bedfellows, this makes sense.

Side note: CEI also fought hard against Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. 

Before joining CEI, Baskt was a Senior Research Fellow in Environmental Policy and Regulation at the Heritage Foundation. He also worked for the US Chamber of Commerce, which is not a governmental agency but a business lobbying group, as well as the free market think tank, the John Locke Foundation. Bakst’s recent articles state that regulating tailpipes is dangerous to consumer freedom, carbon tariffs are terrible for society, and Biden wants to destroy freedom (of course). From his anti-tailpipe regulation screed: 

This is one of the most extreme rules ever finalized by a federal agency. The EPA’s rule would restrict the ability of Americans to buy gas-powered vehicles, a chilling abuse of power and a wanton disregard for individual freedom. Unhinged from reality, the EPA is ignoring the fact that consumers don’t want to buy electric vehicles at the level the Biden administration envisions.

In the conservative mind, Bakst is the perfect guy to deregulate American agriculture. His thoughts on American farmers opens rather expectedly:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can and should play a limited role, with much of its focus on removing governmental barriers that hinder food production or otherwise undermine efforts to meet consumer demand. The USDA should recognize what should be self-evident: Agricultural production should first and foremost be focused on efficiently producing safe food.

If you think “limited role” means overturning ag-gag laws, think again. Instead, Bakst rails against the Biden administration’s goal of making the agriculture economy “equitable and climate smart.” A woke agenda. Bakst only cares about “efficiently producing safe food,” not equity or access or the fact that we’re actually frying the planet. 

Bakst is echoing Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, in 1973, when he told farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow” and “to get big or get out.” Industrial agriculture took hold during that era. Only considering weight, not quality or externalities, is a convenient oversight in capitalist agriculture.

And then the real issue becomes apparent. 

Even before the Biden Administration’s radical effort to reshape the USDA’s work, the USDA’s mission was and is too broad, including serving as a major welfare agency through implementation of programs such as food stamps.

Unsurprisingly, the poors are the real problem. Bakst writes that the USDA’s “clients” are American citizens, not farmers, meatpackers, or environmental groups. He might have a point given who predominantly works on farms, which sure feels like any regulations protecting farmers or meatpackers should be abolished because “they’re not us.”