Trump Administration Takes Aim at the War Against American Farmers

The Trump administration just drew a line in the dirt, and it’s about time someone did. On Thursday, the Department of Agriculture and Small Business Administration announced a memorandum of understanding that’s designed to do something Washington rarely bothers with anymore: protect the people who actually feed this country.

You know what’s been happening to farmers and ranchers while the rest of America scrolls through social media and complains about grocery prices? They’ve been getting destroyed by lawfare. Not the kind of legal battles that make headlines or spark outrage on cable news. The quiet kind. The kind where radical environmental groups and activist bureaucrats team up to bleed families dry through fines, force them off their best grazing land, and ultimately push them to sell property that’s been in their families for generations.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler aren’t mincing words about what’s been going on. This new partnership builds directly on the Farmer and Rancher Freedom Framework, specifically Pillar 4, which aims to create what Rollins calls “a government-wide shield against lawfare.” That’s not bureaucratic speak. That’s a recognition that the federal government has been operating more like an adversary than a partner to rural America.

Rollins told The Daily Wire something that should alarm every American who enjoys eating: “The government at all levels, federal, state, local,” under administrations from both parties, has been systematically taking “our ranching, our farming land, even our small businesses.” This isn’t a partisan problem in origin, though the Biden years certainly accelerated it. This is about decades of accumulated regulatory abuse that’s treated farmers like criminals for doing what farmers do.

Here’s the thing about lawfare that makes it so insidious. Traditional litigation at least happens in the open where you can fight back. Lawfare wraps itself in the language of environmental protection and public interest, then uses the full weight of government agencies and NGO legal teams to crush people who can’t afford to fight back. A rancher facing down the combined resources of federal regulators and activist organizations backed by millions in foundation money? That’s not a fair fight. That’s a mugging with paperwork.

The memorandum targets what both agencies are calling “abusive government overreach.” That phrase gets thrown around a lot in conservative circles, but in this context it means something specific and measurable. It means farmers paying massive fines for practices that were legal and accepted for decades. It means ranchers losing access to grazing lands because some lawsuit from an environmental group forced a settlement that nobody in rural America had any say in negotiating. It means families watching their property values collapse because new regulations made their land essentially unusable.

This matters beyond just rural America, though protecting farmers and ranchers should be reason enough. When you make it impossible to operate a farm or ranch profitably, you don’t just hurt those families. You concentrate food production in the hands of massive corporate operations that can afford the lawyers and compliance officers. You make America more dependent on industrial agriculture and foreign imports. You weaken the social fabric of communities that have sustained themselves through multiple generations of hard work.

The Biden administration seemed perfectly content letting this continue. Actually, worse than content. Many of the regulatory actions that crushed farmers ramped up significantly under Biden’s watch, pushed by appointees who viewed traditional agriculture with something between suspicion and contempt. The people making these decisions rarely had dirt under their fingernails or any understanding of what it takes to run a working ranch.

Now we’ve got two agencies promising to coordinate their efforts to fight back. Will it work? That depends on execution, on whether this memorandum translates into actual protection or just becomes another document gathering dust in a filing cabinet. But the intent matters. The recognition that something’s badly wrong matters. And the willingness to call it what it is, lawfare, instead of hiding behind euphemisms about regulatory modernization or environmental stewardship, that matters too.

American farmers and ranchers aren’t asking for handouts. They’re asking to be left alone to do their jobs without being treated like enemies of the state. This new partnership between Agriculture and the Small Business Administration suggests someone in Washington finally heard them.

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