American farmers are having a tough year, in no small part because of President Donald Trump’s trade war. Now, the White House is gearing up to extend them a multi-billion-dollar bailout, sources tell CNN.
Surging costs and foreign retaliation from tariffs have hurt the US agriculture industry — as have immigration-related labor shortages and plummeting commodity prices. Farm production expenses are estimated to reach $467.4 billion in 2025, according to the Agriculture Department, up $12 billion from last year.
Farm bankruptcies rose in the first half of the year to the highest level since 2021, according to US courts data.
Trump’s policies have exacerbated those woes, from the deportation of the industry’s key migrant workforce to renewed trade tensions between the United States and China. And for traditional American crops, such as soybeans, the situation has grown particularly precarious.
“There’s no doubt that the farm economy is in a significant challenge right now, especially our row croppers,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters Tuesday. “So not just soybeans, although I think they’re probably the top of the list, but corn, wheat, sorghum, cotton, et cetera.”
Indeed, the US soybean industry has become the poster child of the farm economy’s plight in the first year of Trump’s second term. The president recognizes these problems, White House officials tells CNN, and has increased pressure on his administration to address them urgently.
Over the past few weeks, the White House has held a series of interagency meetings with the Departments of Agriculture and Treasury as they attempt to finalize a relief package for US farmers, the sources said. Discussions over the best way to aid the agriculture industry are ongoing, the officials said, but they have zeroed in on two options.
“There are a lot of levers we can use to help ease the pain they are feeling,” one of the officials told CNN. One idea, floated publicly by Trump as recently as Wednesday, is to give farmers a percentage of the income the United States is receiving from the administration’s tariffs on goods being imported into the country.
“We’ve made so much money on Tariffs, that we are going to take a small portion of that money, and help our Farmers. I WILL NEVER LET OUR FARMERS DOWN!” Trump wrote on social media this week. The other is tapping into a “slush fund,” as the officials described it, at the Department of Agriculture.
The Trump administration also dipped into the fund, known as Emergency Commodity Assistance Program (ECAP), in March to similarly provide assistance to farmers. USDA at the time issued $10 billion in direct payments to eligible agricultural producers of eligible commodities for the 2024 crop year.
The administration has also discussed implementing a combination of the two, depending on where they can most quickly pull the funds from, one White House official said. The current range of aid they are looking to offer ranges from $10 billion to $14 billion.
“The final figure will depend on how much farmers need and the amount of tariff revenue coming in,” the official told CNN.
