The next Farm Bill — which will be marked up this week in the US House of Representatives — will likely be the first trillion-dollar Farm Bill. Actually, it’ll be a little more, $1.4 trillion over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent baseline published in February. It’s also a somewhat misleading number, because the Farm Bill is a somewhat misleading name.
Most of what Congress calls the Farm Bill isn’t spent on farms at all. It’s spent on groceries. That’s because SNAP — the federal food assistance program — takes up the bulk of it. Of the proposed $1.4 trillion, roughly $985 billion would go toward nutrition assistance, or about 70%. Everything else fits into the remaining 30%. That includes all the commodity supports, crop insurance, conservation, rural development, forestry, energy programs, research that the US funds.
It wasn’t always like this. Before 1973, food assistance wasn’t part of the Farm Bill.
The Food Stamp Program had existed since 1964, when then-President Lyndon Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act as standalone legislation. It was the result of classic congressional logrolling in which urban Democrats traded votes for wheat and cotton subsidies in exchange for rural support for food stamps. But still, the two programs remained separate. Farm policy was farm policy. Food assistance was something else.
By the early 1970s, that arrangement was becoming a liability for the rural lawmakers who ran the congressional agriculture committees. If food stamps could pass on a standalone vote, urban Democrats no longer needed to trade their support for commodity programs to get it, and the farm subsidy side of the ledger would lose a reliable voting bloc. In 1973, the House and Senate Agriculture committees agreed to fold food stamps into a single omnibus farm bill. The Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of 1973 made the bundling official.
The full story is involved, but the marriage suited both sides. Rural lawmakers kept urban Democrats at the table for commodity programs, and food stamps gained the protection of a multi-year authorization rather than surviving year-to-year in the appropriations process.
That bargain held for half a century. But it’s been strained.
The 2018 Farm Bill nearly collapsed over House Republican demands for stricter SNAP work requirements. The bill failed on the House floor, though, with all Democrats and 30 Republicans voting against it. The work requirements were ultimately dropped, and the bill was signed in December. The 2023 reauthorization didn’t happen on time. Congress has been operating on extensions and stopgaps. The bill that was supposed to be done in 2023 is now expected to slip into 2026 — if it gets done then. The reason is largely that the two halves of the coalition no longer trust each other to deliver, and the spending imbalance is part of why.
Then, in July 2025, Congress did something the Farm Bill itself couldn’t manage: it passed major SNAP changes anyway, through a reconciliation package — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that bypassed the bipartisan agriculture committee process entirely. Work requirements got expanded to age 64 (up from 49), the Thrifty Food Plan was frozen to limit future benefit increases.
When a Republican from Iowa and a Democrat from the Bronx sit down to negotiate the Farm Bill, they are nominally negotiating the same legislation. They are not actually negotiating about the same thing. One is fighting for crop insurance and reference prices for corn and soybeans. The other is fighting for the grocery budgets of roughly 42 million Americans. The two have been linked by a procedural marriage, not by any underlying policy logic.
That marriage produced one of the largest social safety net programs in the federal government, hidden inside a bill most people assume is about tractors. Whether it survives a trillion-dollar price tag is a question Congress should no longer postpone. And while they are at it, maybe they consider a new name for the bill.