Farmers are demanding a bailout but Trump may need a China deal to pull that off

By Alayna Treene, Jeremy Herb, Sarah Owermohle, CNN

(CNN) — Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins burst into the White House last week explaining that her team had found a legal way to help unlock billions in relief funds for US farmers caught up in the trade war with China, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

By tapping into a Depression-era fund and moving around leftover money from the prior fiscal year, Rollins was able to scrounge together enough funding to reopen all 2,100 USDA county offices by paying two employees per office to come back to work. Only then could they get the crucial assistance funds out the door, the sources said.

“We had to pay the employees in order to bring them back. We had to find the money,” a USDA official told CNN.

The maneuver unlocked more than $3 billion in emergency aid and regular program assistance that had already been approved by Congress, money that will be used for things like crop insurance and disaster assistance made to farmers across the country.

But while the agency was able to get that money out the door, it’s unclear whether farmers will also be helped with a much larger relief package.

Trump officials have debated for months whether to move forward with a bailout package to help farmers who have been hit by President Donald Trump’s tariff policies. Discussions have centered on a package of $10 billion to $14 billion, if not higher.

But the government shutdown complicated things, raising questions over whether a farm bailout will materialize at all.

“The shutdown has totally affected this whole process because a lot of the people who were charged with deciding this are furloughed,” a White House official told CNN. “Now the administration, through Treasury and Ag, are reassessing its options.”

The president has also not yet decided on how he would like to proceed, officials said.

Trump’s tariffs prompted China to stop buying US soybeans in May, leaving farmers across the country sitting on billions in unsold crops and some questioning the policies of a president many of them voted for.

Dave Murphy, founder of United We Eat, a farmer advocacy group aligned with Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, said that Trump’s decision to bail out Argentina has soured farmers even more.

“There are farmers that are livid, that have voted for Trump three times,” Murphy told CNN. “If the Trump administration is promising $20 billion, perhaps $40 (billion) for Argentina, he can’t leave farmers behind on this, which is an entirely administration-created nightmare, right, because of the tariffs.”

Now some Trump officials are hoping that a bigger bailout may not be necessary if the president’s sit-down with Chinese leader Xi Jinping results in a deal to lower tariffs and loosen up the trade war.

“We hope we don’t have to use (a bailout). We want China to buy the soybeans, so maybe we don’t have to do a program,” the USDA official said.

In advance of the meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a framework agreement that could prompt Beijing to start buying “a substantial amount” of US soybeans again. China purchased roughly half of US soybean exports last year, according to USDA data.

On Thursday, ahead of the Trump-Xi talks, Rollins said on X that China had made its first soybean purchase since May, a sign that the impasse could be easing.

Lawmakers in major farming states have been frustrated by Trump’s whiplash on tariffs.

“If he can actually pull off a big trade deal with China that involves the sale of soybeans, all will be forgiven,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, told reporters Monday, while adding that he was “exasperated” by Trump’s latest missive ending trade talks with and increasing tariffs on Canada.

The lingering farm bailout is just one of the issues facing Rollins as she navigates the fallout from Trump’s tariffs and the government shutdown. She’s still dealing with the backlash from Trump’s jab at American beef producers last week and the president’s call to buy Argentinian beef — after already bailing out the country itself with $20 billion.

On Tuesday, a group of Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration after the Agriculture Department said it could not legally pay $8 billion in food stamp benefits for November with the government shut down.

A candid text message

Soybeans have been the largest US agricultural export, valued at more than $24 billion in 2024, according to USDA data. China purchased about half of those exports last year but has not bought any US soybeans since May.

Trump himself has gotten involved in the discussions over how to best help the struggling soybean industry, in part because Rollins has forced the issue not only with him, but also with Bessent.

A viral photo of Bessent’s phone captured by the Associated Press last month showed a text on Bessent’s phone from a contact named “BR,” presumed to be Rollins. Her messages illustrated the deep concerns within the Trump administration over the soybean industry’s woes. It came as the Treasury Department was preparing to send Argentina a $20 billion lifeline — something that farmers had criticized as money that should be flowing to them.

“This gives China more leverage on us,” the message said, because Argentina lowered its prices to sell soybeans to China.

Rollins told reporters at the White House earlier this month that she is in “constant communication” with the White House and partners across the government.

Trump had been blaming China for the pain US soybean farmers are facing, while floating tariff revenue as a way to pay for a bailout. But as a potential meeting with Xi grew closer in recent days, he became more optimistic about coming to an agreement.

“I think we’ll make a deal,” Trump said in the Oval Office last week, saying he thought an agreement was possible on China’s rare earth materials as well as on soybeans.

Rollins and Bessent work closely on a series of issues because of the nature of their portfolios. When it comes to the farmer bailout, however, their competing interests have at times led them to clash, two White House officials said.

“Brooke is solely concerned about farmers and ranchers. Bessent is more concerned about consumers,” one of the officials said.

Shutdown puts bailout plans on hold

White House officials said that a farmer bailout likely would have been announced by now if not for the government shutdown. One official argued the shutdown has not only delayed a relief package, but also changed which mechanism the administration might use to offer aid.

Prior to the shutdown, administration officials said, a larger bailout package had been all but decided on. The plan was to use revenues generated from Trump’s tariff policies, as well as money from a little-known USDA fund, to pay for it. However, several of the federal employees tasked with planning and executing the bailout were furloughed during the shutdown.

Administration and congressional sources said that the mechanism for a farm bailout could depend on the size of the package. It’s possible that funds could be tapped through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a Depression-era program that allows the government to help make up losses for farmers.

But the administration also might need Congress to sign off on directing tariff money toward specific programs or to approve bailout funds in a spending bill.

“We’re just really not sure what approach Congress and the administration are taking,” said Lesly Weber McNitt, president of public policy at the National Corn Growers Association.

The shutdown makes it harder to have those conversations. “There are a lot of people who are involved in this type of program construction and implementation who are furloughed,” McNitt said. “It’s just really murky right now.”

USDA earlier this month rejected a bipartisan request to brief the House and Senate Agriculture committees on the shutdown, opting instead to brief only Republican members, according to two congressional staffers. Staffers were hopeful that potential relief programs would be discussed in the meeting.

Joe Glauber, a former chief economist at USDA in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said it’s always a challenge to strike a balance of designing assistance packages that help different types of farmers in an equitable way, so that one crop like soybeans doesn’t get more than another.

“It’s still very fluid here,” said Glauber, now a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “One thing I learned about any farm bailout or farm payments in general — it’s very hard to get them back.”

‘A triple whammy’ hitting farmers

Farm associations have been hesitant to assign a dollar figure to how much relief the industry needs. Some figures floated in congressional discussions have included $20 billion to $30 billion for growers of major commodity crops, such as soybeans, corn and wheat. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has discussed a package in the $10 billion to $14 billion range.

Not even the higher estimates of aid, if approved, would recoup losses. The growers of nine of the biggest row crops were already projected to lose up to $45 billion this year because of soaring production costs and low crop prices, according to Shawn Arita, an economist at North Dakota State University’s Agricultural Risk Policy Center.

Now there is “a triple whammy” of production costs, low prices, and the trade conflict, which goes well beyond the soybean tussle with China, Arita said.

Many farmers who grow both crops planted more corn this season, resulting in a record 16.8 billion bushels of corn this year.

That is roughly 2 billion extra bushels with no buyers.

“That’s going to be a major pile of corn with nowhere to go, and that depresses prices,” said McNitt.

Many farmers say they’d rather sell their crops than receive bailouts but argue that it would make sense to use tariff money to help those impacted.

“It doesn’t take money out of the budget. … The tariffs cause some more issues. But why not use the tariff revenues to help get us through this time?” said Bob Worth, a former president of the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association.

“We were putting all our eggs in one basket, and that basket was China,” added Worth, who has been farming more than five decades. “And China does what China wants to do. You can’t stop it.”

CNN’s René Marsh and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.

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