Government overpaid corn farmers by $3 billion in trade war with China, report from nonpartisan watchdog office shows

The Trump administration's trade war with China hurt American farmers, but flawed data methodologies resulted in many being overpaid, says a report from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress.

The government "overpaid corn farmers by about $3 billion in federal aid in 2019 and farmers in the South were paid more for the same crops than those elsewhere in the country," David Pitt reports for The Associated Press. The Agriculture Department's Market Facilitation Program, created by Trump appointees at the former president's direction, used a "justifiable" baseline for 2020, but "inappropriately high" export values resulted in a too-large payout, the report said.

"This report confirms that the Trump USDA picked winners and losers in their trade aid programs and left everyone else behind," Senate Agriculture chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who requested the report, said in a statement. "Making larger payments to farmers in the South than farmers in the Midwest or elsewhere, regardless of whether those farmers actually experienced a larger loss, undermines our future ability to support farmers when real disasters occur."

The report recommends that "the USDA Office of the Chief Economist revise its internal review process to ensure transparency of its documentation and that the agency conduct a review to ensure proper baseline methods are used in analysis," Pitt reports.

The payments may have been a deliberate attempt on Trump's part to curry favor with core voters, Pitt suggests: "Before he lost the November 2020 election, Trump made it clear he was courting farmers’ votes with federal aid. In 2019, one-third of U.S. farm income came from direct government payments and last year it was nearly 40% of their income."