Originally by at Des Moines Register
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — billed by the conservative think tank as a “policy agenda” and “playbook” for the next president of the United States — has become controversial as more and more details about it are revealed.
Former President Donald Trump is disavowing any knowledge of it. Certainly, implementation of Project 2025’s agriculture and renewable fuels policy recommendations would be an absolute disaster for Midwest agriculture and biofuels.
For the sake of our nation’s corn growers and ethanol producers, who we once proudly represented in Washington, D.C., Trump should disavow it — and do so specifically, clearly, and publicly. Project 2025’s farm and energy policies were written by once and potentially future leaders in his administration who would shape policy if he wins in November. So, whether Project 2025 itself survives as a “playbook” for a future Trump administration or not, its specific policy recommendations need to be unambiguously repudiated by Trump now or they will quite likely resurface if he were to take the oath again.
For starters, Project 2025 encourages the full repeal of the Agricultural Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs, which serve as crucially important safety nets to protect farmers against sudden and unforeseen commodity price crashes and revenue losses. While most farmers would probably agree that ARC and PLC are imperfect programs that could use some tweaks, they have generally been effective. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not a solution.
It gets worse. If the Heritage Foundation had its way, the next President would demand that Congress significantly cut federally supported crop insurance, eliminate the Conservation Reserve Program, phase out certain H-2 work visas, and repeal agricultural export promotion programs like USDA’s Market Access Program. Most farmers know that Market Access Program funding has been instrumental in opening valuable new markets worldwide for corn, soybeans, meat, ethanol and even biorefinery co-products such as distiller grains animal feed.
But it doesn’t stop there. Project 2025 recommends prohibiting USDA from using its discretionary authority to manage Commodity Credit Corp. funding. Perhaps ironically, restricting the use of that agency in this way would have blocked the last Trump administration from distributing billions of dollars in aid to farmers suffering the effects of the trade war with China.
It also would have prevented USDA from providing emergency aid to the ethanol industry when COVID shutdowns caused fuel demand to collapse by half in the spring of 2020.
Project 2025 would also wipe out any technical or financial assistance from the Department of Energy for carbon capture and sequestration projects, one of the most promising opportunities for expanding future value and demand for both corn and ethanol. They’d also take the hatchet to the division of the Energy Department that has conducted extensive research and development on the use of ethanol in high-octane, mid-level blends such as E20 or E30 — a promising low-carbon alternative to electric vehicles.
And, finally, Project 2025 calls for stripping a division of the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to implement the Renewable Fuel Standard, which has been the single most important driver of renewable fuel production and use in the ethanol industry’s history. Instead, they would cede administration of the RFS to a hand-picked political appointee (which the Heritage Foundation typically refers to as “unelected bureaucrats”) who would likely be all too eager to gut the program from the inside out and do the oil industry’s bidding.
To put it bluntly, farmers and renewable fuel industry workers who take the time to read the Project 2025 recommendations on agriculture and energy are likely to be terrified — just as we were. To set the Corn Belt’s collective mind at ease, Trump should not only publicly disavow the Project 2025 “playbook,” he should throw it in the trash and commit to policies that will revitalize rural America, maximize the production and use of renewable fuels like ethanol and biodiesel, and build upon the ingenuity and investments of America’s farmers and biofuel producers.
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