President Donald Trump participates in a roundtable discussion with farmers and lawmakers in the Cabinet Room of the White House on December 8, 2025 in Washington, DC. At left is Cordt Holub of Dysart, Iowa, and at right is Meryl Kennedy of Monroe, Louisiana. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The federal government will provide $12 billion to U.S. farmers harmed by “unfair market disruptions,” President Donald Trump said Monday at a roundtable event at the White House.
Trump has repeatedly said the funding is available thanks to tariff revenues and cast his aggressive trade policies as a boon to farmers rather than a drag on their global market share, as critics of the policy suggest.
“I’m pleased to announce this afternoon that the United States will take a small portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars we receive in tariffs … and we will make it available to farmers as economic aid,” Trump said.
However, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters following the incident that the money came from the department’s Commodity Credit Corporation, which is funded by regular congressional appropriations, according to a White House pool report.
The money, which administration officials called “bridge payments,” will be in farmers’ hands by the end of February, Rollins said.
Although this is not officially marketed as part of a series of Trump events focused on affordability issues, the president has said several times that he was addressing an affordability crisis that he “inherited” from President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
“The Democrats are causing the affordability problem,” Trump said. “And we’re the ones fixing the problem.”
The bulk of the funding, $11 billion, would go to row crop farmers who grow barley, chickpeas, corn, cotton, lentils, oats, peanuts, peas, rice, sorghum, soybeans, wheat, canola, cram, flax, mustard, canola, safflower, sesame and sunflowers, a USDA statement said. The department plans to set aside $1 billion for undisclosed specialty crops, Rollins said.
Payments must arrive before the GOP law takes effect
Trump, Rollins and other Cabinet-level officials said the payments should be used as a “bridge” before implementing measures passed in this year’s massive Republican spending and tax cuts bill.
“This bridge is absolutely necessary given our current situation,” Rollins said.
They blamed the Biden administration for the more negative outlook for farmers. Biden has failed to strike trade deals and a focus on environmental policy has led to higher costs for the agricultural industry, they said.
The package limits payments to $155,000 per recipient, Richard Fordyce, USDA’s undersecretary for agricultural production and conservation, told reporters in a conference call behind schedule Monday afternoon.
Iowa farmer Cordt Holub spoke at the event at the White House, where he thanked Trump for the package.
“I would like to thank you for this bridging payment,” he said. “It’s early Christmas for the farmers.”
Louisiana rice farmer Meryl Kennedy said the industry is struggling but thanked Trump for the relief funding and reference price changes in the Republican megabill.
“Our farmers can feed this country and many countries abroad, but we need fair trade, not free trade,” she said.
Impacts on tariffs are ignored
But they did not mention the impact of the tariffs, which the president’s critics say are responsible for sinking agricultural exports and hurting farmers’ profits.
The House Agriculture Committee’s ranking Democrat, Angie Craig of Minnesota, said in a statement that the package “picks winners and losers in the agricultural economy” and will not provide certainty for farmers or reduce high operating costs.
“It will not return U.S. agricultural exports to pre-trade war levels,” she said. “It also ignores the fact that the President’s tariffs are responsible for the immense financial burden felt not only by American farmers, but also by working people, manufacturers, retailers and small businesses. All Americans are fed up with the affordability crisis created by this administration and Republicans in Congress. We will be back here in a year if the administration does not change its policies.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, also criticized the program.
“The reason farmers need relief at all is largely because Donald Trump betrayed them and decimated their businesses with his disastrous tariffs,” Schumer said in a speech Monday. “Now Donald Trump is patting himself on the back, acting like a hero to farmers while using taxpayer dollars to clean up the mess he made. This is textbook Donald Trump incompetence.”
Another round?
Asked by a reporter during the roundtable whether he would be open to another round of relief for farmers, Trump said it would depend on how international trade develops and said farmers would not want more aid.
“It depends on where we go,” he said. “China buys a lot. Other countries buy a lot. And the interesting thing about the farmers is that they don’t want help. They just want a level playing field.”
He later suggested that this was unnecessary.
“We’re going to make farmers so strong – and I’m not even talking financially, because they just want to produce what they can produce,” he said. “We will make them so strong that it will actually be a golden age for farmers.”
Rollins told reporters following the event that Trump was “open to more.”
