Washington, D.C., doesn’t have many farms, or farmers. Yet thousands of residents in and around the nation’s capital receive millions of dollars every year in federal farm subsidies, including working-class residents in Southeast, wealthy lobbyists on K Street and well-connected lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
In neighboring Chevy Chase, Md., one of the nation’s wealthiest communities, lawyers, lobbyists and at least one psychologist collected nearly $342,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies between 2008 and 2011, according to the watchdog group Open the Books.
Gerald Cassidy, the founder of one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms, Cassidy & Associates; Charlie Stenholm, a former congressman; and Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, all get subsidies. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack continues to receive payments from the agency he has overseen since 2009.
“All of it is entirely legal,” Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski said.
The Department of Agriculture awarded nearly $178 billion in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2012, and another $39 billion in conservation subsidies, according to a second watchdog group, the Environmental Working Group.
Farm subsidies have long been a target for Capitol Hill budget hawks looking to reduce spending and rein in a $17 trillion national debt, and lawmakers now negotiating a new farm bill again have the payments in their sights. The latest proposed change would reduce or eliminate direct payments to farmers that supplement their income and put the money into crop insurance programs that would protect farmers against losses.
“Congress is looking at how to get rid of the direct payment, but still have some life support for the farmer, because the farmer takes huge risks every season when he puts crops into the ground,” a USDA official told the Washington Examiner.
The Depression-era farm subsidies have seen few reforms over the years and are now “out of control,” Andrzejewski said. Billions once spent to keep family farms from going under now go mainly to agribusiness giants such as Monsanto and ADM and to wealthy landowners who have never farmed.
Open the Books calculated how much of the money is flowing into major cities with few, if any, modern ties to farming: Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago. About $30 million in taxpayer subsidies went to those urban residents to compensate them for conserving farmland and for planting soybeans, cotton, corn, rice and other crops.
The big-city farm subsidies show that savvy landowners are legally maximizing a return on their real estate investments at the expense of taxpayers, Andrzejewski said.
Open the Books found that subsidies flow into both working-class city neighborhoods and tony suburbans, though poorer residents got far less taxpayer money than the wealthy and connected.
In the Fairlawn neighborhood in Southeast Washington, where the annual average income is about $20,000 — compared to $106,000 in suburband Chevy Chase, Md. — residents collected a total of $10,000 in subsidies between 2008 and 2011, according to Open the Books.
Van Boyette, a lobbyist living in Washington’s pricey Palisades neighborhood and onetime aide to legendary Sen. Russell Long, D-La., got $186,761 in federal farm payments between 2004 and 2012 for growing corn and other crops, and for conserving farm land he owns in six Iowa counties.
Cassidy, one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists whose firm represents agribusiness clients, collected $41,000 in conservation subsidies since 1995 for a farm called Covey Point that he owns in Dorchester County, Md. Cassidy’s aides declined to return phone calls seeking comment.
Among those seeking changes to the subsidy program is a lawmaker who receives subsidy money, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. He proposed capping annual federal payments at $250,000 per couple.
“Sen. Grassley brings real-life perspective to the problems farmers face,” a spokesman told the Examiner. “He still actively markets his crops, helps with the planting and harvesting, and flies home nearly every weekend to attend constituent events and maintain the family farm. He participates in farm programs the same as any other active participant on a farm does.”
The explanation for why Washington’s movers and shakers get USDA subsidies is not necessarily that simple, or nefarious.
Carl Thorsen, a top aide to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and now a lobbyist living in Chevy Chase, gets about $4,000 a year for 71 acres of Pennsylvania ground on which he and his family have been planting native grass and thousands of hardwood, apple and spruce trees.
“It’s something that I’m passionate about,” Thorsen said. “I don’t golf, I plant trees.”
