We were very interested in reading the "Farmers First Agenda" released by the America First Policy Institute since it tries to do a synthesis between traditional conservative policy preferences when it comes to things like agriculture and nutrition, and new "MAHA" ideas.

The agenda centers on five major policy areas, each designed to simultaneously support American farmers and improve public health outcomes. The most prominent proposal allows states to restrict what SNAP (food stamp) recipients can purchase with their benefits. Nebraska, Indiana, and Iowa have already received USDA approval to ban sugary drinks and junk food from SNAP purchases, with several other Republican-led states pursuing similar waivers. This represents a significant shift in how the $112.8 billion program operates, moving away from unrestricted food choices toward what the administration calls "responsible nutrition policy."

The second major initiative targets food additive regulations, calling for closing the "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS) loophole that currently allows manufacturers to self-certify new food additives without FDA notification. The proposal would require comprehensive FDA review of the approximately 1,000 substances added to American foods without oversight between 1997 and 2011, while establishing strict conflict-of-interest rules for safety assessments.

Work requirements for SNAP recipients feature prominently in the agenda, with proposals to limit state waivers that exempt able-bodied adults without dependents from work requirements. The administration seeks to ensure these requirements are "reserved for areas with the highest unemployment" and is considering raising the age limit for work requirements from 54 to retirement age.

The agenda also addresses food waste, proposing to normalize "imperfect" produce consumption, clarify confusing date labels, and expand liability protections for food donors. Finally, it promotes domestic specialty crop production through "Make America Healthy Again" food boxes sourced from American farmers, replacing the current Commodity Supplemental Food Program with fresh, domestically-grown produce distribution.

As you can see, the main goal is to give MAHA flavor to traditional conservative policy ideas.

While there have been libertarian arguments against nutrition requirements for SNAP, conservatives are also not completely averse to micromanaging welfare recipients.

The emphasis on reducing food waste also represents a departure from typical conservative priorities. While framed in economic terms beneficial to farmers, the idea that reducing food waste is an important issue is usually associated with the environmental left.

Most noteworthy, the call for increased FDA oversight of food additives is a significant departure from traditional Republican orthodoxy. Requiring mandatory FDA notification for all GRAS substances and establishing strict conflict-of-interest rules is not an insignificant increase in regulation.

The "Make America Healthy Again" branding throughout the document reflects the influence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and represents a rhetorical shift from traditional conservative messaging. Rather than focusing solely on reducing government spending or promoting self-reliance, the agenda explicitly embraces government action to improve public health outcomes. This populist health-focused framing would have seemed out of place in Republican policy documents just a few years ago. And yet, the document repeatedly emphasizes traditional conservative themes: federalism, work requirements, supporting American agriculture, reducing dependency. Apart from the new FDA regulations, the proposals that deviate from conservative orthodoxy are mostly things that traditional conservatives would not prioritize, but also not hate.

It's a very skillful compromise. We live in interesting times.

Policy News You Need To Know

#BigBeautifulBill #GreenNewScam — The Senate Finance proposal extends massive new solar and wind subsidies through at least end of 2030, some of which will continue through 2040. A key provision change versus the House bill is that the House bill sets a 2028 deadline of "placed in service" for projects to be eligible for the credits; meanwhile, the Senate Finance text is "construction begins" which not only is a more nebulous criterion in practice (what does it mean, legally, for construction to "begin"? One person has put a shovel in the ground? Grounds have been marked out? A survey has been conducted? You can bet lawyers will be paid a lot of money to answer that question in a certain way), but extends the deadline by 4 years because of "safe harbor" provisions extended to projects whose construction has "begun". This takes us to 2029-2031, which, of course, is after the end of the Trump Administration, which raises the prospect that, especially under a Democrat administration, the credits would again be extended indefinitely (and indeed, this is probably the drafters' true intent, with the deadlines put in there for PR and budget scoring reasons). This is very bad policy. The Federal government is swimming in red ink. Solar and wind don't work (wind doesn't work at all, and if solar is set to work any-minute-now as advocates have been claiming for decades now it shouldn't need subsidies). President Trump ran on "terminating the Green New Scam." Wind and solar companies are, to put it very mildly, not known as supporters of the President or his agenda. This seems impossible to justify on either policy or political grounds.

#FederalLand — Mike Lee has a bill out that would allow some Federal land sales, a long-standing policy goal of conservatives, libertarians, and many people in (especially) the Mountain West where a very large percentage of the land is owned by the Federal government. This bill has, however, caused a mini-backlash on MAGA social media, as many MAGA conservatives are afraid that the land sold will be to promoters to make ugly "live in the pod" buildings, or some other nefarious purpose. At National Review, Dominic Pino restates the case for selling federal land.

#FamilyPolicy #VibeShift — Well, here's an essay title we didn't expect to see in the New York Times: "The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the Birthrate." Whether you call it "feminist" or something else is fine by us. Another data point in our running chronicle of the so-called "vibe shift."

#Immigration — Very revealing report: a Salvadoran migrant in Juarez "said he will wait in case there is a sudden turn in U.S. immigration policy. 'We are already on the border; we could get an opportunity at any moment,' he said." Just as life itself is a constant struggle against entropy, immigration control is a neverending task. Like shaving or mowing the lawn. Which is fine as long as there exists a functional high-capacity government with the rule of law. Border control should be akin to clean and reliable tap water: something which is pretty complicated technically, if you think about it, but actually well within the capacity of a developed government, such that citizens of such countries are perfectly right to feel entitled to it. In almost every place of the developed world, every day, people turn on the tap and clean drinking water comes out immediately, and this is so normal that nobody thinks about it twice.

#Immigration — Of course, it helps not to have a violent fifth column. According to DHS data obtained by Breitbart, ICE agents face a 500% increase in assaults while trying to arrest illegals. Obviously every single one of these assaults should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

#EVs #IndustrialPolicy #EconomicNationalism — Very interesting story from Reuters journalists Alessandro Parodi and Victoria Waldersee: "China floods Brazil with cheap EVs triggering backlash." BYD, the CCP-subsidized Tesla-copycat EV company now has its own fleet of cargo ships (!), and its first, christened BYD Shenzhen (very imaginative), which is the world's largest car-carrying ship (of course), has just made its maiden voyage to Brazil. Brazilians are not happy. "Brazilian auto-industry officials and labor leaders worry that the vast influx of cars from BYD and other Chinese automakers will set back domestic auto production and hurt jobs." The article informs us: "Brazil has emerged as a flashpoint in the China auto industry's torrid global expansion. A growing surplus of new cars being pumped out of Chinese factories has led to an export boom over the past five years, helping China pass Japan in 2023 to become the world’s top vehicle exporter. Much of this excess is being shipped overseas, to markets like Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America." Beyond the Brazilian dispute, this highlights the game-theoretical problem of free trade: free trade only works if everyone plays by the rules; if one country is economic-nationalist, it will win at the expense of the other countries; because the incentive is to be economic-nationalist, most countries will be economic-nationalist; which means that a country that idealistically embraces free trade is simply asking to be robbed. Whatever else it may be, the Chinese Communist government stealing Tesla's designs and then subsidizing a company to pump out copies at price points explicitly designed to drive competition out of business, is not a free market.

#PartyOfTheWorkingClass — You may remember the East Palestine, Ohio disaster where a train crashed caused a chemical spill in a struggling working-class community in Ohio. The long-term health and environmental effects of the spill are unknown, and could be dire. As Senator of that state at that time, JD Vance, who famously grew up in a similar kind of community in Ohio, did many things to try to improve the situation, but was limited by Senate rules and partisanship. When he was selected to run for Vice President, he pledged that he wouldn't "forget East Palestine." Well, here's an example; the Vice President just tweeted: "I'm proud to announce with Secretary Kennedy and NIH Director Bhattacharya that the Trump Administration is launching a program to study long-term health effects of the chemical spill in East Palestine, OH and help residents access the care they need. East Palestine, we will never forget you." Good. Political leaders in America should care about the communities they come from.

#DEI — Will Hild of the group Consumers First with an important warning: companies and universities are trying to maintain DEI policies by rebranding them under the word "belonging." DEI delenda est. These kinds of tricks must not be vindicated. It's up to conservative activists and media (and regular people!) to keep highlighting DEI insanity as it continues to happen in these institutions, and then up to the DOJ Civil Rights Division and other government bodies to use every legal means to ensure that civil rights laws are finally applied and that DEI in America is crushed forever.

Friday Essays

Andrew T. Walker, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and also a Fellow in Christian Political Thought at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, reports for First Things from the latest annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. Walker writes: "The most famous Southern Baptist statesman of his generation, Adrian Rogers, remarked at the Southern Baptist Convention in 2002: 'As the West goes, so goes the world. As America goes, so goes the West. As Christianity goes, so goes America. As evangelicals go, so goes Christianity. As Southern Baptists go, so go evangelicals.'" This may be a tad exaggerated, but the SBC certainly is a very big and influential component of American Christianity, and Walker finds reasons for cautious optimism that Southern Baptists continue to uphold a Biblically-based worldview.

Nate Silver (yes, that Nate Silver) studies a well-established sociological fact: conservatives report being happier than liberals. He notes that this gap remains even when you account for things like marriage (married people are happier than single people and conservatives are more likely to be married) and age (older people are happier than younger people and conservatives tend to be older). "The difference between liberals and conservatives is remarkably persistent even once you control" for a bunch of factors.

The New York Times Magazine has a long post-mortem on Skrmetti, the Supreme Court case which decided states have the right to ban so-called transgender procedures for minors, by one of their star reporters, Nicholas Confessore. "For this article, he reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and interviewed former Biden administration officials, lawyers at L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups and the A.C.L.U. and dozens of civil rights experts and current and former L.G.B.T.Q. activists." Skrmetti is a major setback for the so-called trans rights movement, and it's interesting to see it analyzed from a not-completely-insane left-wing perspective.

Over at Substack, Kevin Lynn marshals the evidence that the large numbers of Chinese exchange students in the US—which President Trump has expressed a willingness to continue—are "not merely an educational exchange but a systematic intelligence-gathering operation orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party." His case is very convincing.

Wendy Wang, a sociologist and demographer by training, and Director of Research at the Institute for Family Studies, wrote a very good, long piece for IFS asking "why Americans aren't getting married and having kids." She finds two main causes: first, the biggest problem is not "money or careers" but "finding the right person"; second, Americans have adopted what conservative social scientists have called the "capstone model" of marriage, where you get married once you have gotten everything else in your life in order, such as degrees, career, financial security and so on, rather than the older so-called "cornerstone model" (which, it seems to us, should be called "foundation stone model", since the cornerstone is also added last to a building, but ok) which "sees marriage as a foundation to start with, where two people commit to each other, support each other, and grow together as they build a life."

At Compact Magazine, UC Davis professor Norman Matloff writes about a little-known, but fascinating bit of history: in 1989, the National Science Foundation proposed encouraging foreign Ph.D students, and the documents from that time show that they did so with the explicit intent of lowering wages for American researchers. The high number of foreign STEM students in America today is the result of deliberate policy choices, motivated by the intent to reduce wages for Americans.

Another one of those must-read (or must-listen or must-watch, if you must (yes, that is a lot of "must"s)) interviews by Ross Douthat, this time of Lina Khan, the famous or infamous depending on your perspective former chair of the FTC in the Biden-Administration who, as he correctly notes, also has fans on the "populist right" (even as so many on the "tech right" shifted to supporting Trump specifically out of animus against Lina Khan).

At the British magazine The Standard, writer David Goodhart, asks: "If immigration continues at current levels, what will happen to London?" It's noteworthy that Goodhart is a man of the left, he was previously editor of the center-left Prospect magazine and director of the center-left think tank Demos. And yet, he notes that "rapid demographic change has transformed London," which is certainly true, and that this has been accompanied by a distinct lowering of the quality of life and status of a once-great world city.