Summary
Trump’s move to defund USAID is causing unintended consequences for American farmers and businesses.
The Washington Post reports that USAID purchases billions in U.S. agricultural products, with American farms supplying 41% of its food aid.
The funding freeze has already halted $340 million in food shipments, leaving tons of wheat stranded in Houston.
Experts warn this decision directly harms American jobs and businesses, as much of USAID’s aid is administered through U.S.-based organizations employing American workers.
If they didn’t learn last go around, do we expect them to this time. I remember during his first term, his tarrifs made China reduce purchasing (I forgot which crop) from the US. Instead, they looked to other countries like Brazil. To combat the lost revenue to farmers, he created a fund to aid them.
I watched a great video about this yesterday: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SS2dSOiMN6g
Tariffs and other limitations on exports from the USA to China have only helped to make China stronger and reduce its dependence on the USA, either by relying on other countries or by them producing a better product domestically.
That’s also a major part of the reason why DeepSeek-R1 was much cheaper to train than OpenAI’s equivalent models. The USA restricted exports of high end Nvidia GPUs and AI accelerators to China, so people in China had to do the same job with cheaper, lower-end hardware.
China is already far ahead in many industries. They have electric vehicles that can go 600 miles on a single charge, while most EVs in the USA barely get half of that. People in other countries are enjoying their cheap Chinese vehicles, but they’re banned in the USA and we end up with more expensive vehicles that aren’t as good.
Soybeans