The spending surge began in mid-2018 when USDA started writing checks to farmers and ranchers to pay for the damage from Trump’s trade war, which brought about higher tariffs that crushed agricultural exports and commodity prices. Farm sales to China plummeted from $19.5 billion in 2017 to just $9 billion the next year; as producers continued to hemorrhage profits in 2019, farm bankruptcies jumped nearly 20 percent last year.
His failed policies.
