I didn’t need a policy seminar to learn how global trade hits rural America. I learned it behind the wheel of a tractor, on the same Kansas soil my family has farmed for generations. And like a lot of farmers across the heartland, I know what it’s like to be squeezed by bad trade deals and forgotten by out-of-touch bureaucrats.
That’s why President Trump’s America First trade agenda is so important. By standing against the unfair agricultural trade practices of other nations, the president is standing up for the men and women who feed the world and forging a path for freer markets for their products in the years to come.
President Donald Trump is also close to passing his One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). The legislation helps farmers by preventing their taxes from going up and expanding their tax deductions and exemptions.
Yet powerful forces in Washington, D.C. recently snuck a provision into the bill that would do the opposite. It would repeal some “duty drawbacks,” a valuable policy on which many farmers rely.
Here’s how it works…
Like everyone else, farmers pay tariffs on goods they import into the United States. But when they make the goods they import into other goods and then export those goods, or — in some cases — when they export similar goods, they can get some or all the tariffs they paid refunded.
These so-called duty drawbacks are only fair. American farmers have long produced surpluses of crops, which they then sell overseas. Allowing them to recoup tariffs they might have paid incentivizes them to sell more abroad. That means more money into the American economy, more American food around the world, and a lower U.S. trade deficit.
Duty drawbacks aren’t some sneaky loophole dreamed up by special interests. They date all the way back to 1789 when the Founding Fathers saw the wisdom of letting exporters offset their costs. Duty drawbacks were America’s first trade program, implemented under America’s first secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton.
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It wasn’t just that duty drawbacks provided relief for farmers; they were good for all American industry. They encouraged American companies to export while incentivizing the onshoring of business and the development of trade infrastructure like ports. They helped make America into a manufacturing powerhouse.
No doubt this is why Congress expanded the use of duty drawbacks as recently as 2004 and 2015. They were a wildly successful policy and a win all around.
Yet while Washington might do the right thing on occasion, they still don’t really understand how the American economy works, let alone the American farm. Now they’re trying to kill this deeply successful, historic policy under cover of Trump’s OBBBA.
As Virginia farm advocate and MAGA cable news commentator Martha Boneta Fain put it, “Today, they want to eliminate the duty drawback for American-grown tobacco products. But tomorrow it will be wheat, corn, cotton, soy, steel — you name it. Give the special interests in D.C. an inch, and they’ll take a mile. They always do.”
And farms that grow tobacco also tend to plant other crops, meaning it won’t just be the tobacco sector that’s hurt if duty drawbacks are rolled back. As one grower put it, “Tobacco is what holds the rest of [a farmer’s] operation together.” It’s the lynchpin not just of many individual farms but entire rural communities, and it’s under dire economic threat if the OBBBA passes as is.
Even farmers who don’t grow tobacco will face consequences. America’s national debt is becoming increasingly unsustainable, and rather than cut spending on its own immense bureaucracy, Washington prefers to shake down more distant targets, like farmers. What begins with tobacco will spread to corn, soybeans, and dairy.
Hence why American agriculture across the board is uniting against the elimination of duty drawbacks. One organization representing tobacco farmers declared, “Removing this program would introduce new uncertainty into an already challenging environment. It puts a significant share of our market at risk without a clear path forward.”
The National Black Farmers Association (NBFA) agreed: “To some, the incentive may seem minor,” said John Boyd Jr. of the NBFA who is himself a farmer. “However, to my members and growers across America, protecting the duty drawback is of great significance.”
Congress shouldn’t ruin Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill with an anti-farmer provision that is completely antithetical to the America First agenda. It needs to make sure the legislation protects farmers, not special interests and big-government bureaucrats before it’s too late.
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