Republicans included provisions to prevent the implementation and enforcement of Packers and Stockyards rules completed under Biden.
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Republicans included provisions to prevent the implementation and enforcement of Packers and Stockyards rules completed under Biden.
June 9, 2025
June 9, 2025 – Last week, House Republicans tucked a provision into a draft agriculture funding bill that would take away the ability of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to implement and enforce a package of rules the last administration completed to protect farmers from meatpacker abuse.
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Under President Joe Biden, the USDA finalized three rules and proposed a fourth related to the Packers and Stockyards Act, a law that has been on the books for more than a century but has lacked teeth. Farmers and ranchers have fought for decades to strengthen the protections, especially as meatpacking companies have become bigger and more powerful, wielding more influence over the producers who raise the animals and who take on significant costs to do so.
The new rules were a landmark step forward in ensuring fairness in contracts and protecting farmers and ranchers from exploitation by meat companies; their trade groups are already suing to overturn one of the rules. This new bill represents another threat.
Appropriations is solely about allocating funding, so the lawmakers inserted language that prohibits any funds from being used to write, publish, finalize, implement, or enforce the four rules, essentially killing them. The only thing the bill would allow funds to be used for is to “withdraw or rescind” the rules.
Members of the full Appropriations Committee are expected to vote on the bill this week. If it passes, it would then have to be approved by the full House of Representatives and move to the Senate. The bill also includes a variety of significant spending cuts to align with the Trump administration’s budget requests, and its chances for success within a closely divided Congress are far from certain. (This appropriations process is completely separate from the ongoing negotiations over the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.)
In the meantime, farm groups are mobilizing to oppose the provisions. This afternoon, the influential National Farmers Union (NFU) sent out an action alert urging members to “act now to defeat a bill that threatens family farmers and ranchers everywhere,” by contacting their representatives in Congress. “These rules protect family farmers and ranchers from anticompetitive and abusive practices in the highly consolidated meat and poultry industries,” the NFU wrote.
In a bill summary released by committee, Republicans characterized the changes as “reining in harmful regulations proposed during the Biden administration that dictate how poultry and livestock producers raise and market their animals.” (Link to this post.)
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June 26, 2025
At our latest Civil Eats virtual salon, our team talked about the launch and evolution of the Tracker, a running report on federal actions that affect food and agriculture.
January 20, 2025
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