Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast

for Monday, June 25th with Anastasia Glova.

As Congress considers a new farm bill in coming weeks, it has an opportunity to cut

damaging subsidy programs and reduce the federal deficit. To help policy makers and the public find

programs that are good targets for cuts, Cato has launched a new

web resource called Down sizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Cato's Director of Tax Policy Studies, Chris Edwards talks about the project in this podcast.

Why did you launch this new website dedicated to downsizing the USDA?

We plan to launch at KA to a whole series of websites called downsizing the federal government,

one website for each of the 15 cabinet agencies and I started with the

U.S. Department of Agriculture because Congress is considering a farm bill this year.

The purpose of these websites is to let policy makers and the public know where they can

find major savings in the federal budget because we've got a gigantic budget deficit on Washington

and we've got exploding costs for Social Security and Medicare coming down the road.

We need to cut budget costs and I want to help people find out where they can find savings.

What are the biggest culprits in the USDA's budget?

How much, for example, does the USDA spend on farm subsidies? Well, the USDA is a gigantic federal agency spending $89 billion of taxpayers money every year.

Interestingly, though, most of the money does not go to farm subsidies about

twenty nine billion of the eighty nine billion goes to farm subsidies

but fifty five billion goes to food subsidies

mainly the school lunch program and food stamps.

And how much are, for example, trade barriers and regulations costing the U.S. economy?

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