The Presidential Candidates on Factory Farming

Addressing Hsiung, Hanania, and Bentham's Bulldog on Trump vs. Harris.

Substackers

Bentham's Bulldog

and

Richard Hanania

recently capped off a friendly argument over Trump vs. Harris with a debate on Bulldog’s channel. The two are both rationalists (in the colloquial rather than epistemological sense) and both belong to the broad community of thinkers who are generally interested in making the world a better place and using reason and empirical evidence to do so. They agree, for example, that Effective Altruist principles are good, even if Hanania is critical of the movement, and that factory farming is bad—and they might disagree, I assume, over what the corporate tax rate should be and whether one should pursue, in the words of William F. Buckley, Jr., “busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors.”

Bulldog makes the case for Harris, and Hanania defends Trump. I recommend reading both Hanania’s original piece and Bulldog’s response and then watching the debate and subscribing to their newsletters before going any further.

(Update: Bulldog published another article expounding on some points he made in the debate.)

Debating Richard Hanania About Trump V. Harris

For full disclosure, I’m grudgingly on Team Harris. I think she’s simply better than Trump on almost all of the most important issues, including global health and development, immigration, climate change, foreign policy, nuclear risk reduction, pandemic prevention, animal agriculture and food systems, not actively trying to become a dictator, and AI. I think there’s a plausible case that Trump is better on Ukraine, pharmaceutical innovation (also: Operation Warp Speed), and abortion if you’re pro-life—though Trump is remarkably non-committal on abortion restrictions—and I don’t think Harris is particularly good on any of the above issues. I’m also partial to Hanania’s defense of Republicans as the more market-friendly party, but Trump’s support for massive tariffs and his habitual corruption on behalf of whomever he thinks might deliver him the most votes and money makes me think that neither candidate has a decisive edge on the economy, and if one does then it’s probably Harris.

One of the main sticking points in the Hanania-Bulldog debate is the candidates’ positions on factory farming. Trump, Bulldog suggests, might try to ban clean (“lab-grown”) meat, while Harris is more likely to authorize federal funding for it. Hanania demurs that clean meat is unlikely to be a salient political issue during the next administration, and if you approach politics with a utilitarian calculus that includes animal welfare, you’re going to end up with a lot of weird and counterintuitive conclusions. You might think, for example, that we should purposefully try to retard economic growth in developing countries and minimize the world population so there would be fewer people around to kill fewer animals and eat less meat.¹

This isn’t the first time that factory farming has come up in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent circles during the 2024 election cycle. About a month ago, animal rights superstar

Wayne Hsiung

made the provocative claim that Trump might be the vegan choice for president. Trump and the Republicans, Hsiung suggests, are more likely than Democrats to cut the subsidies that prop up animal agriculture, since the USDA chapter of Project 2025 “propose[s] an end to many farm subsidies, along with the ‘checkoff’ programs that have created a public-sponsored cartel in factory farming.” Even though Trump is worse on enforcing animal welfare laws and promoting veganism in the culture, farm subsidies are so important that a Trump victory probably means less death and suffering than Harris.

I don’t vote, and I’m certainly not a single-issue voter, because I know that my chance of influencing an election outcome is extraordinarily low.² If I did vote, however, my single issue would be animal agriculture. Every year, human beings subject over a billion pigs, 70 billion chickens, a trillion fishes, and 25 trillion shrimps to agonizing suffering and premature death. Even if you think land animals are morally worth just one-in-a-thousand times as much as the average human being, and aquatic animals are worth just one-in-a-million times as much as a human being, that’s the equivalent of murdering about 100 million people every year (and our best assessments of animal capabilities suggest that these estimates are too small by two or more orders of magnitude). There’s no good reason to do this, since people can live perfectly healthfully on a plant-based diet. In fact, most people would be healthier than they are now if they stopped eating animals, and we’d go a long way toward solving climate change and a host of other social and environmental issues. Just because of the frivolity and immense suffering involved in using animals for food, factory farming is probably the most important actionable moral crisis in the world today.³ Whichever candidate is better on the treatment of farmed animals, or who would reduce the number of animals raised for food, even slightly, compared to their opponent, is probably the better candidate under any reasonable moral theory.

Who’s better, then: Trump or Harris? Both are bad and abet moral atrocities, but one is less bad than the other. Contra Hanania and Hsiung, that candidate is Kamala Harris.

AI thinks that Harris looks like this.

Against Trump

Hanania and Hsiung offer two arguments in Trump’s favor. Hanania claims that Trump is better for the economy because Republican elites are, on average, more ideologically committed to free market principles than Democrats. Since so much federal policy is determined by an administration’s staffers, Trump would be more likely to cut farm subsidies (Hsiung’s argument), and there would be greater private investment available under Trump for technologies that might replace factory farming, like clean meat (Hanania’s argument). Hanania observes:

[Eizabeth] Warren types who are reflexively anti-market are far more prominent on the Democratic side. Republicans aren’t better on most issues because they all carry around Hayek’s books and have internalized his arguments about how markets are the only rational way to aggregate information. They’re often just too busy getting worked up over drag queens to be constantly paranoid about anything involving money and prices. People who are ideologically pro-market as a reflex moreover are disproportionately represented among conservative elites. Belief in economic freedom doesn’t motivate many Republican voters, but when Elite Human Capital does tilt right, it’s usually for this reason. All of this means that while the typical Republican voter might not be much more pro-market than the typical Democratic voter on any particular issue, the gap between the judges and high-level government officials of each side is vast.

Hanania elsewhere furnishes good evidence that the more pro-market party is typically better for long-term economic growth. I don’t doubt that that’s true, and I’m also convinced that, since the federal government intervenes so aggressively in the market to promote factory farming, the more anti-interventionist party is usually the one that’s better for farmed animals. (The same goes for animals used in research, which is also publicly funded, though wild animals are a different matter.) The exception would be a party that supports active government intervention to curtail factory farming—something that’s not true of the Democrats and certainly not true of Joe Biden or Tim Walz.

Hanania gets it right that Trump’s staffers are generally more pro-market than the Democrats, which is why we got tax cuts and conservative regulatory policy during Trump’s term instead of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill he was touting in the 2016 campaign. But it’s wrong to think that Trump’s staffers have ever had free rein over Trump’s economic policy. Trump’s most distinctive break from Republican orthodoxy, perhaps besides his disavowal of free trade, has been his shameless zeal for intervening in the economy to pander to key voting demographics (i.e., vote buying). Both parties have a long history of buying votes, but there’s a world of difference between the Republican Party of 2012 that nominated Paul Ryan for vice president despite the inevitable backlash from the AARP and the Republican Party of 2020 whose president sent every American a check with his name on it.

One of the key buyable voting demographics in American politics today, thanks to the electoral college, is Midwestern factory farmers, who got the best of both worlds during the first Trump administration. Conservative staffers enjoyed wide latitude over technical policy details and did things like jack up the maximum line speed at slaughterhouses and wipe Animal Welfare Act enforcement data from the public record, while Trump reveled in his cult of personality among rural voters and forked over tax money to “our Great Farmers.”

Contra Hsiung, farm subsidies rose every year during Trump’s presidency, from $14 billion in 2017 to $52 billion in 2020. Most of the rise was driven by his $61 billion in bailouts to farmers hurt by his trade wars, whose votes he thought might help him win the 2020 election. A government watchdog found that out of an initial $14.4 billion tranche of bailout payments, over 98% went to dairies, hog farms, and producers of “nonspecialty crops” commonly used as livestock feed. Trump even had his USDA Secretary distribute $530 million in bailout money to lobster fisheries shortly before the election because he wanted to win a single electoral vote from Maine.

During a second term, Trump’s protectionism for factory farmers may take on the form of a ban or restrictions against clean meat. Contra Hanania, even if Trump is better than Harris on the economy—and that’s doubtful—investment in factory farm-displacing technology may depend less on the general state of the economy than on the state of the culture war over “lab-grown meat,” where Trump is clearly on the wrong side.

Ever since clean meat demonstrated its market potential last summer, outrageous claims and dishonest narratives from meat industry front groups have whipped conservative media and policymakers into a frenzy over so-called “lab-grown meat.” Trump’s most likely choice for USDA Secretary, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, has said he wants to follow the lead of Republicans in Florida and Alabama and ban clean meat—something the USDA may de facto be able to do by gumming up the approval process for cell-based products. Earlier this summer, Republicans in Congress introduced two different pieces of legislation to prohibit federal funding for alternative proteins, something that may end up on the next president’s desk if it gets attached to the farm bill.

The potential consequences of clean meat restrictions can hardly be overstated. If a Republican administration keeps clean meat from replacing factory farming for even a single additional year, they’ll be responsible for torturing 80 billion animals with the capacity to suffer about as much as a human baby. If you want a vision of the future under Donald Trump, imagine the torture of 80 billion babies.

A second Trump administration looks like this, 80 billion times over.

For Harris

There’s not a lot to be said for Kamala Harris besides the fact that she isn’t Donald Trump. Harris is unlikely to cut farm subsidies, impose sweeping new regulations on factory farms, or give up on the Midwestern farmer vote in 2028. But she’s also unlikely to further bail out livestock producers, weaken farm animal welfare laws, and ban clean meat just because she’s afraid of it. When Biden and Harris took office in 2021, they repurposed Trump’s bailout fund to support climate-focused conservation projects. When Harris was Attorney General of California, she successfully defended the precursor to the nation’s strongest animal welfare law, Prop 12, which factory farm lobbyists are now trying to overturn.

Probably the best thing that can be said for Harris is that she speaks in a language that’s comprehensible to animal advocates. She’s no radical or PETA member, but she’s at least more open than Trump to the (very conservative) claim that something might be wrong with the food system. Trump doesn’t know how to pronounce the word vegan, thinks climate change is a hoax, and officially declared that meatpacking is essential to U.S. national security. Harris is at least accountable to a voter base that claims to care about the second-order consequences of factory farming.

We shouldn’t expect Harris to launch a moonshot for clean meat or ban new factory farms—she’s no Cory Booker. But she’s more likely to listen to the experts and lobbyists who are calling on governments to embrace and subsidize alternative proteins, include food systems on the global climate agenda, and revise federal dietary guidelines away from red meat and toward plant-based proteins.

Hanania expresses skepticism that the federal government can do much to curtail factory farming and support new technologies like clean meat, since it’s not the type of thing that gets a line item in the federal budget. But lobbyists are creative, and federal agencies already have enough reasons to fund alternative proteins that they authorized $81.9 million in grants for alternative proteins research and commercialization just last year. The Good Food Institute, which boasts a $32 million annual operating budget, has lobbied governments around the world with varying success to support alternative proteins as part of the solution to climate change, land and water use, rising food demand, and supply chain security. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the most influential policy think tanks in the world, has supported GFI’s efforts. President Biden even signed an executive order in 2022 recognizing investment in “foods made with cultured animal cells” as an important tool for bolstering food supply chains.

Now, we can’t know if Harris will heed the calls of animal advocates and alternative protein experts to help transform the food system. Nor can we rely on alternative proteins to displace animal agriculture even in the next few decades. Ending factory farming requires changing minds in addition to changing policy and technology. But substantial policy action on food systems during the next presidential term may be critical for accelerating the transition to a humane agricultural system by a handful of years. Potentially hundreds of billions of animal lives hang in the balance—it just takes someone with minimal decency to save them.

1. Incidentally, there was an active discussion on the EA Forum last week about how to approach global health and development interventions in context of the “meat-eater problem,” the observation that some attempts to improve human welfare may lead to increased suffering because meat consumption in the developing world is positively correlated with GDP per capita. I recommend perusing the comments for some possible answers to this objection.

2. My reasoning here is similar to Bryan Caplan’s:

If I had a 5% chance of tipping an electoral outcome, I might hold my nose, scrupulously compare the leading candidates, and vote for the Lesser Evil. Indeed, if, like von Stauffenberg, I had a 50/50 shot of saving millions of innocent lives by putting my own in grave danger, I’d consider it. But I refuse to traumatize myself for a one-in-a-million chance of moderately improving the quality of American governance. And one-in-a-million is grossly optimistic.

3. I say “actionable” here to distinguish animal agriculture from other issues that may have a greater effect on global experiential welfare but are not clearly tractable to present-day interventions. These include wild animal suffering, long-term existential and catastrophic risk, and digital sentience.