The Presidential Candidates on Factory Farming

A closing argument for Kamala Harris.

Note: This is a revised version of a Substack post I wrote in late August. Since then, I’ve made the introduction more concise, polished the conclusion, and updated information about Trump and Harris’s policies — but nothing of substance that appeared in the original post does not appear below. On the off chance that one of my readers is an undecided voter in Pennsylvania, I’ve included an AI text-to-speech to make the article as accessible as possible.

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In late August, Substackers Bentham's Bulldog and Richard Hanania capped off a friendly argument over the presidential candidates with a debate on Bentham’s channel. Bentham makes the case for Harris, while Hanania defends Trump. For fuller context, you can read Hanania’s original piece and Bentham’s response and then watch the debate below.

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, not actively trying to become a dictator, and AI. 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 noncommittal 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 pro-market 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 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-Bentham debate is the candidates’ positions on factory farming. Trump, Bentham suggests, might try to ban clean (so-called “lab-grown”) meat, while Harris is more likely to authorize federal funding for it. Hanania protests 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 factory farming has come up in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent circles during the 2024 election. In July, animal rights activist and lawyer 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 because 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 won’t be voting this year, and I’m certainly not a single-issue voter, because I don’t live in a swing state and my chance of influencing an election outcome is extraordinarily low.² But if you do vote, there’s a case that your single issue should be factory farming. Every year, human beings subject over a billion pigs, 70 billion chickens, a trillion fish, and 25 trillion shrimp 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 assessment of animal capabilities suggests 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 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 on any reasonable moral theory.

Who’s better, then: Trump or Harris? Both are bad, and if either wasn’t in the race, the other would deserve to lose the election. 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. The shared premise is that Republican elites are, on average, more ideologically committed to free market principles than Democrats — and because 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:

[Elizabeth] 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 because 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 Trump’s staffers have ever had truly 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 buy off key voting demographics and reward his largest donors. Vote buying has a long history in American politics, 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.” (Incidentally — I’m sure — one of Trump and the Republican Party’s largest donors is Ron Cameron, owner of Mountaire Farms, the fourth-largest chicken producer in the United States.)

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 millions of dollars 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 is less likely to depend on the general state of the economy than on 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 cell-cultured products. Trump’s most likely choice for USDA Secretary, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, is a cattle rancher and farm subsidy welfare recipient who’s 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 cultivated products. Trump surrogate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who’s been promised control over the administration’s health and food safety portfolio, has promoted a baseless conspiracy theory that “fake meat” is part of a plot by Bill Gates to control the world’s food supply. Trump allies in Congress have introduced multiple pieces of legislation to restrict funding and free speech in labeling 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 alternative protein 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 has never indicated that she’s going to cut farm subsidies, impose sweeping new regulations on slaughterhouses, or give up on the Midwestern farmer vote in 2028 by ending federal protectionism for animal agriculture. But she’s also unlikely to give special bailouts to livestock producers, weaken farm animal welfare laws, and ban clean meat just because her donors say so.

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 unlike Trump, she’s open to the very conservative claim that there might be something wrong with the food system. Trump doesn’t know how to pronounce the word vegan, thinks climate change is a hoax, and officially deemed meatpacking essential to U.S. national security. Harris, as Attorney General of California, successfully defended the precursor to the nation’s strongest animal welfare law, Proposition 12, which Trump has said he’ll attempt to supersede through federal action. And Harris is at least accountable to a voter base that says it cares about the second-order consequences of animal agriculture, like climate change.

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 far more likely than Trump to listen to the experts and lobbyists who are calling on governments to support the alternative proteins industry to bolster global food security, include food systems on the international climate agenda, and revise federal dietary guidelines away from red meat (a probable carcinogen) and toward plant-based proteins.

Hanania is skeptical that the federal government can do much to 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 in 2023. The largest alternative proteins lobbying group, the Good Food Institute, boasts an annual operating budget of $32 million. 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 which included language promoted by GFI recognizing investment in “foods made with cultured animal cells” as an important tool for bolstering food supply chains.

The opportunities presented by a Harris presidency are clear, even if unlikely to come to pass. It’s possible to imagine Harris and her staffers deliberately weighing the arguments for food systems reform and making policy decisions based on the merits, rather than the cynical politics and personal transactions and grievances that totally dominate Trump’s calculus. If Harris wins, the greatest progress may be made by competent civil servants allowed to act along the margins of government policy and exercise their authority to make research grants and issue regulations on the environment and public health. A grant here, an organic poultry rule there — it’s nothing like animal liberation in our lifetime, but it’s a step in the right direction.

The reality here is not quite as Hsiung put it, but it’s close:

I suspect that what you’ll find, if you [dive deeper], is not that one candidate is clearly better than the other on animal rights but, rather, that the real power for change won’t come from either Harris or Trump. It will come from you. 

Government policy and support for alternative proteins alone will not displace animal agriculture even in the next few decades. Ending factory farming will require 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 competence and minimal decency to save them.

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1. Incidentally, there was an active discussion on the EA Forum the week before I wrote this piece 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 factory farming from other issues that may have a greater effect on global net welfare but are not clearly tractable to present-day interventions. These include wild animal suffering, long-term existential and catastrophic risk, and digital sentience.