Pursuit's Take
The cost of the federal crop insurance program and farm sector income and wealth grew significantly from 2003 through 2012. The cost of crop insurance averaged $3.4 billion a year from fiscal years 2003 through 2007, but it increased to $8.4 billion a year for fiscal years 2008 through 2012. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA), the agency that administers the crop insurance program, subsidies for crop insurance premiums accounted for $42.1 billion─or about 72 percent─of the $58.7 billion total program costs from 2003 through 2012.
Reducing premium subsidies for revenue policies could potentially result in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual budgetary savings with limited costs to individual farmers. For example, the federal government would have potentially saved more than $400 million in 2012 by reducing premium subsidies by 5 percentage points, and the savings would have been nearly $2 billion by reducing these subsidies by 20 percentage points. Report.