From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Bonner Cohen

“We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” said President Trump in an Aug. 20 post on Truth Social.  “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”

Trump’s remarks came six weeks after enactment of his One Big Beautiful Bill terminated tax credits for wind and solar projects by the end of 2027.

The Trump administration has also issued a stop-work order for the Revolution Wind project, an industrial-scale offshore wind project 12 miles off the Rhode Island coast that was 80 percent completed.  This was followed by an Aug. 29 announcement by the Department of Transportation that it was cutting around $679 million in federal funding for 12 offshore wind farms in 11 states, calling the projects “wasteful.”

Sending an unmistakable message to investors to avoid risking their capital on no-longer-fashionable green energy, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is pulling the plug on a slew of funding programs for wind and solar power.

“Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on a visit to Tennessee in late August.  “We are no longer allowing businesses to use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland, and we will no longer allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in our USDA-funded projects.”

The White House is putting the squeeze on an industry that can ill-afford to lose the privileges it has enjoyed for so many years. Acknowledging the hesitancy of investors to fund green-energy projects with the looming phaseout of federal subsidies, James Holmes, CEO of Solx, a solar module manufacturer, told The Washington Post, “We’re seeing some paralysis in decision-making in the developer world right now.”  He added, “There’s been a pretty significant hit to our industry, but we’ll get through it.”

That may not be easy.  According to SolarInsure, a firm that tracks the commercial performance of the domestic solar industry, over 100 solar companies declared bankruptcy or shut down in 2024—a year before the second Trump administration started turning the screws on the industry.

As wind and solar companies confront an increasingly unfavorable commercial and political climate, green energy is also taking a hit from its global financial support network.

The United Nations-backed Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) “has suspended activities, following the departure of numerous financial institutions from its ranks amid political pressure from the Trump administration,” The Wall Street Journal reported.  Established in 2021, the NZBA’s 120 banks in 40 countries were a formidable element in global decarbonization schemes, which included support for wind and solar power.  Among the U.S. banks that headed for the exits in the aftermath of Trump’s election were JP Morgan, Citi, and Morgan Stanley.  They have been joined more recently by European heavyweights HSBC, Barclays, and UBS.

Wind and solar power require a lot of upfront capital, and investors may be having second thoughts about placing their bets on what looks like a losing horse.

“Wind and solar energy are dilute, intermittent, fragile, surface-intensive, transmission-extensive, and government-dependent,” notes Robert Bradley, founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research.

Given these inherent disadvantages of wind and solar power, it’s no surprise that the Department of Agriculture is throttling the flow of taxpayer money to solar projects.  The USDA’s mission is to “provide leadership on food, agriculture, food, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues….” It is not to help prop up an industry whose best days are behind it.

Effective immediately, wind and solar projects will no longer be eligible for USDA Rural Development Business and Industry (B&I) Guaranteed Loan Program. A second USDA energy-related guaranteed loan program, known by the acronym REAP, will henceforth require that wind and solar installations on farms and ranches be “right-sized for their facilities.”

If project applications include ground-mounted solar photovoltaic systems larger than 50 kilowatts or such systems that “cannot document historical energy usage,” they will not be eligible for REAP.

Ending Misallocation Of Resources

“For too long, Washington bureaucrats and foreign adversaries have tried to dictate how we use our land and our resources,” said Republican Rep. Harriot Hagermann of Wyoming.  “Taxpayers should never be forced to bankroll green new deal scams that destroy our farmland and undermine our food security.”

Hagermann’s citing of “foreign adversaries” is a clear reference to China, which is by far the world’s leading manufacturer of solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency.

According to a USDA study from 2024, 424,000 acres of rural land were home to wind turbines and solar arrays in 2020.  While this – outdated – figure represents less than 0.05 percent of the nearly 900 million acres of farmland in the U.S., the prospect of ever-increasing amounts of farmland being taken out of full-time food production to support part-time energy was enough to persuade USDA that a change of course was in order.

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

MxM News

Quick Hit:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is urging medical schools to make nutrition a core part of physician training. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he said the Trump administration will support reforms to combat the chronic disease epidemic driven by poor diets.

Key Details:

• RFK Jr. warned that chronic disease, fueled by poor nutrition, kills 7 in 10 Americans and consumes nearly 90% of the $4 trillion healthcare budget.
• He blasted medical schools for providing an average of only 1.2 hours of nutrition training per year, with three-fourths offering no required clinical nutrition classes.
• Kennedy announced that with Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s support, the Trump administration will push accrediting bodies and licensing boards to overhaul standards and mandate robust nutrition requirements.

Diving Deeper:

Kennedy opened his op-ed by drawing a comparison to the Covid-19 pandemic, noting that in 2020 telehealth expanded by 154% in just weeks. “That rapid pivot showed us a truth too often ignored: When we recognize a crisis, the medical sector can adapt overnight,” he wrote. Yet, he warned, the system has shown “refusal” to act with similar urgency against what he called a “far greater, longer-running crisis: the chronic-disease epidemic.”

The statistics Kennedy cited are sobering. According to his piece, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity are diet-related illnesses that claim more than 500,000 preventable deaths annually. “Poor diet fuels more than 500,000 preventable deaths annually from heart disease, stroke and diabetes. The science is indisputable, and the void is clear,” he said, pointing to a “paltry” average of just 1.2 hours of nutrition education for medical students.

Kennedy criticized accrediting bodies for “looking the other way” while physicians graduate without the knowledge to guide patients in lifestyle and dietary change. He stressed that nutrition counseling, when applied properly, can “prevent and even reverse chronic disease.” For that reason, he argued, future doctors must be equipped to “assess risk, guide lifestyle change, provide nutritional counseling, educate patients and address environmental factors, with nutrition education as the most proven and powerful tool.”

The reforms Kennedy outlined are sweeping: prerequisites for premed students, nutrition questions added to the MCAT, new standards for preclinical and clinical nutrition training, specialty-specific residency requirements, and expanded testing of nutrition knowledge on licensing exams. “We expect public commitments from each organization to make a priority of nutrition education, establish competency-based evaluation tools, and create sustainable faculty-development programs,” Kennedy wrote.

He concluded with a blunt warning: “The chronic disease epidemic is the most urgent and costly health crisis in America today. We can’t afford another decade of delay.” According to Kennedy, embedding nutrition at the core of medical education is a necessary step “to equip the next generation of doctors with the tools to restore the health of our nation—to make America healthy again.”