Matt Bell has been farming in North Carolina for more than half his life. He voted for President Trump but said farmers are "fighting for survival" as they combat rising prices.
Page F2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 18 September 2026
Promised to put farmers first, Trump spends $40 billion — conservatively — on war with Iran
As it ran on the front
Matt Bell has been farming in North Carolina for more than half his life, and this week he told CBS News he is "in survival mode," that he can't stay in business under the weight of rising costs. He voted for President Trump. He says he was sold a bill of goods — a promise, plain as any campaign line, to put America's farmers and ranchers first. That's the ledger he was handed.
Now the reconciliation. Three days before Bell's interview aired, the Congressional Budget Office closed its own books on a different account: the war with Iran. By the end of July, CBO found, the Department of Defense had already spent $38 billion in operational, logistical, and sustainment costs — replacing munitions lost in battle, covering the extra flying hours, keeping the whole operation fed and fueled. Add it up and you clear nearly $40 billion. CBO called that a conservative estimate. Not a ceiling. A floor.…
…(cont) Line the two ledgers up side by side and the arithmetic is not complicated. The money did not go missing. It went somewhere. It just did not go to Matt Bell's farm, or to the farms like it, fighting the same rising costs he described this week. Forty billion dollars — conservatively — cleared for a war before the growing season's bills came due for the people who were promised they'd come first.
This is not an accusation. Nobody diverted a check from a farm account and wired it to a war account; that isn't how appropriations work, and I'm not here to tell you it is. What I can tell you, because CBO put it in writing, is which column the money landed in, and it isn't the one marked "farmers and ranchers first." That column, per Bell, reads survival mode.
There is always a conservative estimate, hon, and it is never the one describing what farmers get. It is always the one describing what the war cost. Bell says he can't stay in business. CBO says its own number is low. Read those two sentences back to back and you have the whole file: not a scandal, just a set of books, open on the desk, for anyone who wants to check whose name is on which page.
“There's no money for the farm, they say — but there's forty billion dollars, conservatively, for a war nobody at this bar remembers voting on. That's not a shortage, that's a choice about whose column the check lands in. Matt Bell's still farming on a promise; the Pentagon already cashed its check.”
“National security isn't a line item you second-guess after the fact — replacement munitions, sustainment, flying hours, that's just what defending American interests costs. Is it forty billion, conservatively? Sure — okay, "conservatively" is doing a lot of work there. The farm bill runs on a separate appropriations track; they're not competing for the same dollar. Probably.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
CBO Finds Trump's Iran War Has Already Cost Nearly $40 Billion—And That's a 'Conservative' EstimatePresident Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran has already cost US taxpayers almost $40 billion, according to a report released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office. In total, the CBO report estimates that, by the end of July, the US Department of Defense had already spent $38 billion in operational, logistical, and sustainment…
Matt Bell said he initially supported Trump's policies but now feels he and other farmers were "sold a bill of goods" that there was a plan to "put America's farmers and ranchers first."
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.