Trump's ugly bill hands major polluter a multi-billion-dollar favor

In 1960, the TV show “The Twilight Zone” aired an irony-soaked episode called “Eye of the Beholder” that played around with the axiom about where beauty truly lies. In it, a bunch of grotesque doctors try to make a gorgeous woman (played by Donna Douglas from “The Beverly Hillbillies”) look like them, because conformity matters more than anything to their grotesque leader.

I was reminded of this episode last week while reading up on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress has been debating.

In case you haven’t heard about OBBBA and how controversial it is, consider this: Despite being strongly endorsed by our own grotesque leader, the bill squeaked through the House of Representatives by a single vote. Now it goes over to the Senate, where it’s liable to face even more opposition. I sure hope it does, anyway.

This “beautiful” bill contains a lot of ugliness. It will add trillions to the federal deficit, news that led to none other than Elon Musk calling it an abomination. It slashes food stamps for seniors to give billionaires a tax cut. And it makes such drastic changes to Medicaid that it’s led to a dispute in Iowa over how many people will die.

But what grabbed my attention is the really big favor it includes for Florida’s Big Sugar.

The feds already prop up our sugar industry with expensive government subsidies. This bill boosts that subsidy even higher, from 19.75 cents per pound to 24 cents per pound.

Bear in mind that the sugar industry produces about 8 trillion tons of sugar every year. A hike of a nickel on a pound of sugar equals an awful lot of dough.

Eve Samples via Friends of the Everglades

“It’s egregious that this polluting industry — which Florida taxpayers have paid well over $2 billion to clean up after — is poised to reap even more profits if this budget bill passes the U.S. Senate,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades.

Samples questioned how boosting the profits of the sugar industry fits in with the goals of an administration that says it’s going to “Make America Healthy Again.”

Maybe in this case the slogan should be altered to “Make Big Sugar’s Profits Healthy.”

Protected at every level

The sugar industry may be headquartered in South Florida, but it’s long been king in both Tallahassee and Washington.

“This industry is protected at every level,” Samples said.

For instance, take its horrible air pollution.

From October to May every year, Florida’s sugar companies burn their 400,000 acres of fields to prepare for harvest, thus getting rid of the outer leaves of the cane stalks.

It’s an old-fashioned practice that other countries have banned. So much burning sends billows of thick smoke floating across the little towns by Lake Okeechobee, showering down what residents refer to as “black snow” that coats their houses and cars and the lungs of the unlucky.

Four years ago, the Florida Legislature passed a bill — with support from both parties — that makes it much harder for anyone harmed by all this soot to sue the sugar industry.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, when he was a congressman, repeatedly voted against federal price supports for the sugar industry. When he moved into the governor’s mansion in 2019, he called for all the members of the South Florida Water Management District board to resign for being too pro-sugar.

But when the Legislature handed DeSantis its bill to protect the sugar industry against suits over its burning practices, he signed it into law without a word of protest.

Or take water pollution. Twenty years ago, the industry deployed 40 lobbyists — picture an army marching in bespoke suits and Italian loafers — to persuade lawmakers to extend the deadline for cleaning up Everglades pollution from 2006 to 2026.

The bill sailed through, and then-Gov. Jeb “Punctuation Marks Are Cool!” Bush — a self-described Everglades advocate — signed it behind closed doors.

The industry controls these politicians so utterly that if sugar executives demanded they line up and start dancing to the old Archies hit “Sugar Sugar,” they’d say, “Sweet!”

Money makes the world go ’round

The main reason Big Sugar always gets what it wants is that it’s ready to spend Big Bucks to get it. As the song from “Cabaret” put it so well, “Money makes the world go around!”

According to the Dirty Money Project database created by the folks at the Vote Water environmental group, between 2018 and 2024 Florida’s sugar industry spent $36 million on Florida political contributions.

In the past year alone, Big Sugar gave more than $5.2 million to Florida politicians, including $3.1 million donated by U.S. Sugar, $2.1 million donated by Florida Crystals, and just over $43,000 by the Sugar Co-op.

Acting like an always-available ATM has its advantages. Access, for example.

On Presidents’ Day in 1996, Bill Clinton was busy breaking up with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office when the phone rang. The caller: Sugar magnate Alfonso Fanjul Jr., of Florida Crystals.

Clinton spent 20 minutes on the phone with him, listening to Fanjul complaining. The sugar baron was upset about Vice President Al Gore’s proposal of a penny-a-pound tax on Florida sugar growers to pay for cleaning up the Everglades. After that phone call, Clinton shelved the plan.

Incidentally, the Dirty Money website shows that the company Fanjul runs with his brother Pepe, Florida Crystals, donated $1 million last year to the super-PAC known as Make America Great Again Inc. You can probably guess which grotesque presidential candidate it supported.

The industry has already seen a benefit, Patrick Ferguson of the Sierra Club told me. Three years ago, former President Joe Biden banned imports from a sugar company based in the Dominican Republic named Central Romana over evidence the company used forced labor, i.e. slaves.

Central Romana is run by the Fanjuls, and in March the current administration quietly removed the Biden ban. Maybe they count “being concerned about slavery” as being in favor of DEI. Can’t have that!

It’s not just politicians who reap the benefits of sugar’s bucks. In the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to produce research that played down the connection between sugar and heart disease. Instead, they shifted the blame to saturated fat.

One of the scientists paid by the sugar industry went on to become head of nutrition at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.

That’s why environmental advocates weren’t at all surprised to see Big Sugar included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“Big Sugar is once again getting gifts they really don’t deserve,” Ferguson said.

Up goes the price

Sugar has been getting special treatment from the federal government since the days when Alexander Hamilton was a real guy and not a smash Broadway show.

In 1789, Congress imposed a tariff on imported sugar to raise revenue for the struggling young nation. It was the first substantive legislation passed by the young nation, and it was signed into law by the first president, George Washington.

Despite that connection to our Founding Fathers, you know who’s been the most critical of federal policy on propping up Big Sugar? Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute. Eight years ago, Cato published a paper titled, “Candy-Coasted Cartel: Time to Kill the U.S. Sugar Program.”

When I talked to him this week, the author of that Cato paper, Colin Grabow, pointed out something about the OBBBA’s nickel-per-pound boost for Big Sugar that hadn’t occurred to me:

“This is basically raising the cost of sugar in the United States,” he said. “We just had an election where people were complaining about the cost of things.”

Yeah, I told him, I recall a lot of people fussing over the price of eggs before going to the polls in November.

“Now, instead of reforming the system,” Grabow said, “we’re just going to hand them more money and make sugar more expensive.”

I heard similar points from Vincent Smith of the equally right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The boost called for by the bill is “a pretty dramatic increase,” he said.

That will make all the goods that contain sugar — soft drinks, cookies, cake, applesauce, cereal, you name it — cost more as well. As an avid consumer of Publix sweet tea, hearing this made me do a classic spit-take.

Smith joked that making sugar and its related products so much more expensive may be good news for dentists but not for family pocketbooks.

Colin Grabow via the Cato Institute

Grabow pointed out, “You can bet that the language related to sugar in the bill is directly due to lobbyists.’

What do the senators say?

I tried contacting officials from the sugar companies about all this, but I just couldn’t sweet-talk them into speaking with me.

The closest I got to a quote was this statement from Ryan Duffy, senior director of corporate communications for U.S. Sugar, who told me via email, “We typically don’t comment on pending legislation.”

Of course, the more important folks to talk to would be our two senators. Everyone wants to find out where they stand on the Big Bad Wolf — er, I mean, One Big Beautiful Bill. But they didn’t respond to my requests for comment either.

Our senior senator, Rick Scott, has a long history of being tucked in Big Sugar’s hip pocket. Last year, when he was running for re-election, the sugar companies made big donations to his campaign’s super-PAC.

In his story on those donations, my colleague Mitch Perry pointed out the hypocrisy of Scott’s pro-sugar stance. When he first ran for governor 15 years ago, he blasted his GOP primary opponent, Bill McCollum, for accepting contributions from Big Sugar.

“He’s owned by U.S. Sugar,” the Orlando Sentinel quoted Scott saying of McCollum. “They’ve given him nearly a million dollars for his campaign. And it’s disgusting.”

Scott apparently thought it was a lot less disgusting when Big Sugar’s big payouts were going into his coffers, not McCollum’s. He hasn’t turned down a dime from them since.

In fact, as governor, Scott was one of quite a few Republican officials who accepted hunting trips to Texas from a sugar company, then declined to answer reporters’ questions about it.

Yet Scott says he has serious qualms about the One Big Beautiful Etc. He doesn’t believe it cuts enough federal fat, so he says he’s inclined to reject it.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (photo via the Scott campaign)

“I think there’s plenty of us would not vote for it in the Senate,” he said, according to CBS News.

Then we come to Florida’s newest senator, the recently appointed Ashley Moody. When she was Florida’s elected attorney general, the former Plant City Strawberry Festival queen was no friend to the environment. She also fought several absurd legal battles on the behalf of Mr. Grotesque. So far, she hasn’t indicated whether she’s in the same position as Scott or not.

If you’re inclined to bang your head against the wall, I’d encourage you to call or email these two and demand they stop this giveaway to a polluting industry. But bear in mind, they may not listen to you.

After all, the more money the sugar companies rake in, the more they can give away to our elected officials. That’s right — by boosting their profits, we’re enabling the sugar companies to continue to spend so freely on buying the favors of our politicians.

But I do have suggestion. If Scott and Moody say, “The heck with my constituents!” and vote to pass this bill for Big Sugar, I think every single one of us should send them our grocery bills, demanding a refund.

A tsunami of grocery store receipts inundating the senators’ offices would be, I think, a beautiful thing to behold.