Western Massachusetts farmers are used to facing and overcoming challenges — from late frosts and damaging storms to droughts and soil erosion, and more. What they’re not accustomed to is the president of the United States standing in their way of earning a living and bolstering our local economies.

As part of this administration’s DOGE cuts, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have aimed their chainsaws at our farms and our communities. They have slashed crucial USDA programs like Local Food for Schools (LFA) and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which help western Massachusetts schools, food banks, and care facilities purchase healthy, nutritious food from our family farms.

More than 240 school systems in Massachusetts rely on the LFA program to feed hungry children, and the loss of the LFA and LFPA programs will collectively cost Massachusetts farmers more than $18 million. Farmers rely on the important market access and take into account the expected funding from signed contracts while carefully planning their annual crops and balancing their books. In announcing these cuts right before the growing season begins, Donald Trump has hung farmers out to dry this year.

My office has heard from many local farmers directly impacted by Trump’s actions. For Harrison Bardwell, a ninth-generation vegetable farmer who runs Bardwell Farms in Hatfield, it means a loss of $200,000 in revenue that his farm was counting on. Mr. Bardwell told our office that, as a result of these cuts, he is spending this spring scrambling to find customers to fill the void. Bardwell Farms employs 15 workers at peak season and their jobs and hours are at risk if the farm cannot replace the funding that this administration stripped away without warning.

Mr. Bardwell is not alone. The loss of these funds — funds that were legally appropriated and committed to our farmers by the federal government through binding contracts — has left many farmers’ growing plans in flux and their futures in doubt. Our farmers have families, workers, customers, and communities that rely on them. Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t care.

By delaying and terminating critical USDA funding, Trump and Musk are violating the law and breaking the contractual promises the federal government made to farmers here in western Massachusetts, throughout our commonwealth, and across the nation. These illegal actions mean less nutritious food on students’ lunch trays, less nutritious food on seniors’ plates, and less nutritious food to feed families most in need. Trump’s chaos puts farmers’ livelihoods at risk, saddles them with crippling debt, and threatens further consolidation of the farming industry. And further delays to obligating funding for programs like the Rural Energy for America Program make it more difficult for small businesses to install new clean energy systems.

Let’s be clear about why Trump is doing this — to pay for tax breaks for Elon Musk and the billionaires who support him. It’s a simple formula: Raid working people while the billionaire class gets paid. Not only does terminating individual contracts hurt our small family farms — where Musk is taking money out of farmers’ pockets and putting it into his own — but cancelling the wider programs further enriches the CEOs of agribusinesses at the expense of our climate, our environment, and our local farmers.

It isn’t just these disastrous cuts that are hurting our farmers. President Trump’s frivolous tariffs are making it more expensive for farmers to do business. During President Trump’s joint address to Congress on March 6, he asked farmers to “bear with” him through the financial turmoil caused by his reckless trade wars.

Why should hardworking farmers, who get up before the sun each day and do everything they can to make ends meet for their families, have to “bear with” a billionaire president that has a gold-plated private jet and a Diet-Coke-on-demand button on his desk? This president is making it more difficult and more expensive for New England farmers to do business with our Canadian neighbors, while simultaneously marketing his fraudulent cryptocurrency to the entire world.

I’m calling for the Trump administration to immediately release all USDA funding without further delay and to honor the contracts that the federal government signed with our farmers. And if the administration continues to violate the law, we’ll see them in court, where time and time again, they have been ordered to comply with the law — just as they were ordered by the courts to restore the jobs illegally cut from the USDA.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk think they had a billionaire coronation in January, but they forgot about two things: the first, is the Constitution of the United States, and the second, is all of us. We will fight for our farmers and for the people of western Massachusetts.

Sen. Edward J. Markey has represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate since 2013.