The Opportunity To Make Rural America Great Again
Written by Chriss W. Street
The clear message from the 2024 elections is the 66.3 million people that the Census Bureau define as rural based on housing and population density, have become a powerful 20% voting bloc that has earned the right to demand greater federal resources to promote rural economic and community development.
Congress has 14 separate committees that have jurisdiction over legislation to support economic and community development across all the different-sized U.S. communities.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is charged with coordinating federal rural policy, including access to 400 federal economic and community development programs, spanning 13 departments, 10 independent agencies, and 50 offices and sub-agencies.
The Brookings Institution analyzed 93 of these targeted rural-exclusive spending initiatives in fiscal year 2019. BI found rural communities lack access to flexible grant funding and are disadvantaged by eligibility requirements, per capita spending formulas, and allocation formulas that favor densely populated urban areas.
Bookings found rural-exclusive grant funding amounted to only$2.58 billion, or about 0.2% of total Congressional discretionary spending in FY 2019.
Adding $38 billion of rural-exclusive loan funding, the total rural funding accounted for less than 3.3% of total Congressional discretionary spending for FY 2019.
Congress engaged in a series of bipartisan discussions over the last decade about forming a domestic development bank aimed at modernizing rural economic and community development. But the outperformance of the rural voting bloc in the 2024 elections has made moving forward to fund a rural developmentbank a major priority.
The incoming Trump Administration is already discussing (1) establishing White House high-ranking positions responsible for rural and tribal development and (2) create a rural development corporation to competitively award large block grants.
Shasta County as the largest member of the California rural county caucus, which is also the largest rural caucus in the United States, has an excellent opportunity in take an appropriate leadership role in a new national initiative.