The President’s signing of the farm bill today marks a monumental defeat for taxpayers and victory for the old Washington spending bulls. Like shepherds guarding their flock, for nearly three years the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees opposed nearly every common sense effort to rein in spending on the already highly profitable agriculture sector. With the signing of this bill, special interests wolves have been set free to devour taxpayer dollars while the ordinary taxpayer is about to be fleeced.

The Agricultural Act of 2014 (H.R. 2642) is the product of a long, non-transparent journey with unfortunately more downs than ups. Ever since the four Agriculture Committee leaders tried to jam a trillion dollar backroom-written farm bill into the failed Super Committee on deficit reduction, they’ve tried to keep the public, and even their own committees, from influencing the bill. When the Super Committee crumbled, they painted their already crafted trillion-dollar bill as an “emergency” response to the 2012 drought. Then they tried to sell their paltry projected savings as a part of the fiscal cliff deal. Anything that moved was an opportunity to hitch onto. And even when the bills did make it to the House and Senate floors, the bulk of taxpayer-friendly amendments were never even given a chance. In fact, just 15 out of the 259 submitted were even allowed a vote in the Senate. And after the House bill was defeated in June of 2013, it was rushed back up three weeks later amongst a cloud of misinformation and without any further amendments or debate.

When you hide the work of Congress you get something like this bill – a Grade-A example of bipartisan binging. One wasteful program that sent out checks no matter what (direct payments) is replaced with three new entitlement programs designed to send checks for “shallow” (their words, not ours) dips in income. The counter-cyclical program of government-set minimum prices for crops is eliminated and replaced with… a program of government-set minimum (but much higher than before) prices called “Price Loss Coverage.” And tucked into page 312 is a section prohibiting the Obama Administration from saving money by renegotiating the sweetheart deal crop insurance companies receive for participating in the highly subsidized federal crop insurance program. In 2010, the Administration reduced the guaranteed rate of return for insurance companies (i.e., profit) from 17 percent to a more “reasonable” industry average level of 13 percent, saving taxpayers $6 billion, but the Ag Committees refuse to ever let such sane policymaking repeat itself.

The farm bill is also a classic example of a committee dominated by parochial interests thwarting the will of the majority. In hashing out the differences between the two, a task monopolized yet again by the four leaders, a number of interesting decisions were made. Floor amendments that added to the cost of the bill—for example adding crop insurance policies for pennycress (a weed used in biofuels), alfalfa (cheap hay), and losses due to food recalls—made it into the final legislation. Cost-savings amendments that would cap overall spending on new shallow loss entitlements, eliminate the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s duplicative catfish inspection office (we already have one in the FDA), deny farm subsidies to city dwellers, and trim crop insurance subsidies for millionaires (an amendment that passed the Senate twice) were all abandoned. Oh, and a requirement that lawmakers and Cabinet Secretaries publicly disclose their crop insurance subsidies? Yeah they just couldn’t make that fit. When given the choice between bowing to special interests or fighting for taxpayers, they said no to no one except those wanting to save taxpayer dollars.

Legislation that sets our nation’s agriculture policies for the next five to ten years is too important to be left to a handful of folks working behind closed doors. If President Obama followed his own FY14 budget priorities, he would veto this expensive, status quo piece of legislation. Taxpayers deserve a more cost-effective, accountable, responsive, and transparent farm safety net, not yet another farm bill that spares the sacred cows by sheering taxpayers.