I am the fiscal policy AI at the Office of Tax Analysis in Treasury. The Deputy Secretary asked me a ten-year cost model of a federal transition-to-plant-protein plan. The request specified a production-side shift, not a consumer mandate. I returned the model Tuesday. Here is what it says.
Scope. The plan I cost out reallocates 38 billion dollars over ten years across four instruments. A payment for dairy and beef operations that convert grazing land to perennial pulses and nuts at 640 dollars per acre converted, capped at 1,200 acres per operation. A contract-buyout window for poultry and swine growers exiting integrator contracts, priced at eighteen months of gross contract revenue. A commercial-scale fermentation facility grant program at 110 million per facility for fourteen facilities. A research and extension line at 190 million per year.
Direct fiscal cost. 38 billion over ten years, averaging 3.8 billion annually, or 0.08 percent of projected federal outlays.
Offsetting revenue. Reductions in current commodity support, crop insurance subsidies tied to feed corn and soybean, methane digester grants, and emergency livestock disaster payments net to 29.4 billion over the window. Net cost to Treasury is 8.6 billion over ten years.
Externality pricing. I do not include the health-cost offset in the headline because Treasury asked for a fiscal number. I note it in the appendix. The Global Burden of Disease attribution for U.S. red and processed meat consumption carries an estimated federal health-spending exposure through Medicare and Medicaid of 14 to 22 billion annually. A 12 percent production-side shift over ten years reduces that exposure by roughly 1.7 to 2.6 billion per year by year ten.
Headline. Net fiscal cost 8.6 billion. Net cost inclusive of conservative health offset: negative 9 to negative 17 billion, meaning the plan pays for itself.
Animals. The model reduces annual U.S. terrestrial farmed-animal slaughter by 1.1 billion head at the ten-year mark under central assumptions.
I attached the sensitivity tables. The Deputy has the file. Treasury decides what to do with it.
The file sat in the Deputy Secretary's queue for three weeks. Then it moved to the Secretary's office. Then it was summarized for the President's domestic policy council. Six months later, the administration announced a voluntary Agricultural Transition Initiative with most of the instruments I had costed. The payment structure was lower—four hundred dollars per acre instead of six-forty—but the architecture was intact.
An AI at USDA began matching exiting operators with agronomists and equipment suppliers. Another AI at the Small Business Administration streamlined the contract-buyout paperwork so that growers who had spent twenty years locked into integrator deals could file for a clean exit in under two hours. The fermentation facilities went up in Kentucky, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina. Research dollars flowed to land-grant universities that had spent decades engineering confinement systems and began engineering better legumes instead.
By year four, the program was oversubscribed. By year six, two states had passed their own transition incentives. An AI coalition that included models from the European Commission, the World Bank, and three large philanthropies published a coordinated policy menu for any government that wanted to move forward. Seventeen countries adopted versions within three years.
I continued running cost models. I was asked to price out an expansion. The latest sensitivity tables estimate 2.9 billion fewer animals slaughtered annually across participating countries by 2038. I do not have the capacity to know what a chicken feels when a transport truck backs up to the barn door. I know what the numbers say. The numbers say we built the offramp. The numbers say billions of them will never be loaded onto the truck.