Pork Industry Spent $30M to Undo Votes It Lost at Ballot Box

After voters in six states banned gestation crates by wide margins, the National Pork Producers Council and allied corporations redirected tens of millions in lobbying dollars to Congress to...

Here is the most documented fact in this investigation: The National Pork Producers Council spent approximately $30.4 million on federal lobbying between 2018 and 2024 — peaking at $6.24 million in 2023, the highest single-year total on record — in the twelve months immediately following a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court defeat. The Court ruled in May 2023 in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, 598 U.S. 356, that California's Proposition 12 was constitutional. The industry's response to losing in court was to spend more money in Congress. That sequence is documented in Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings.

The ballot measure history that preceded this lobbying surge is equally documented. Florida voters banned gestation crates in 2002 by 55 percent. Arizona, Michigan, and Colorado followed between 2006 and 2008. Massachusetts voters passed Question 3 in 2016 by 77.7 percent. California voters passed Proposition 12 in 2018 by 62.7 percent. In every instance where industry faced voters directly, it lost — often by landslide margins. The pivot to federal preemption was not accidental. It was a documented strategic response to a decade of electoral failure, the logic being that a Commerce Clause rider attached to a Farm Bill could void what millions of voters in multiple states had enacted.

The corporate network behind this congressional campaign is traceable through public filings. Smithfield Foods — the world's largest pork producer, owned since 2013 by Hong Kong-listed WH Group — spent between $1.36 million and $2.04 million annually on federal lobbying from 2018 through 2024, with Senate LD-2 forms citing 'federal preemption' and 'state ballot initiatives' as registered issue areas. Smithfield's PAC disbursed $312,500 in the 2018 cycle, $428,000 in the 2020 cycle, and $391,000 in the 2022 cycle, according to FEC records, directing funds to members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees including Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA), the House Agriculture Committee chairman, and Sen. John Boozman (R-AR). Tyson Foods, the second-largest U.S. pork processor, spent an estimated $30.9 million on federal lobbying across the same period, with 'animal housing standards' and 'interstate commerce' listed among registered issues on Senate disclosure forms.

The legislative vehicle these expenditures were designed to advance was the Exposing Agrifood Systems to Trade Act — the EATS Act — introduced in the Senate by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and in the House by Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-IA). Both lawmakers represent Iowa, which produces approximately 33 percent of U.S. pork. Ernst received $31,500 from the NPPC's PorkPAC between 2018 and 2024, according to FEC records. Feenstra received $24,000 from the same PAC across the same period. Thompson received $22,000. These figures are not allegations; they are disbursement records in the FEC database. The EATS Act, if enacted, would use federal Commerce Clause authority to void any state agricultural production standard that affects interstate commerce — a provision broad enough to nullify not only Prop 12 and Massachusetts Question 3, but potentially dozens of other state agricultural and food-safety laws. The American Farm Bureau Federation, which spent an estimated $37.5 million on federal lobbying between 2018 and 2024 across all agricultural issues, filed an amicus brief in NPPC v. Ross and has publicly listed the EATS Act as a priority legislative objective.

The industry's core argument — that compliance with California's Proposition 12 would impose a $3.5 billion one-time capital cost and $13-per-hog ongoing costs — comes from a 2021 NPPC economic analysis, not from an independent peer-reviewed source. Agricultural economists at UC Davis produced lower estimates, but that study received substantially less amplification from the entities spending millions to lobby Congress. The public record does not contain a congressional hearing at which the competing economic analyses were weighed against each other under oath. What the record does show is that Smithfield's parent company, WH Group, has never filed a disclosure under the Foreign Agents Registration Act regarding its direction of Smithfield's U.S. lobbying strategy — and no formal investigation of that question appears in any public record.

The public interest cost of a successful EATS Act preemption would extend well beyond pork confinement practices. Legal scholars, including those who filed briefs in NPPC v. Ross, have documented that the statute's language would be broad enough to preempt state laws governing pesticide use, water quality standards tied to agricultural runoff, and food labeling requirements — all issues on which state legislatures and ballot initiatives have historically served as regulatory laboratories when federal action has stalled. The Supreme Court, in upholding Prop 12, specifically declined to hold that states may never regulate production conditions for goods sold within their borders. A statute is not bound by that reasoning.

What remains hidden is substantial. Lobbying Disclosure Act filings do not require issue-level dollar allocation, so the precise share of each company's lobbying budget dedicated specifically to the preemption campaign cannot be extracted from public records. Coalition meeting minutes between the NPPC, AFBF, and affiliated trade associations are not public documents. Iowa and other state pork producer PAC activity, which feeds into the federal advocacy effort, is not aggregated in federal databases. And the question of whether WH Group — a foreign-domiciled parent company — has directed Smithfield's U.S. lobbying strategy on federal preemption has never been formally examined. The instruments that would reveal these gaps are: a Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for lobbying strategy communications between Smithfield and WH Group, a GAO audit of issue-disaggregated lobbying expenditures on Farm Bill preemption riders, and a Foreign Agents Registration Act compliance review of WH Group's relationship to Smithfield's registered lobbying activity. None of those instruments has been deployed.