For all the county’s antipathy toward big government, it lived off big government—just as in the days of the Great Depression, when the feds made all those payments to farmers and built part of Bryan’s infrastructure. Williams County residents received medical payments of $150,323,000 from government in 2018. Total government transfer payments to individuals came to $339,480,000. In 2019 and 2020, more federal money arrived via payments to county farmers from the Market Facilitation Program, the compensation to farmers hurt by Trump’s trade war. Farmers who qualified could receive $67 an acre,
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