Block 10, Article 1 — The Voter Set the Standard. The Committee Rewrote It.
Block 1 opened with what was here. This article opens the accounting.
A congressional farm bill can nullify the results of a ballot measure. Not in theory. In practice, in the current session of Congress.
California voters passed a ballot measure in 2018 requiring that pigs raised for sale in the state have enough room to turn around. Sixty-three percent voted yes. Massachusetts had already passed a similar measure two years earlier, in 2016 — 78 percent. The pork industry challenged both laws in court. It lost, repeatedly, all the way through 2025 and 2026. It went to the House Agriculture Committee instead. The House farm bill passed in April 2026 with a provision, inserted in committee, that would nullify both state laws and preempt any future state effort to set minimum animal welfare standards for pork sold across state lines. As of this writing, the Senate’s version of the farm bill has left that provision out — the fight is not yet resolved, but the mechanism itself, run through committee after losing in court and at the ballot box twice, is the point.
The provision is called Save Our Bacon.
The structure here is not primarily about pigs, though it is about pigs. It is about what the apparatus documented in the previous nine blocks can now do. Having purchased the room, it can reverse the outcomes of the room it could not purchase — the ballot box. The five-step sequence this series has been tracing — identify the resource, write the instrument, execute the transfer, protect the rate, silence the accounting — is now being run on direct democracy itself. The voters set the standard. The committee rewrote it. The voter is not in the room where that happens.
Save Our Bacon was framed as protecting interstate commerce from a patchwork of conflicting state animal-welfare standards. That two states’ voters, by landslide margins, had already decided what standard they wanted for products sold in their own states was not in the frame the commerce argument was built to avoid naming.
This article opens the accounting for what that apparatus produced over 150 years of operation.
What kind of argument this is
Block 1 established what was here. The land, the water, the forests, the topsoil, the fisheries, the spectrum, the knowledge base built with public money. The blocks between Block 1 and Block 10 documented the mechanisms — the frozen room, the rigged map, the private government, the locked door, the bought bench, the money pipeline, the darkened room. Each mechanism has a secondary lever: a specific way it enabled, accelerated, or protected the transfer of the commons to private hands at below-market rates.
Block 10 is not a mechanism block. It is the ledger close.
This is not a political argument. A political argument assigns blame and proposes remedies. This is an accounting argument. The public was the owner. The transfer was the transaction. The balance sheet shows what remains. What the following articles document is not grievance — it is arithmetic. The below-market royalty rates, the unregulated aquifer pumping, the zero-cost spectrum licenses, the unused march-in rights — each represents the same transaction: private extraction of publicly owned value at a price set by the rooms the extractors purchased.
The 1872 Mining Law charges five dollars an acre for claims on federal land containing minerals worth billions, with no royalty on what is extracted. The cleanup costs go to the Superfund. Superfund appropriations have fallen for a quarter century — from $2.6 billion in fiscal year 1999 to $537 million in fiscal year 2024, then cut again to $282.75 million for fiscal year 2026, a 47 percent reduction in a single year. The remediation need has not fallen with it. The widening gap is the balance sheet entry the transfer left behind. Private profit was recorded at the time of extraction. The public liability was deferred. It is still being deferred. The people who will pay it were not born when the rate was set.
The ledger
Aquifers recharged by Pleistocene glacial melt over millions of years. Topsoil built by ten thousand years of undisturbed biological process — one inch per several centuries. Old-growth forests five hundred to a thousand years in formation. Commercial fisheries that sustained coastal economies for generations. The electromagnetic spectrum — a physical property of nature, allocated by government license, declared in 1927 to be the inalienable possession of the people. The federally funded scientific knowledge base — $900 billion in cumulative NIH investment generating pharmaceutical compounds that private industry patented and sold back to the public that funded them.
None of this was created by the industries that extracted it. All of it was created by geological time, biological process, collective public investment, or some combination of the three.
The articles that follow this one close the ledger one entry at a time. The soil. The water. The spectrum and the knowledge base. The identifiable beneficiaries. The inheritance the current generation is preparing to pass forward. Each entry answers the same question: what did the apparatus produce?
The answer, across every category of natural capital the country possessed, is the same. The profit was extracted. The liability was deferred. The public held the asset and was left with the cleanup.
The accounting mechanism that would have made this visible
In April 2022, President Biden signed an executive order establishing a framework for natural capital accounting — a federal methodology for putting the value of natural assets and the cost of their depletion on the public balance sheet. For the first time, the federal government would begin measuring what it owned and what it was losing, and recording both numbers. The depletion would appear in the same ledger as the extraction revenue.
The order was reversed on the first day of the following administration.
The accounting that would have made the balance sheet visible was terminated before it produced a single annual report. The gap between the Superfund’s need and its appropriation remains off-book. The Ogallala’s depletion has no federal ledger entry. The spectrum value conveyed at zero cost has no public receivable. The pharmaceutical returns on $900 billion in public investment have no reconciliation line.
The ledger exists. It has never been formally opened. The articles that follow in this block open it anyway, one entry at a time, using the data the government has already collected and the comparisons the government has already made and then declined to publish.
The balance sheet opened here closes in Article 7. Block 11 is what the depleted balance sheet costs when the bill arrives all at once, in a room that cannot respond to any one entry, let alone the sum of them.
Check this yourself: EPA Superfund site inventory and funding gap
epa.gov/superfund/superfund-remedial-annual-accomplishments
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Steve Sagnotti
is a serious amateur photographer, writer, and technologist based in Oregon. With his camera he tries to capture common images not often seen, leading to common questions not often asked.
© 2026 Steve Sagnotti
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Sources
Save Our Bacon Act, introduced by Rep. Ashley Hinson (IA-02).
https://hinson.house.gov/media/press-releases/hinson-introduces-save-our-bacon-act-block-californias-radical-prop-12-protect
Save Our Bacon Act passed as part of the House-passed Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, April 2026.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/farm-bill-save-our-bacon
Senate Agriculture Committee draft omits the Save Our Bacon provision, mid-2026.
https://www.humaneworld.org/en/news/whats-happening-california-prop-12-farm-bill-save-our-bacon-act
California Proposition 12 (2018), 62.65% approval, Ballotpedia.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_12,_Farm_Animal_Confinement_Initiative_(2018)
Proposition 12 upheld by U.S. Supreme Court, National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, 2023.
https://ballotpedia.org/National_Pork_Producers_Council_v._Ross
Massachusetts Question 3 (2016), 77.6% approval, Ballotpedia.
https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Minimum_Size_Requirements_for_Farm_Animal_Containment,_Question_3_(2016)
Question 3 upheld by U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Triumph Foods v. Campbell, October 2025.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/24-1759/24-1759-2025-10-03.html
1872 Mining Law, $5/acre lode claim price, no royalty on extracted minerals, 30 U.S.C. § 29.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=%2Fprelim%40title30%2Fchapter2&edition=prelim
Superfund funding gap, GAO, appropriations declined from $2.6B (FY1999) to $537M (FY2024).
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-108408
FY2026 Superfund appropriation, $282.75M, a 47.4% reduction from FY2025.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13191
Communications Act of 1934 spectrum provision, 47 U.S.C. § 301.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/301
NIH cumulative investment, NIH Office of Budget historical tables.
https://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/history.html
Executive Order 14072, “Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities, and Local Economies,” signed April 22, 2022.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/04/27/2022-09138/strengthening-the-nations-forests-communities-and-local-economies
EO 14072 revoked as item (x) in Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” signed January 20, 2025.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/29/2025-01956/unleashing-american-energy
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