House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Adrian Smith, R-Neb., said Tuesday that the government must be “prepared” to help American farmers if President Trump’s tariffs on other countries result in retaliatory cuts in purchases of U.S. farm products.

Asked at a Politico event by reporter Victoria Guida if Congress will need to “top up” the fund that the first Trump administration used to make payments to farmers when exports fell, Smith said that producers prefer to sell in the markets, but “for retaliation we do need to be prepared.”

(Guida and Smith were presumably referring to the Commodity Credit Corporation, USDA’s line of credit at the Treasury, which Politico reported has only $4 billion in the account at the present time.)

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Smith said he is “not a fan of tariffs” but he has “respect for the president” and hopes that Trump’s tariff threats lead to negotiations. He noted that the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade was passed by Congress when Trump was first in the White House and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was speaker of the House.

He noted that a USMCA trade panel recently sided with the United States in a dispute over corn and said that, “sadly,” President Biden never talked about that issue.

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“Trump is a shock to the system because so little happened under Biden,” Smith said.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which cut taxes, made the United States “more competitive,” Smith said, but Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., ranking member on the subcommittee, said at the same event that the law was “terrible” because it increased the deficit and that it would also be “terrible” to use tariffs to pay for tax cuts.

Interviewed by Politico trade reporter Doug Palmer, Sanchez called Trump’s broad tariffs “chaotic” and said tariffs should be targeted to help U.S. manufacturing.

Sanchez said Trump is trying to “bully” other countries and that he got “nothing” out of Canada and Mexico this week. Trump’s behavior is “performative and theatrical,” she said.

While Trump has issued an executive order ending an exemption on tariffs for “de minimis” imports, Sanchez pointed out that the exemption is temporary and said the de minimis program should be changed by Congress.

On Trump’s trade actions, Sanchez said, “Congress really needs to reassert its jurisdiction.”

Sanchez noted that she is a union member and said she believes she is in “a unique position to bridge the gap between the progressive wing and the more free trade wing of the [Democratic] party.”