There is a small but revealing moment in the debate over the proposed Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger, and it comes from a senator no one would accuse of carrying water for the railroads.
Asked in July whether the deal would be good for agriculture, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley did something careful. He said he is a member of the Iowa Farm Bureau, and that the Iowa Farm Bureau thinks the merger would be bad for agriculture. Then he added that he did not want to say he had made up his mind.
Grassley also said what any farm state senator should say: that he expects the Surface Transportation Board to weigh competition and service impacts. Those are the right questions, and this is not an argument that he is wrong to ask them. The point is the distinction he drew almost in passing, between what his association has concluded and what he himself as both a U.S. Senator and farmer has concluded. He treated the Farm Bureau’s position as evidence worth considering rather than a monolithic verdict on the deal.
Trade associations are not neutral megaphones. They are advocacy organizations by trade. They have staff, budgets, boards, and, by nature, their own institutional interests. Having spent years in the association world myself, including at the National Federation of Independent Business working on regulatory policy for small business owners, I can tell you firsthand that the traffic between a trade association and its members flows in both directions. Most of it flows from headquarters down.
That is not necessarily a scandal. It is just how the model works. But what it does mean is that we should stop treating the viewpoint of an association’s press release as a unanimous verdict shared by everyone whose dues pay for it. Grassley just reminded us of that. The reminder is worth taking seriously.
The Farm Bureau’s own recent history actually makes the point. In January 2023, the American Farm Bureau Federation signed a memorandum of understanding with John Deere on right to repair for their tractors and farm equipment, and agreed in return to encourage state Farm Bureaus to stop backing right to repair legislation. Farmers did not follow. In a survey of producers by the National Farmers Union, 95 percent said they supported that legislation, and bills kept moving in statehouses anyway. The Farm Bureau may well have made the right call in taking a negotiated deal over an uncertain legislative fight. But the position on the letterhead and the position in the field, were two different things, and only one of them got a press release.
Which brings us back to this merger. A handful of shipper associations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Freight Rail Customer Alliance, and others, have lined up in opposition. Their letters are polished, their talking points are consistent, and the trade press has largely accepted their framing as if it were the voice of American shippers speaking with one accord. It is not.
Look instead at what individual shippers have actually filed with the STB. In their filings before the Board, the applicants report more than 2,000 letters of support on the record, including more than 500 from shippers themselves, a coalition no trade association could manufacture. Small businesses and Fortune 500s. Individual farmers and agricultural cooperatives. Coal producers, chemical shippers and auto manufacturers. Trucking companies that see rail as a partner, not a rival. Short line railroads that need a stronger Class I network to keep their own communities on the map. Multiple rail labor unions, which have signed onto an unprecedented “Jobs for Life” guarantee.
That is not the profile of a captured industry. It is the profile of an industry that has actually looked at the deal and decided that the application’s projected $3.5 billion in annual shipper savings, the 2.1 million truckloads shifted off the highways each year, the job protections, and America’s first true coast-to-coast single-line rail service are worth supporting on the merits.
None of this requires assuming bad faith. Associations have institutional interests that do not always track member interests, and a proceeding that stays open is easier to justify to a board than one that ends quietly. Anyone who has worked inside the Washington association world knows those incentives are real. They do not make the opposition letters wrong. They do mean the letters are one organization’s considered position, not a headcount of everyone it represents.
The Surface Transportation Board’s charge is to serve the public interest, not to referee a battle of talking points. That means giving proper weight to the actual voices of the shippers, workers, and communities on the record, rather than assuming the associations that claim to speak for them necessarily speak for all of them.
Grassley did not let his association do his thinking for him. The Board should extend the same courtesy to the thousands of shippers, workers and communities who have spoken for themselves on this record, and then decide the case on what that record actually says.
Andrew Langer is President of the Main Street Foundation.
