WASHINGTON — America’s farmers have been shut out of foreign markets, hit with retaliatory tariffs and lost lucrative contracts in the face of President Donald Trump’s trade war. But a $12 billion bailout program Trump created to “make it up” to farmers has done little to cushion the blow, with red tape and long waiting periods resulting in few payouts so far.

According to the Department of Agriculture, just $838 million has been paid out to farmers since the first $6 billion pot of money was made available in September. Another pool of up to $6 billion is expected to become available next month.

The program, which is using a Depression-era fund, allows farmers earning less than $900,000 a year to receive money if they produce one of the agricultural products that has faced retaliation. In some cases, the government is buying excess food such as apples and orange juice and giving it away through nutrition assistance programs.

Under the program, different types of commodities receive different rates — for instance, hog farmers get $8 per head for 50 percent of their herd, while dairy farmers get 12 cents for every hundred pounds of milk — creating questions about equity.

The dairy industry has been particularly critical of the program and, in a letter, asked the administration to rethink how it calculates subsidies and to make them more generous to dairy farmers. The milk federation expects dairy farmers to lose $1.5 billion from the tariffs in the second half of this year and it has received only $127 million in aid.

Many farmers are disappointed as the subsidies have not made up for their losses.

“I don’t think this is going to be enough to compensate them,” said Eric Belasco, an economist at Montana State University and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “It seems like there’s not really an end in sight.”