Cock-a-doodle-do! Crowing About False Farm Bill Savings

The House Committee on Agriculture, in a recent letter to the budget committee, boasts of being “proud to have made a significant contribution to deficit reduction with the passage of the (2014) farm bill.”

That’s like a rooster bragging about the sunrise.

Not only are the “savings” committee members took credit for beyond their control, they’re not even savings at all. In fact, the cost of farm subsidies has already wiped out the potential savings Chairman Mike Conaway (R-Texas) and Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), the ranking minority member, are crowing about.

Most of the savings come from a program that has little to do with farmers: food stamps. Because of an improved economy, more people are able to support themselves without relying on food stamps than Congress accounted for when it passed the Farm Bill in 2014.

As EWG’s Anne Weir pointed out last week, the farm subsidy reforms in the Farm Bill are chock full of empty promises.

Only a few years after passage of the Farm Bill, the supposed savings are already evaporating. When the Congressional Budget Office estimated costs of the bill, all Commodity Title programs were supposed to cost $38.1 billion from 2015-2023. The latest estimates have now increased to $47.2 billion for the same time period.

This extra $9 billion expense wipes out the $6.9 billion in crop insurance “savings” in the budget office’s latest updates –and those updates hinge on a slump in commodity prices that, again, the agriculture committee can’t claim credit for.

Americans deserve a better deal.

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