News Coverage
Reformers Take Last Stab as Farm Bill Nears Deal
Published February 29, 2008
Advocates of a farm bill overhaul are looking to the Bush administration to help them in one last attempt to scale down crop subsidies as key negotiators move closer to a deal on funding for the bill.
The leaders of a failed effort in the House floor debate to revamp the farm bill, Reps. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Ron Kind (D-Wis.), asked House and Agriculture Department leaders yesterday to press for changes in the ongoing efforts to come up with a conference agreement.
Flake and Kind want to lower the income cap on who can receive payments and reduce crop subsidies and direct payments to farmers. The pair, who circulated their ideas in a "dear colleague" letter to fellow House members this week, have the backing of some taxpayer and environmental groups.
Their proposal has a slim chance among lawmakers that will be working out the details of the new farm bill. The House and Senate Agriculture committees, which will be conducting the actual farm bill conference negotiations, have squarely rejected their proposals to scale down crop payments.
That leaves the reformers in the position of asking the Bush administration -- which has insisted on a lower pricetag for the farm bill -- to help plea their case. Flake and Kind met with Deputy Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner yesterday afternoon.
"The president plays a crucial role, he is pushing for reform and is an important principal in the negotiations," Kind told reporters yesterday.
Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook said he cannot remember a time in the past 30 years when the administration has played "such a crucial role" in farm bill negotiations. Cook wants a reduction in crop subsidies, which he says are wasteful and unfair and create more incentives for industrial agriculture to plow up sensitive lands.
"They are stirring up reform again and again, and fiscal accountability. It has been a pretty impressive performance, my hope is that they will continue to hold the line," Cook said.
But Flake and Kind are outliers in what has been an ongoing tug of war between the House, Senate and Bush administration that may come to a resolution soon. The parties are trying to come to an agreement on a pricetag and offsets for extra spending for the bill. Key Democratic negotiators from the House and Senate met Tuesday night and agreed to scale down their farm bills to about $10 billion above the baseline for the next 10 years. House Agriculture Committee aides said the decision marked "major progress."
The leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and Bush administration officials were planning to meet last night to try to work out an agreement on some of the funding offsets.
Finding a package of spending mechanisms that will be agreeable to all parties is complicated. House Agriculture Committee ranking member Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said yesterday that he would support the agreement, as long as it does not does not raise taxes to pay for the extra spending.
House Republicans supported the farm bill rewrite in committee but voted against the bill on the floor because of the tax changes that were included to offset the extra spending. The Senate's tax proposals won backing by most Republicans in that chamber but were not acceptable to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Committee asks for no more 'reserve funds'
As farm-state lawmakers wrangle over farm bill funds, the House Agriculture Committee asked the Budget Committee yesterday to abandon the concept of reserve funds in future budgets -- which they blame for getting them into the farm bill funding confusion.
The request was a part of the fiscal 2009 budget and estimates letter the committee approved yesterday. Committee members said the reserve fund that was intended to help them in the fiscal 2008 budget has only made the farm bill process more difficult.
"From this committee's perspective, it is far easier to operate with budget certainty than it is to deal with the prospect that additional resources may or may not materialize in the future from other committees, and with strings attached," House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said.
The fiscal 2009 budget resolution included a $20 billion "reserve fund" for agriculture, allowing the committee to spend that much more above the current baseline without facing a budgetary point of order. The letter said the process had pitted committees against each other, as well as Congress and the administration.
