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Senate and House farm bills by the numbers
Story Date: 6/3/2013
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Source: NATIONAL SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE COALITION, 5/31/13
Note to Readers: With Congress on recess for the week, we are playing catch-up on our farm bill reporting. This post takes a closer look at farm bill funding issues.
Farm Bill Funding Anomalies
The farm bill back-to-back “doubleheader” markups were not the only unusual feature of this year’s farm bill debate. Farm bill budgeting has also proceeded in an unusual fashion.
First, the Congressional Budget Office “baseline” for farm bill spending did not get published until the very same day the Senate Agriculture Committee marked up its bill. Normally the baseline is out months in advance of action on a bill, but was slowed by this year’s long and convoluted budget process. The baseline establishes what farm bill programs would cost over the course of the next decade if Congress took no further action and a new farm bill does not come to fruition. It is used as the measure against which new farm bill spending proposals are measured.
Second, the automatic, across-the-board budget cut (sequestration) policy the federal government is operating under makes farm bill budgeting more complicated than ever. The sequester cuts have already kicked in and are scheduled to continue for nearly the next decade unless Congress moves in the meantime to end or modify its current meat-ax policy.
Under current sequestration rules, farm bill conservation programs will be cut $2.1 billion over the next decade. Those cuts will be across the board for all farm bill conservation programs with the sole exception of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Ironically, though CRP is exempt from sequestration, it is one of the two programs most heavily cut in the pending Senate and House farm bills.
Direct commodity payments will also be cut by $4.1 billion via sequestration. This is something of a moot point, however, because both the pending Senate and House farm bills terminate the direct payment program anyway.
That sequestration would cut a program Congress plans to terminate, and exempt a program from cuts that the normal farm bill process is planning to cut more heavily than other programs, demonstrates just how awful sequestration is as a coherent policy mechanism. Nonetheless, those sequester cuts are part of current policy and will continue to take a bite out of farm bill conservation spending each and every year unless Congress eventually decides to replace sequestration with something resembling actual legislating and serious decision-making.
Third, and most importantly for the fate of the farm bill, there has been no upfront agreement between the two houses of Congress on the level of spending for the new bill. Without such an agreement, which is usually part of the normal process, and with the two bills miles apart on funding — an $18 billion 10-year cut in the Senate bill versus a $33 billion in the House bill — a final agreement will be even more difficult. That difficulty will be magnified by the $16 billion difference between the two bills over the SNAP budget, an increasingly partisan conflict that could become the major stumbling block to getting a bill finished.
Funding Comparisons of the Two Bills
The following charts show estimates of the dollar amounts the two bills would cut relative to existing baseline (the spending estimate for the current law with no changes) over the coming decade according to the official scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office.
To see the full report with graphs, click here.
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