Congress rarely completes a farm bill on time, including the 2018 version, which President Trump could sign into law as early as next week. This year’s bill is more than two months overdue, largely because of a fight over SNAP work requirements that led Rep. Collin Peterson, often in the front row for farm bill drama, to say, “I don’t know if we’re ever going to get another one done.”
The past decade provided ample reason for doubt. President George W. Bush twice vetoed the 2008 farm bill — unsuccessfully. The House defeated a farm bill for the first time ever in June 2013, as Tea Party-influenced conservatives pushed for the largest food stamp cuts in a generation; they ultimately lost that battle in negotiations with the Senate. Last June, the GOP-controlled House needed two attempts to pass its farm bill, which included its proposal for stricter work requirements for SNAP recipients, by a razor-thin 213-211 margin.
House Republicans did not relent on SNAP until the Nov. 6 midterm elections transferred majority-party power to the Democrats, beginning in January. Faced with the possibility that the farm bill deadlock with the Senate could run into the new year, Agriculture Committee chairman Michael Conaway said, “I chose the route to getting this farm bill done.”
Despite the rise in rancor accompanying farm bills — the 2014 and 2018 bills occasioned bitter ideological splits — as a practical matter, Congress has to keep writing them, said farm policy experts. The legislation couples SNAP with land stewardship, farm subsidies, ag research, and international food aid in a package that unites urban and rural lawmakers.
“As with every farm bill since 1948, only 70 years ago, there is a sunset date, and so Congress will be back at farm bill stuff in 2022 and 2023,” said economist Vincent Smith of Montana State University. Unless Congress acts when the 2018 farm bill expires, farm supports will revert to the terms of the 1948 law. Those terms would set subsidy rates for some commodities at unrealistically high levels and leave others, such as soybeans, with no backstop at all.
In the end, the House and Senate passed the 2018 farm bill by nearly 8-to-1 margins in an embrace of a mostly status-quo bill that modestly strengthens farm supports; legalizes industrial hemp; expands the land-idling Conservation Reserve Program; and makes nieces, nephews, and first cousins of farmers eligible for crop subsidies. “By no means would I suggest this was in any way easy,” said Pat Westhoff of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, a think tank. “The bill has a lot in it for a lot of different interests; if bipartisan legislation remains at least possible in the future, the farm bill probably has more chance of success than lots of other potentially important legislation.”
Former USDA chief economist Joe Glauber said the House, while conceding on SNAP, “was able to extract a lot out of the Senate.” He pointed to language for higher loan rates for cotton, grains, and soybeans; the loosening of farm subsidy rules; an escalator clause for the “reference” prices that trigger subsidy payments; and “a pretty generous dairy program.”
Glauber, like Smith, said there will be pressure on Congress to finalize a farm bill in 2023 to avoid a return to the 1948 permanent law. “As for some of the other programs — SNAP, crop insurance — they will continue on regardless,” said Glauber. SNAP and crop insurance are permanently authorized.
In recent years, conservatives have suggested splitting the farm bill in two, so that the food stamp program would be separate from “farm only” legislation. Although the idea was spawned as a way to attack SNAP, some farm state lawmakers believe it would mean the end of the farm program as well because few House districts have many farmers.
In June, the Trump administration proposed a different way of splitting farm and public nutrition programs. Its plan to reorganize the federal government would move SNAP and WIC, which account for half of USDA spending, to the Department of Health and Human Services. The USDA would retain control of school and child nutrition programs under the Trump proposal and would also be the home of a new food safety agency with responsibility for the entire U.S. food supply.