After repeated delays, House Agriculture chairman Glenn Thompson said on Tuesday that his committee, “without a doubt, will mark up a farm bill before Memorial Day.” Republicans on the Senate Agriculture Committee plan to release a farm bill framework soon after the House panel acts, but Senate Agriculture chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat, cautioned, “We haven’t set an exact timeline” to move the bill.
Farm bill leaders said they were working earnestly to pass legislation this year — the new farm bill is six months overdue already — notwithstanding impasses on crop subsidies, climate funding, and SNAP cuts. “I see a path to do that,” said Stabenow. “We’ll move when I know we can get this done.”
Thompson said his package, to be released a few days before the committee vote, would offer “a robust farm safety net” that is strengthened with money drawn from a USDA reserve. “We’ll be able to accomplish that,” he said, crediting Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for the idea. Thompson would use climate change money, earmarked for climate mitigation more broadly among USDA soil and water conservation programs.
And he would require future USDA recalculations of the cost of a healthy diet to be budget neutral; Republicans say the Biden administration unfairly boosted SNAP benefits by an average of 25 percent during a re-evaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan in 2021. “Not a single dollar will be cut from current SNAP beneficiaries,” the Pennsylvania Republican told the North American Agricultural Journalists.
Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee said in February that they opposed cuts in SNAP and in climate funding — two steps Thompson said he would take in his draft. A press aide to Georgia Rep. David Scott, the senior Democrat on the committee, was not immediately available for comment. Committee Democrats discussed Thompson’s proposal inconclusively last week.
“The amount of input, the ownership, really belongs to members of parties. So it clearly will be a bipartisan bill,” said Thompson. The chairman has suggested at least two earlier dates for action on the farm bill.
“We have made significant progress, and I am happy to say the committee, without a doubt, will mark up a farm bill before Memorial Day, which is not that far away,” said Thompson.
But the farm bill schedule could be disrupted if there is a fight over the speakership, he said. Two House Republicans want to remove Speaker Mike Johnson from his post. It took Republicans weeks to agree on Johnson after they voted out Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy last fall.
Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, the Republican leader on the Senate Agriculture Committee, said he would release a farm bill “framework” after the House Agriculture Committee acted. Boozman is a proponent of higher reference prices, the triggers for crop subsidy payments, and an expansion of federally subsidized crop insurance. Farm supports must be adjusted, he said, because of high costs of production and inflation.
Climate funding should be moved into the farm bill baseline, which would have the bonus of assuring larger annual funding in the future, said Boozman. Stabenow has said there must be guardrails to assure the climate funds are spent on their designated purpose.
Like Thompson, Boozman said updates to the Thrifty Food Plan must be budget neutral. “It’s very clear where I have been” on the issue, he said.
Stabenow, who followed Boozman in speaking to the ag journalists, said a resolution over climate funding was “very do-able”; 49 of the 50 most-popular practices in USDA conservation programs were approved as climate-smart activities. “There is no language agreed to,” she said, although she and Boozman have discussed the matter.
There was “substantial agreement” between Republicans and Democrats on half of the 12 titles in the farm bill, said Stabenow.