On its second try and by a two-vote margin, the Republican-controlled House passed the GOP-drafted farm bill on Thursday. The bill imposes stricter work requirements on 7 million people to qualify for food stamps while easing eligibility rules for farm subsidies. “Farm bill just passed the House,” tweeted President Trump. “So happy to see work requirements included. Big win for the farmers!”
The Senate is on track to vote on its bipartisan version of the farm bill next week. During an impromptu news conference, House Agriculture Committee chairman Michael Conaway sent congratulations in advance to his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts, and cheered the prospect of getting to work on the final version of the new farm policy law before the Fourth of July. If Congress enacts the 2018 farm bill this summer, he said, it “will alleviate some of that anxiety” created by the five-year slump in farm income.
Conaway said he expects that the final version of the farm bill will toughen work requirements for food stamp recipients. But Roberts and the senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Debbie Stabenow, looking to draft a bill that would be broadly popular and pass the Senate easily, ruled out major changes to SNAP.
Representatives passed the bill, 213-211, with Republicans providing all the votes in favor. Twenty Republicans joined 191 Democrats in opposing the bill.
Conaway, who had sounded out lawmakers before the vote, had been confident of victory. Still, he said, “I knew it was going to be razor thin.” Republican leaders, including Speaker Paul Ryan, an advocate of welfare reform, were taken by surprise on May 18 when the House voted against the farm bill. Ryan used parliamentary sleight of hand to revive the bill after hard-line conservatives dropped their objections.
Anti-hunger groups, environmentalists, and fiscal hawks faulted the bill, saying it is unduly harsh on poor Americans, unfairly cuts funds for land stewardship, and engages in corporate cronyism for big farmers. The Democratic leader on the House Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson, said the bill “simply doesn’t do enough for the people it’s supposed to serve. It still leaves farmers and ranchers vulnerable, it worsens hunger, and it fails rural communities.”
Democrats said the bill would drive 2 million people from SNAP through more stringent eligibility rules and by creating a maze of paperwork requirements for people trying to prove compliance with the 20-hour work rule. They also said the bill does not provide the states with enough money to run high-quality job-training programs for millions of people a year
House Republican leaders said the new work requirements would move poor people into the workforce. With the unemployment rate at its lowest level in a decade, “they shouldn’t be able to sit on a broken welfare system,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, No. 3 in the House GOP leadership, a day before the vote. “It’s time for them to help be part of this growing economy and get back in the workforce. These work requirements that we have in the farm bill are equally important to getting this economy growing as the important farm policy.”
“The bill will take food out of the refrigerators and off the tables of millions of people in need, leading to greater hunger and poverty,” said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center. “As the legislative process continues, FRAC will continue to urge policymakers to reject HR 2’s SNAP cuts and instead maintain the approach adopted by the Senate farm bill, S 3042.”
The Senate was scheduled to vote on Monday evening in a procedural step that would allow debate on the bill. Senators were expected to substitute their language for the text of the House bill in an attempt to facilitate work on the bill’s final version.
Both bills tweak, rather than overhaul, farm subsidy programs and would give farmers a one-time choice between the insurance-like Agriculture Risk Coverage subsidy and the traditionally styled Price Loss Coverage subsidy. Analysts expect a rush to the PLC. The House would expand the land-idling Conservation Reserve Program to 29 million acres from the current 24 million acres. The Senate would expand the CRP to 25 million acres. The House bill would eliminate the green-payment Conservation Stewardship Program.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said he will seek a vote on language to impose a $125,000 “hard” cap on farm subsidies per year and limit eligibility to farmers, spouses, and one manager per farm. Payment limits are nearly toothless at present. The House bill would make cousins, nieces, and nephews eligible for subsidies and remove payment limits on some types of corporate farms.