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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Budget deal cuts USDA 15%, Forest Service 11%

Details keep trickling out about the budget compromise that will come up for a vote in Congress on Thursday. For a list of the cuts, click here.

The cuts include 11 percent for the Forest Service, down to $4.7 billion, and 15 percent for its parent agency, the Department of Agriculture, down to $20 billion. The bill "reduces agricultural credit programs by $433 million, Agricultural Research Service by $64 million, and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture by $125.9 million below the fiscal year 2010 levels," says the House Appropriations Committee's summary of the bill, available here.

"Rural development initiatives . . . would experience significant reductions," Philip Rucker of The Washington Post reports. "But some of the worst-sounding trims are not quite what they seem, and officials said they would not necessarily result in lost jobs or service cutbacks. In several cases, what look like large reductions are actually accounting gimmicks."

The bill would halt "one of the Obama administration's cornerstone policies to protect unspoiled lands in the West," an inventory of roadless federal lands with an eye to greater protection for them. It "mirrors language from the continuing resolution that the House passed in February but was excluded from the Senate's proposed short-term funding bill," Phil Taylor reports for Greenwire.

Taylor also notes "The Land and Water Conservation Fund -- the main vehicle for acquiring new federal lands, protecting species and promoting urban recreation -- would be funded at $301 million, a $149 million cut below current levels. . . . The proposal weakens the Obama administration's odds of receiving its requested $900 million -- the maximum authorized -- in fiscal 2012 and threatens a central goal of the president's Great Outdoors initiative." (Read more, subscription required)

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