Farm Bill hearings begin; look for a fight over food programs

Hearings on a new Farm Bill, which goes well beyond farming to the well-being of rural America and the feeding America's poor, started in the House this week. With the Republican takeover of the chamber, the new chair of the Agriculture Committee is Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.), who "could soon become Washington’s hottest new dealmaker," Garrett Downs reports for Politico's Weekly Agriculture. He’ll have to get comfortable in that role as one of the top players in the only major legislative game in town" in a Congress split between the parties.

Rep. G.T. Thompson, R-Pa.

"He’ll have to manage an insurgent right wing of his caucus demanding spending cuts and Democrats hoping to score climate wins and protect nutrition," Downs notes. Former chair Collin Peterson, D-Minn., now retired, told Downs, “He understands that he's going to have to figure out how to navigate this because at the end of the day, they're not going to get these things that they keep pushing for. As long as they don't pick a fight over food stamps, I think they'll be fine.”

"Food stamps" is the old name for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Thompson noted his family used the program when he was a young adult and that he has rounded up Republican support for it: “I got folks on my side of the aisle, they vote against everything, but they didn’t vote against that because I brought them to the table.”

Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), who chairs the moderate Main Street Caucus, favors work or education requirements in SNAP and different levels of eligibility geared at avoiding benefit cliff, "two things that Republicans say would move recipients towards independence from benefits," Downs reports. "Democrats, meanwhile, are drawing hard lines in the sand." Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) told him that Republicans “make proposals that throw people off the program … Come March, [the benefit] will only be two bucks on average per person, per meal. Come on Dusty, you try and live on that.”

The Farm Bill doesn't always pass on time, and Congress could punt until 2024 to get a better bill, suggests Roman Keeney, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, in The Hill: "The 2018 Farm Bill expires at the close of September this year. Failure to replace that law with a new package puts a number of agricultural programs in limbo. Expiration of the farm bill leaves some programs with no authorization while others would revert to archaic permanent laws established before 1950. The close of the 2023 fiscal year is not just a deadline for replacing the current farm bill. In any year, those final weeks represent a legislatively tense period of government negotiations. With a new U.S. House majority splitting the political leadership in Congress and competing agendas within each political caucus the timeline for delivering replacement farm legislation is incredibly short. An early, pre-emptive extension of the 2018 Farm Bill’s authority for one additional year could be pursued to offer a degree of policy certainty to decision-makers and agricultural markets while gaining the necessary time to deliver transformative farm legislation for a policy era that requires it. . . . the abbreviated timeline would also promote the status quo in areas where current policy has fallen short."