Agriculture portion of megabill sliding to next week
The Agriculture Committee is still working through controversial farm bill provisions and food aid spending cuts in its portion of the bill.
By Meredith Lee Hill and Samuel Benson
The agriculture portion of the GOP megabill in the Senate likely won’t be finalized until next week as Republicans debate where they’d need to find other spending cuts if they can’t match the House-passed measure’s deep reductions in food aid spending, according to three Republicans with direct knowledge of the plans.
Key Republican senators have made no secret of their opposition to the House plan to force states to significantly increase their share of the cost of the nation’s biggest nutrition assistance program. But House Republicans are relying on those provisions to pay for a $60 billion farm bill package in the legislation. GOP senators are now debating scaling down the cost-share plan to penalize only states with the highest payment error rates, or more likely, simply scaling-down the percentage of benefits all states have to pay to around 5 percent. That would still mean states would face billions of dollars in new costs or decide to cut aid to low-income families.
Republican senators and committee staff are now debating a range of other options for cuts that Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman and Majority Leader John Thune discussed in a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning. They are also discussing scaling down the farm bill provisions included in the House version of the tax and spending package, according to the three Republicans.
GOP senators have warned some farm bill pieces might not pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian, who will decide which policies comply with the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process. But the larger fear behind the scenes is most Republican senators have less of an appetite to completely blow up the traditionally bipartisan farm bill, which would be the effect of jamming provisions of that legislation into a purely partisan vehicle.
Senate Agriculture GOP Committee staffers were scheduled to meet with the parliamentarian Tuesday night to discuss the House’s farm bill provisions as senators consider options, according to two other Republicans granted anonymity to share details of private conversations.
Committee aides already met with the parliamentarian last week to discuss the nutrition portion of the panel’s contribution to the megabill, with Boozman acknowledging Tuesday it would be “ambitious” to expect to see draft bill text by the end of this week.
“I think that we’re getting the concepts together as we speak,” Boozman said. “But again, from a concept standpoint, we’d like to get this done in the next couple days.”
Senate GOP leadership is pushing panels to release text quickly to meet the goal of passing the bill by the July 4 recess.
“I think that the timeline is such that leadership would like [the text] yesterday,” Boozman quipped. “It’s just a matter of smoothing out some things, visiting with our members, getting input. … Those things take time.”
Boozman has supported including risk management farm bill titles in the reconciliation bill, like crop insurance provisions and reference price increases. But House Republicans pushed a larger array of farm bill funding into the package, and are pressuring the Senate to keep everything intact.
“They better keep it all,” one House Republican warned.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.