The Congressional Budget Office released data late Wednesday estimating the net cost of the Senate farm bill at $4.4 billion over the 10-year budget window. However, regardless of the score, there are differing opinions on whether a permanent farm bill can even pass in the lame-duck session of Congress.
The big obstacle for the farm bill’s passage has been the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The CBO estimates SNAP would cost an average of $1.1 billion annually. The Senate bill delays the implementation of the state cost-share mandate for one year, reducing states’ spending by $5.2 billion.
Democrats wanted a two-year delay, which split the historically bipartisan Senate Agriculture Committee. But at least one senator thinks the shared values of food and farming will bring the votes together to pass a farm bill.
“We’ve got to figure out a way of putting that back together,” Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., says. “And I believe that there is a way because I know that those cuts to the nutrition programs affects rural counties just as much or maybe even more than it affects more urban and suburban counties.”
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., voted against the farm bill in committee because it fell short on conservation funding for the 40 million people in the Colorado River basin and due to party division, but even he remains hopeful.
“I’ll also say honestly that I was upset that we’d seen a division between ... a separation of the historic coalition that joined the producer element of the farm bill and the food elements of the farm bill,” Bennet says. “I’m hoping that we’re gonna be able to bring that back together again.”
Insiders Predict Lame-Duck Gridlock
Some Washington insiders are not as optimistic and say the SNAP funding fight is not over.
“I look at the farm bill and I think about the SNAP provisions and I think, well, the Democrats don’t really have a reason to give in on that,” Mary Kay Thatcher, president of MK Thatcher Consulting, says. “It would probably be easier for them if they waited until next year when they were in charge.”
Thatcher says the odds of getting the bill done in a lame-duck session are slim to none.
“Certainly we’re not going to get a farm bill done, in my estimation, as a standalone piece of legislation,” Thatcher says. “Now, could they push it into some kind of a reconciliation bill or some mass must-pass piece of legislation, something like the National Defense Authorization Bill? Maybe.”
But there are even questions about whether a defense bill can pass in the lame duck, and the odds may be worse in a new Congress.
“This may be our last farm bill,” says Jay Truitt, president of Policy Perspectives, noting that the traditional process of neatly bundling SNAP and agricultural spending together could be coming to an end.
That shift in how Washington handles ag legislation may ultimately mean another extension of the current farm bill, which is going on eight years old.
