On December 20, 2018, President Trump signed the Agricultural Improvement Act, commonly known as the 2018 farm bill. Like most recent farm bills, it was scheduled to expire in five years, on September 30, 2023. No new farm bill was enacted at that time, and Congress Has had to extend the authority of the 2018 farm bill three different times, not just for fiscal 2024, but also for the following two fiscal years in subsequent legislation.
It has not been unusual in recent decades for Congress to take more than one year to complete a farm bill. In fact, until the 2018 farm bill, that full legislative process, starting with Agriculture Committee hearings and ending when the bill is signed into law, had lasted for one year or more the previous four farm bills, due to delays for a variety of factors, including figuring out to cut funding to generate budget savings (in 1996 and 2014) or how to obtain new funds to address farm policy concerns of stakeholder organizations (2002 and 2008).
The current process has gone on for more than three full years, with Congressional hearings held in both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees in advance of anticipated legislative action as early as the spring of 2022. In April 2022, the Senate Agriculture Committee held a field hearing in Michigan (the home state of the then-Committee chair, Senator Debbie Stabenow), to start to document farmer feedback on the previous farm bill. The House Agriculture Committee held its first hearing nearly a month earlier, in March 2022, although after Republicans took over control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 mid-term elections, the new Chairman Glenn Thompson (R, PA) basically restarted the hearing process from scratch in early 2023.
The House Agriculture Committee was able to report a bill out of Committee in the spring of 2024, but never attained the next step of having that bill debated on the floor of the House by the end of the 118th Congress. The Senate Agriculture Committee didn’t even get that far, their activity limited to the chair and ranking member putting out dueling farm bill frameworks late in 2024, but no formal committee action was taken. Bitter partisan disagreements over how to generate additional funding to address improvements to the farm safety net as urgently sought by farm stakeholder groups was the main reason for the ongoing stalemate in 2023 and 2024.
In 2025, the Republican majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate enacted legislation under the Congressional budget reconciliation process, officially called the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ (OBBB), which included a number of legislative items that are normally included in traditional farm bills. These were provisions that made changes to existing nutrition and conservation programs that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) determined would save approximately $190 billion over ten years, of which about $65 billion was retained within farm bill programs to bolster funding primarily for commodity, crop insurance, and disaster relief programs. Using this reconciliation process allowed the GOP majorities to pass the bill due to an exemption from Senate filibusters under Congressional rules. However, those same rules limited the extent to which the OBBB could encompass farm bill provisions not directly linked to federal spending. More details on the farm bill provisions included in this bill were covered in a blog I wrote in July 2025, shortly after the passage of that legislation (https://www.agweb.com/opinion/farm-bill-process-drags)
Early last month, the House Agriculture Committee again marked up and passed a farm bill, entitled ‘Food, Farm, and National Security Act of 2026’. Chairman Thompson has referred to this bill many times in public comments as a ‘skinny’ farm bill, although that does not qualify as a valid reference to its length, which clocks in at 802 pages. That adjective can be applied to its cost, however, which according to CBO, had a 10-year score of -$1 million in estimated outlays.
Lacking new resources from outside the Agriculture Committees, Chairman Thompson was not able to further augment spending on farm safety net programs beyond what was included in the ‘OBBB’ provisions last summer. Only four of the twelve titles included in the legislation had any mandatory scoring implications according to CBO, and that mainly consisting of diverting roughly $1 billion from the EQIP program in the conservation title, and using those savings for the following purposes:
Conservation title
• Establishes new forestry conservation easement program (estimated to cost $240 million over ten years)
• Provides funding for the Feral Swine Eradication program ($56 million)
• Expands eligibility and increasing the cost share for the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP–$228 million)
Trade title
• Re-tasks funds provided for the new Agricultural Trade Promotion and Facilitation Program under ‘OBBB’ to augment existing trade promotion programs, such as MAP and FMD (no change in net funding)
• Gives the Secretary of Agriculture full authority over the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, which had no resources in it as of the end of FY25 ($70 million over five years)
Commodities title
• Expands eligibility for Tree Assistance Program ($5 million over five years)
Energy title
• Moves resources from the biorefinery program to the biobased products program (no net change in spending)
Other provisions included expanding loan limits on FSA loan programs, streamlining access to beginning farmer programs, establishing a rural childcare initiative, making purchase and use of precision agriculture applications eligible for cost-share in conservation programs, moving operation of the Food for Peace international assistance program from the now-dismantled USAID to USDA, and establishing limitations on states’ ability to impose production requirements on livestock producers as well as regulate pesticides.
Chairman Thompson has stated publicly that he has been assured by the House GOP leadership that his farm bill will get debate time on the floor later this spring, and the Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator John Boozman (R, AR), has committed publicly to marking up a farm bill in his committee ‘within weeks’. It remains to be seen whether these efforts will result in a new 2026 farm bill being enacted by the end of the year, as the 60-vote Senate filibuster threshold will be in effect for this legislation.
