A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report estimated the House Ag Committee’s farm bill proposal is 33 billion dollars over budget. However, Senate Agriculture Committee Ranking Member John Boozman (R-Ark.) says CBO didn’t give enough consideration to the House bill’s use of USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) funds.
“Well, what they’re trying to do in the House is use some of the CCC dollars. And if you look at what’s being spent on just kind of peripheral things, you know the CCC to me is for farmers. It should be spent on agriculture. There’s been a lot of things, the gig climate initiative of Secretary Vilsack was a couple billion dollars, that again is peripherally attached to agriculture,” he said. “But I think that there’s a lot of money floating out of there that that could be used in in better ways. And so that’s what they’re saying is let’s use some of those dollars for the ag safety net, which desperately needs to be improved. It just simply doesn’t work.”
CCC funds are used to implement specific programs established by Congress as well as to carry out activities under the authorities of the CCC Charter Act. Boozman says the CCC wording in the previous farm bill worked at the time, but things have changed.
“The 2018 Farm Bill was a great bill for 2018 and 2019. And then the pandemic came and the 2018 Farm Bill, which was based on 2012 data, simply doesn’t work. And so, we’ve got to get it in business. So, what they’re trying to use is some of those CCC dollars,” he said. “If you look at the last six or seven years, how much of this funding was used for things that were kind of gray as to whether or not it had anything to do with agriculture, there’s a lot of money there. And so that’s what they were trying to capture. CBO refused to give him any credit for that.”
Boozman says lawmakers would still like to complete a new bill this year.
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Sabrina Halvorson
National Correspondent / AgNet Media, Inc.
Sabrina Halvorson is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and public speaker who specializes in agriculture. She primarily reports on legislative issues and hosts The AgNet News Hour and The AgNet Weekly podcast. Sabrina is a native of California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.