Republicans press Johnson for farm bill vote, warning of looming ‘crisis’

Correction: This article has been updated to accurately reflect how the farm bill that passed the House Agriculture Committee earlier this year would pay for additional subsidies for commodity crops.

Dozens of House Republicans are calling on Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to schedule a vote on a farm bill before the end of the year.

That timeline is essential: Funding from the stopgap farm bill passed last year after the 2018 version expired is set to run out at the end of December.

If that happens, American farm policy will be thrown back into the days of the New Deal — a stark and disruptive change that will upend much of the foundation the modern agriculture sector is built on, the Congressional Research Service found in May.

And while some lawmakers — including Senate Agriculture Committee Ranking Member John Boozman (R-Ark.) — have called for another one-year stopgap, on Thursday GOP House members warned that this would fail to staunch the bleeding.

“Farmers and ranchers do not have the luxury of waiting until the next Congress for the enactment of an effective farm bill,” the members, who included House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), wrote in their letter.

Passing the bill, they wrote, is among “the top priorities” of the Republican conference.

The letter pointed to record levels of farm debt ($540 billion) and steep falls in receipts from crop sales amid rising costs from disasters — all of which the agricultural sector is grappling with as the federal support it receives “is projected to reach its lowest level since 1982.”

That year’s low level of support, the members charged, “presaged the farm financial crisis of the mid-1980s,” a disaster they argued could be repeated.

The GOP lawmakers were clear who they blamed for the delay: House Democrats, who they accused of standing “in the way of progress on a highly effective Farm Bill.”

The two parties have been divided on issues like food aid, conservation funding aimed at slowing climate change and measures aimed at breaking up farm sector monopolies. 

In particular, the left and right are fiercely divided over the grand bargain that Thompson orchestrated to craft the version of the farm bill that passed the House Agriculture Committee this summer. 

That legislation, which passed the committee largely along party lines but with some Democratic support, included tens of billions in additional subsidies for commodity crops like rice, peanuts and cotton — support that would be paid for by new restrictions on the Commodity Credit Corporation, the Agriculture Department’s lending arm.

In a controversial move, the bill would also freeze the ability of the government to spend more on food aid in the future, and would reinvest those savings elsewhere. The Congressional Budget Office has found this would come nowhere close to covering the cost.

Democrats in both House and Senate have widely panned this plan, which they describe as a back-door cut to food aid and nutrition programs, and Agriculture Secretary Tom has said the funding mechanism would “rob Peter to pay Paul.” 

The House process has also been marked by intraparty divisions, with an unusual alliance of left-leaning and libertarian groups uniting to fight farm welfare programs they argue amount to crony capitalism.

In their letter to Johnson, GOP members expressed hope that the current bill — which includes measures that Democrats in both chambers say they cannot support — could pass in the lame-duck session after November, when “election year politics have run [their] course.”

They added: “All Americans, particularly our rural constituents, deserve nothing less.”

— Updated at 2:30 p.m.