The NPR Politics Podcast - The Fight Over The Farm Bill

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

The Farm Bill is a sweeping legislative package that funds an array of programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — formerly known as food stamps. Internal Republican disagreements have some watchers worried the new package might not get over the finish line before funding runs out.Correction - Feb. 15, 2023:The audio of this story suggests that the Farm Bill is the source of funding for the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program and the National School Lunch Program. It is not; those programs are funded through separate legislation. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, politcal reporter Ximena Bustillo, and political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Em calling from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, where I have just started hanging labels for a new installation. This podcast was recorded at 1.11 p.m. on Thursday, February 9th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully I won't have hung anything upside down or next to the wrong object. Okay, enjoy the show. I'm just imagining the chaos of just going through and mislabeling everything. Yes, but chaos in such a peaceful place. I love it. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Jimena Bustillo and I cover politics.

And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover politics. On today's podcast, we are going to dig deep on a behemoth piece of legislation that touches every American in one way or another. And yet it doesn't get a lot of attention. I'm talking about the Farm Bill. It's up for renewal and there's a tight deadline, disagreements among Republicans. And if it doesn't get done, it could threaten the biggest safety net for America's farmers. Ximena, let's start from the beginning. What is in the farm bill, as I remember from covering it in times past? One big thing is nutrition. Yeah, the nutrition is one of 12 titles to this massive package, but it does make up the bulk of the spending.

About 80 percent of the dollars go towards nutrition programs, which is food stamps like SNAP, the Women, Infants and Children program. And that is what I think a lot of folks will tell you is what makes the farm bill most attainable to the average person. A lot of regular everyday people benefit from school lunches, from these nutrition programs. But there's a bunch of other stuff, too. You know, there's money for rural development, like utilities and conservation funding, which will be a big conversation this year. So there's definitely a lot to kind of get into. And then there are just like the old school farm subsidies, right? That we all think about, like, go to cotton farmers or sugar farmers or generally not the specialty crops, but like the big industrial crops. Yeah, they're like called

commodity crops, too. It's like corn and soybeans, cotton, as you mentioned, and a lot of payments, a lot of disaster relief. Programming can happen in the farm bill. Other sorts of payments for farmers if their crops crop is not terribly big, if prices are low, just keeping farmers afloat. And that is definitely a big part of it. Another really big part of it for farmers is crop insurance. Crop insurance is heavily subsidized. And a lot of farmers will tell you that that is the part of the farm bill that they really, really rely on quite a bit. So we've alluded to potential drama on the Republican side. But I think what you're talking about now, some of this disaster relief stuff, that actually has lot of strong stances coming out of the House leaders. But on the Senate side, Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow and her ranking member, John Bozeman, they both have independently mentioned that they want to look at disaster relief payments. And the reason why is there's increase in droughts, disasters, hurricanes,

and oftentimes Congress has to approve that money as these disaster comes, which means that you can have a wildfire or a hurricane and not actually get payments to cover the losses for two or three years later. Hameda, one thing about the farm bill that I think makes it more complicated to talk about than a lot of the other bills that we talk about on this podcast is that it is not a bill that cuts one way or the other in a partisan way, right? It's not as if Republicans support the farm bill and Democrats don't or Democrats do and Republicans don't, right? Right. It prides itself on being a bipartisan bill. And that is often because a lot of the differences and the fights really

differ by region. That being said, you know, Democrats and progressives are going to support the nutrition side of things and expanding that more. Republicans are by and large going to be a lot more apprehensive to that because that is the largest part of the farm bill. That is often what determines whether or not it gets passed or whether or not it gets stuck. So, Ximena, I have used several words to describe the size of this thing, including behemoth. But how big, how much money are we potentially talking about here? So the 2018 Farm Bill was estimated to cost $867 billion over the course of 10 years. That was just the Congressional Budget Office baseline. That is pretty comparable to the infrastructure bill that was passed bipartisanly by Congress,

which cost just over $1 trillion. So it's big. Yeah, it's a big investment. I want to ask about House Republicans in particular. They have been pretty vocal about their desire to cut spending. So are they looking to find savings in the farm bill? And what is that going to mean for negotiations? It's been long argued, even going into this new Congress, that there's, quote, no can go in the farm bill, particularly

in conservation spending. And that is something that Chairman G.T. Thompson, you know, he accuses Democrats of like going rogue, but then in the same breath is like, we might have a little more money here to play with. Yeah. And when you're talking about cutting costs in the farm bill, on the one hand, you do not hear the words farm bill a lot on the campaign trail when candidates are talking to voters, unless you're in Iowa that's ahead of the caucus time and all of that. But still, generally speaking, no. But like Ximena is saying, when you break it down into its constituent parts, there are some real and very fiery, then do you want to take money from hungry people is a very compelling argument. Especially if you are a lawmaker from a rural farm-heavy state, then okay, how can you take money from these good upstanding family farmers who are feeding the

world? How dare you? And these are both and plenty of others are very effective political arguments. And that's what makes this so contentious. Even if as a listener, as a news consumer, you don't hear about the farm bill much. A lot of the stuff in it is very much relevant to a lot of people. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a second. And we're back. And whenever there is a big piece of legislation like this, a big vehicle, there are a lot of people who hang their hopes and dreams on that vehicle for changes to programs, changes to the way the government operates. You've been talking to advocates who are looking for some policy changes in the bill.

Who did you talk to and what are they looking for? Yeah, it definitely ranges. So first, I spoke to folks at the Center for Employment Opportunities based out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and their mission is kind of unique. They strive to find job training opportunities for folks that have been recently incarcerated. And they work really closely with the SNAP program because SNAP does more than provide food. It provides allowance for clothing. It provides access to child care and transportation as folks are looking to get a job and get training to get a job. But they are penalized if they are making an income off of the training that exceeds the SNAP limits. So even if they're not making a living or in a stable,

like permanent job, they're in training programs, they lose their food benefits and then therefore their transportation, child care and clothing allowance as well. So they are trying to get changes to make sure that those income requirements don't hurt formerly incarcerated folks that are looking for job trainings. There are also people that are looking for more changes in voluntary conservation programs to make those more accessible. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and other advocates have long said that the current programs are oversubscribed, meaning that more producers want to be a part of them than there is money or room at USDA for that as well, which is really big when it comes to the climate conversation. So it really is a big hodgepodge of things. $20 billion in money from the Inflation Reduction Act that could go towards climate programs.

I'm wondering, what are some things that climate advocates are hoping for that could come out of that? So they want to be able to see more farmers, ranchers, and foresters enroll in these conservation programs. Republicans maintain that they are okay with the program so long as they are voluntary and not mandatory. Okay, help me understand these programs. Is it a farmer says, you can put my farm into a conservation easement and forever in the future, this will always remain undeveloped land? Or do they agree to care for their land in a certain way? What do these easements, because it's like a tax benefit, what do these easements do for the environment? Yeah, so one thing that has been discussed ahead of this farm bill is something called regenerative agriculture. The idea is to shift how farmers are using their land, especially

in between crop cycles. So when the corn comes out of the ground, what do you do with that land? Do you just let it sit until you plant again, or do you put in a cover crop? The idea is you can put in cover crops. You can take steps so that in the future, for example, you won't have to use as much fertilizer on your land because that fertilizer is a pollutant often. And furthermore, cover crops can prevent soil erosion. Soil erosion is a very big part of conservation efforts around farming. So that's one, just one sort of example.

The idea is to incentivize financially, help farmers pay for doing that kind of crop rotation. Okay, let's turn to a different aspect of politics here, which is, this is a thing that matters in every state, but are there, you know, are there electoral politics involved in the Farm Bill? Yes, there are definitely electoral politics at play here, because on the one hand, if you're just thinking of this as the Farm Bill, which given what it all funds is a bit of a misnomer, it's something like just 1% of Americans farm. It's a tiny, tiny sliver of a sliver. But the agriculture industry is much bigger. Those farmers have entire towns, entire economic systems built up around them,

and that is a much larger part of the country. And so when you're in a place like Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, this is a bill that keeps towns running, that can bring internet to your town, that can help support not just your local farmers, but all of the places that they go to buy things. The local insurance agents, for example, all of that. Talking specifically about farm issues, yes, it may not appeal to a major segment of the population, but to the people that it matters to, it matters a lot. And often they are quite important voters. And the other thing here is that, like I said, this matters a lot to rural voters.

Well, rural voters, as we know, have been swinging much more Republican in recent years. So if you're a Republican politician, you want to make sure that this bill serves the people that have been voting for you. If you're a Democratic politician in one of those states, you want to make sure that this bill serves people and that they know about whatever part you played in it. And I would add that there is like the thought that ag and rural are also not completely interchangeable, but a lot of the issues on the ground that people are concerned about do root back to the cost of your food, right? The cost of what it takes to develop housing, the cost of your internet bill. And this bill particularly does tackle a lot of those issues. So even if it's not immediately affecting the constituency or the one farmer that's going to go out and vote one way or another, I mean, it is going to affect the supply chain and then therefore the larger perception of whatever president is in office when this thing gets signed. So when this thing gets signed,

what is the timeline? I mean, clearly there's a deadline, but what happens if they miss it? Do you think they could miss it? Like, where is this? So the current 2018 farm bill expires on September 30th. And if they fail to pass a new bill or pass anything, then all these subsidy programs, all the things we've been talking about, will revert to the original farm bill from like the 1930s. That is a doomsday scenario and is unlikely to happen because what is more likely is they'll just pass an extension, which will just carry on current status quo until they can pass something new, very similar to a continuing resolution. Like for a budget bill. Yeah, for a budget bill. However, time is really not on lawmakers' sides. They have until September 30th to pass something through the House, through the Senate, conference the two versions of that,

get it to the president. And as we talked about, there are plenty of little sticking points that could come up. And we barely have committees set right now and hearings getting going. So not out of anyone's fault. Time just doesn't look good. Well, we have no more time in this podcast,

but we will be back in your feeds for our Friday roundup tomorrow. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Ximena Bustillo and I cover politics. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.