As the House and Senate prepare to start conference negotiations on the farm bill, leaders of the House Agriculture Committee say they are at an impasse as to how to resolve the crucial issues of how much to spend on the bill and how to pay for it.
While most House members returned from their holiday break on yesterday, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson
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(D-Minn.) said he spent most of the holiday recess in Washington, doing some advance work on the farm bill in the hopes of moving forward with a conference on the House and Senate bills this month.
Peterson said he met several times with Agriculture Department Acting Secretary Chuck Conner to try to resolve objections that led to veto threats on both the farm bill approved in the House last summer and the one the Senate passed last month.
Despite those efforts, he and Conner are "not making any progress," Peterson said in an interview this week. He said he still had not resolved the key question of what the overall spending number can be for the farm bill conference.
The House and Senate bills each include separate tax provisions, mostly for foreign corporations, that would offset about $14 billion in additional spending for the bills. Each chamber has some objections to the changes to the tax code used in the other chamber's bill.
The bills also each use different mechanisms to shift some spending to future years, in order to lower the budget scoring and comply with congressional "pay as you go" rules.
"The big problem is coming up with a way to pay for the bill," said Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the top Republican on the House Agriculture Committee. "A lot of people are going to have to be willing to give, but we're not even to the table to talk about those things yet."
Even if the two chambers agree, USDA's Conner has said the White House will not accept the new taxes as part of the bill. Conner called the tax changes a "non-starter" for the administration in remarks earlier this week to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
"Right now, we have some fundamental differences with Congress over the two versions of the farm bill it has put together," Conner told Farm Bureau members at their annual convention. "The bills passed by the House and the Senate, as they stand today, are not on the road to a successful passage."
Peterson said Conner is striking a hard line.
"It seems like the administration has gone further off the deep end," Peterson said in an interview, shortly after finishing a phone call with Conner.
Eliminating the tax provisions would be difficult. The changes to the tax code included in the two bills are key to their overall effort to increase funding for nutrition, conservation and energy programs, while keeping the crop support system intact and staying within the pay-as-you-go spending rules.
One possible tactic for the conference committee could be to plow ahead with tax changes and spending increases and put President Bush in the politically delicate situation of deciding whether or not to go ahead with his veto.
But at least for now, that is not Peterson's tactic. He said he is trying to work with the administration and is even considering trying to cut some spending in the bill.
"I have not ruled anything out, but it's pretty hard to see how we can do it without any extra revenues," Peterson said.
For his part, Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman -- who represents thousands of farmers for the nation's largest agriculture lobby -- was not convinced by Conner's speech and wants to see swift completion of a farm bill that is "within the parameters" of the House and Senate measures.
"Farmers don't really care about whether something is a budget gimmick or a closing a tax loophole ... what our members care about is is the farm bill going to be done and are we going to know the rules," Stallman told reporters this week.E&E Daily
