Page 45 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

The Watershed Rehabilitation
Program was the second biggest Adventures with CBO
loser through ChIMPS, with $620
million in cuts. The analysts for the Congressional Budget
Office who estimate the cost of farm and
CHIMPS to programs such as nutrition are for the most part anonymous
EQIP have become so popular scorekeepers. But changes in their
with appropriators over the past methodology or assumptions can have major
decade that the Agriculture impacts on their estimates. And, sometimes
committees now assume that the they can make mistakes, too.
dollar amounts that they write into
the farm bill for those programs In 2002, the Agriculture committees were more
will never be fully spent, a than a little lucky that they had all that extra
congressional aide said. money to spend: During final congressional
negotiations on the bill in 2002, the
Congress has not yet acted on Congressional Budget Office made a $6 billion
fiscal 2017 appropriations for most error in scoring, or estimating, the bill’s cost.
departments – the government is
operating under a continuing The mistake occurred when CBO analysts
resolution that maintains 2016 misread the proposed new rules for calculating
spending levels – but the House direct payments to grain and cotton growers. The
Agriculture Appropriations new rules allowed them to update their yields.
Subcommittee included another Former Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman
$427 million in farm bill CHIMPS Tom Harkin (shown below) famously
to the 2017 spending bill the panel downplayed the significance of the error by
wrote for USDA. calling it “pencil dust” in the context of federal
Groups interested in conservation spending.
programs will be appealing to
appropriators not to cut any of
those programs, including EQIP
and the Conservation Stewardship
Program, in fiscal 2018 so that the
cuts don’t result in lower spending
levels in the next farm bill.
The sequestration cuts required
by the 2011 Budget Control Act
turned out to be a double
whammy for the farm bill. Even
though the 2014 farm bill cut
spending, payments under most
farm programs – other than SNAP
and the CRP – also have been reduced through sequestration. In addition to reducing the baseline
used to write the farm bill, additional sequestration cuts from fiscal 2013 through 2017 have
reduced spending by another $6.4 billion, according to a congressional staff estimate.

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