Congress passed a farm bill loaded with goodies to attract enough votes. One might think that settles issues for 5 years. One would be wrong. What's in the farm bill is two things: "entitlement programs"--the sort of thing that leaps to mind when we speak of "farm programs", and other programs, programs for which the farm bill simply "authorizes" spending $X, but for which the appropriations committees have to appropriate the actual money, either in the annual appropriation bill for USDA or in an omnibus appropriation bill. (That's one of the problems with "earmarks", they are stuck in the appropriations bill either without a previous "authorization", or bypassing the bureaucratic process for prioritizing expenditures of authorized and appropriated money.)
Now the agricultural policy sites, such as EWG's, are full of coverage of fights over what money gets appropriated. Because the old-line farm programs tend to be entitlements, and the newer stuff favored by the greens are not entitlements, guess who's screaming.
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