Sen. Charles Schumer and Payment LImitation

The good senator from New York was precocious, winning election to the State Assembly and then to the US House in his twenties.  He's notorious as a publicity hound, and I strongly suspect in his early days aggravated his elders and betters.  That, I speculate, is why an early committee assignment was to House Agriculture Committee--why else would one stick someone so obviously and completely a city slicker on that committee if not to embarrass him?

I don't remember all the ins and outs, but I do remember that Schumer was active in pushing payment limitation provisions.  And here's a GAO report back to Schumer and Conte on their proposal to change the provisions in the 1985 farm, to tighten them up.   In considering the 1990 farm bill he proposed an adjusted gross income limitation, which was defeated then, but which finally passed.

A lesson for farm state legislators: never agree to put ambitious urbanites on your committee.  As Shakespeare warned:

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Politico on Farm Bill Costs

David Rogers at Politico analyzes potential costs of the 2014 farm bill.  It's too detailed for me, but I think the bottom line is he believes it will cut costs, unlike some publications which believe it will increase costs, over its lifespan.  However, I think he's saying that the cut will be much smaller than anticipated when the bill was passed.

The Farm Bill Draws Nigh

Reports are that the farm bill will hit the House floor today. But EWG has an ominous post about the possibility that some provisions will run afoul of the WTO.

Grassley and Delegation of Authority

From Chris Clayton at DTN:

"Discussing the farm bill, Grassley said the principal negotiators may take his language defining an actively engaged farmer out of the farm bill and leave it up to USDA to determine who is actively engaged. This Congress is filled with lawmakers who have criticized administrative rulemaking usurping congressional authority. Yet, farm-bill conferees now seem intent on turning over rulemaking to USDA to redefine who is actively engaged as a farmer.

"The people who want to shovel this off to the administration for rulemaking, they don't want anything," Grassley said. "They want to take it out. If they could get away with taking it out, they would just take it out ... They think they can accomplish the same thing by giving to the department and the department might not do anything very significant."

Grassley's actively engaged rule only allows one person designated as the farm manager. He noted the Government Accountability Office has cited instances of 16 people classified as "managers" for a single farm entity.

Grassley reiterated there was no need to change anything in the payment-limit provisions because they were the same in both the House and Senate bills."

 I don't trust my memory because I tried and failed to find documents supporting the following: when "actively engaged" first became law, ASCS wrote regulations implementing the provision.  But I believe that the powers that be in Congress (Jamie Whitten perhaps, as he was head of House Ag and represented MS) got ASCS to back off a bit.  Don't know whether that was a provision in another law or just pressure on the USDA hierarchy.  Anyway, I'm sure FSA is looking forward to having this responsibility once again.  I'm sure.

Base Versus Planted, Continued

From David Rogers at Politico on farm bill negotiations:

In aggregate numbers, the estimated 260 million base acres counted today in farm programs are not so different from the average of real “planted” acres. But within that universe, huge shifts have taken place as corn and soybeans have grown more dominant while rice, cotton and wheat plantings have declined
For example in the South, about 12 percent of the base acres went unplanted in a recent year compared with just 3 percent in the Midwest. Oklahoma and Texas alone accounted for more than 4 million unplanted base acres or 26 percent of the total for the nation that same year.
At the same time in Midwest states, plantings over base totaled almost 9.5 million acres in 2010 — more than double that of the South. And in Kansas and North Dakota, corn plantings have soared as land has been pulled out of the conservation reserve program.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/farm-bill-crop-subsidies-agriculture-congress-corn-soybean-interests-100758.html#ixzz2mioXC5Mu

 

The reallocation/adjustment process he's predicting will keep FSA offices busy for a while.

Base Acres Versus Planted Acres

That's the dispute going on now, according to today's Farm Policy.  Base acres avoids problems with the WTO, planted acres reflect current operations, not something many years in the past.

Sounds like one option is going back to 1977 and the "normal crop acreage".  As someone said: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes".

The Difference a Year Makes: Corn Prices and Farm Bill

Corn prices look very different now than last year, so the provisions of the draft farm bills in House and Senate are attracting scrutiny, as in this Politico article.

Farm Bill Time Again

The House and Senate conferees will meet next week on the farm bill. The Rural Blog passes on speculation about possible effects on FSA offices.

I wonder whether FSA employees are comparing the rollout of MIDAS (which seems to have had problems, though not very visible outside the walls of FSA) with the rollout of ACA. 

WTO Fades Away

That's my read of this statement from Collin Peterson as reported in Farm Policy:

“As for a coming House-Senate conference, Peterson said he told Senate Ag Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., ‘there will be target prices’ in the Title I safety net program and ‘they will be based on planted acres not to exceed base acres.’ He noted that some commodity groups are ‘simply wrong’ to press base acres rather than planted acres for any target price payments. ‘We can’t sell that to Congress any more … about paying for acres not planted.’”

My recollection is that the WTO believes that paying on planted acres encourages production, which is limited under its rules for agriculture.

Defeat of Farm Bill

Keith Good at Agfax writes about the defeat of the farm bill, including some interesting discussion from Craig Jagger, who blames the defeat in part on the changes in Congressional rules.   I liked this:

Furthermore, the BGov Study stated that, “In addition, explicit timing shifts were used to capture ‘savings’ of $2.6 billion over 10 years for the 2002 farm bill and $4.5 billion over 10 years for the 2008 farm bill. Timing shifts move costs outside the 10-year budget window. The CBO scores savings for the shifts even though only the timing, not the amount, of program costs change. Those explicit timing shifts are not available for the 2013 farm bill, because all that could be identified have been used and each timing shift can be used only once…When major program changes are being made, having extra money to make them more palatable to those losing benefits makes writing legislation easier. This farm bill process undoubtedly has been more contentious and difficult from not having extra money above its baseline that recent farm bills had. Now to add funding for a new program or to increase funding for an existing program, funding for a different Agriculture Committee program that has a baseline needs to be cut, robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

Bottomline: the Ag committee had run out of tricks to ease the pain.

Into the Bureaucratic Weeds with the Farm Bill

From Farm Policy:

"A news release yesterday from Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) noted in part that, “[Chairman Goodlatte] introduced an amendment that would ensure regulations imposed under the FARRM Act are subject to promulgation under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Congressional Review Act, which falls under the jurisdiction of the House Judiciary Committee.  The version of the bill reported by the House Agriculture Committee last month waived this requirement. Congressman Goodlatte’s amendment passed the House Judiciary Committee by voice vote with bipartisan support.”

 I've not followed this closely.  Farm Policy goes on to explain this action on the part of House Judiciary is part of the infighting over the dairy provisions in the House Ag farm bill.  Chairman Goodlatte wants USDA to do some studies.  But from the description, it sounds more general, perhaps applying to all provisions of the farm bill. 

In my memory the farm bill always contained an exemption from the APA for production adjustment programs.  The usual reason was that Congress never got the legislation completed in time, so we were always behind the eight ball in getting the program in the field.  By waiving APA requirements Congress could ask us to act quickly and keep their constituents happy.  Now as I write my memory is being tickled with the idea that maybe one of the attorneys in OGC did push us to comply once or twice, but by putting out an interim rule instead of doing the proposed rule/public comment/ final rule process. 

I may also be wrong on this, but I think the APA always technically applied to the farm bill, but in the 70's ASCS ignored it.  It was only with the 1983 PIK program with its contracts that we got really serious about involving the lawyers and dotting every i.

John Phipps and the Fiscal Cliff Package

John says farmers made out like bandits.

It's Not All Partisanship in DC

Despite the headline news stories over the past week, month, year, decade from Washington, you'd be sorely slightly mistaken if you think the Capitol is solely devoted to partisan bickering.

The continuing saga of the farm bill is evidence to the contrary.  According to this Politico story from this morning, the four leaders of House and Senate agriculture committees are united in proposing a 1-year extension (i.e., through Sept. 30) of the 2008 farm legislation, but Speaker Boehner is opposed.

Why Milk Prices Shouldn't Rise: Break the Law

Usually bureaucrats think the law is sacrosanct, it's what we do.  But the dirty reality is laws aren't self-executing; there's lots of provisions enacted into law which become a dead letter.  The price of milk in 2013 should be one of them.

Without a new farm bill, the provisions of old law come into effect. That means for milk the government is supposed to support the price at a level which means $8 a gallon.  But suppose USDA doesn't do so?  Theoretically some group, presumably milk co-ops, could haul out their lawyers and file suit in federal court to force USDA's hand.  My theory is, by the time the suit is written and filed, and DOJ works with OGC to come up with a reply, new law will have superseded the old law, and Congressional attorneys will have put in a provision which essentially nullifies the suit.  Net effect: consumers don't see a rise in milk prices.

[Update:  This is an example of why there are dead letter provisions: if the bureaucracy doesn't act on its own to implement a provision of law, there needs to be someone who can take USDA to court and/or with enough PR clout to raise a stink about it.  In many cases there's neither.]

Merry Christmas from Chris Clayton

He has a tongue-in-cheek thank you post to Boehner and Cantor looking forward to the 2013 farm bill discussions.

Progress on Farm Bill?

Politico reports the House and Senate ag types are working out their differences, meaning there might be a way to get a farm bill passed.  I don't know if Nate Silver has any predictions on this; I suspect he's postponing that challenge until after he figures out how to predict earthquakes.

South Versus the West in Ag

Sen. Roberts says he'll accept target price supports for southern crops if he can get crop insurance for his crops.  See this Politico article.  Back in the old days we had separate programs for each crop, but we gradually simplified the programs and legislation down to cover almost all crops the same.  But realities sometimes break through the best plans of bureaucrats, legislators, and simplifiers.

The Choice: Abortion or Farmers?

The question is why did the Republicans lose their runs for the Senate in Missouri and Indiana.  The pat answer inside the Beltway is "abortion", ill-advised remarks by the Republican candidates.  But  Farm Policy reports on a Politico piece on the possibility of Sen. Cochran taking the ranking member role in Senate Ag, which includes this:

"“Boehner’s stand may have cost Republicans at least one if not two Senate seats that the GOP had hoped to win in Great Plains states. And Roberts argued Tuesday that the leadership must take a second look now at the farm bill and its promised savings –a precious commodity given the fiscal pressures at the end of the year.”

MN Famers on Congress " we’re hopeless"

So says Rep. Collin Peterson--his constituents don't expect action from Congress on the farm bill.

From Farm Policy.

[Updated: Politico piece on the current status.]

[Update 2: Politico report on rally for farm bill]

Why Congress Drives Program Developers Crazy

Yes, I was crazy by the time I retired.  Chris Clayton reports Sen. Grassley is guessing a 1-year extension of the farm bill.  Where does that leave the MIDAS people.  I don't know.  If I were in their shoes a year or so ago, there would be these choices:

• develop to support current programs, in which case if Congress does its job, you've wasted your efforts
• develop to support current programs, minus the direct payment and counter-cyclical ones which the conventional wisdom says are going to bite the dust, in which case if you believe Grassley you've missed the boat and need an emergency effort
• develop to support only the basic records, with some sort of bridge to existing software to provide support for ongoing programs, in which case you run the risk of hanging counties out to dry, sort of like the SURE program under the 2008 legislation.

I've no idea which way they went; maybe there's another option which is better.  But it points out the difficulties of software development scheduled to coincide with farm legislation.