While breaking news about U.S. military action against Iran dominates the headlines, a consequential piece of legislation quietly cleared a major hurdle in Washington. In the early morning hours of March 5th, after a 20-hour marathon markup session, the House Agriculture Committee voted 34-17 to advance the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 — dubbed “Farm Bill 2.0.” With the priciest farm programs already locked in through last year’s reconciliation bill, what’s left may look slimmer on paper. But as TCS President, Steve Ellis and Director of Research and Policy, Josh Sewell break down, don’t let the size fool you.
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Budget Watchdog All Federal, the podcast dedicated to making sense of the budget spending and tax issues facing the nation. Cut through the partisan rhetoric and talking points for the facts about what’s being talked about, bandied about and pushed to Washington, brought to you by taxpayers for common sense. And now the host of Budget Watchdog AF TCS President Steve Ellis.
Steve Ellis:
Welcome all American taxpayers seeking common sense. You’ve made it to the right place. For 30 years, TCS, that’s taxpayers for common sense, has served as an independent budget watchdog group based in Washington, DC. We believe in fiscal policy for America that is based on facts. We believe in transparency and accountability because no matter where you are in the political spectrum, no one wants to see their tax dollars wasted. We are recording in the first week of March 2026, and the news has been anything but quiet. Earlier this week, US and Israeli forces launched a massive coordinated military operation against Iran, code named Operation Epic Fury on the American Side and Operation Roaring Line by Israel. The war was not authorized by Congress and the president and his administration have sent mixed and at times contradictory messages about its goals, from preventing an imminent attack to dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, to taking out its naval capabilities, and ultimately achieving regime change.
Although the goal seems to shift depending on who’s talking. As of March 5th, six US service members have been confirmed, killed in action, and hundreds of Iranian civilians have also been killed. This is a developing and consequential story, and we will continue to track it and the cost to American taxpayers as it unfolds. We know that an emergency supplemental bill is in the offing and that it may not only contain Pentagon spending, but also wildfire assistance and yet more agriculture benefits, which leads us to this episode. Today, we’re turning to a story that may be flying under the radar amid the breaking news and one that will have real lasting consequences for federal spending and American agriculture. In the early morning hours of Thursday, March 5th, after a marathon markup session that lasted more than 20 hours, the House Agriculture Committee voted 34 to 17 to advance the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026.
That’s HR 7567. Seven Democrats crossed the aisle to join Republicans in moving the bill forward. Chairman Thompson of Pennsylvania has signaled that House leadership may bring the full bill to the floor for a vote by Easter. That’s just a month away. The Senate hasn’t even begun formal work on its version yet. Now, this bill is being called Farm Bill 2.0, partly because the most expensive farm subsidy and nutrition assistance programs were already funded through reconciliation. Remember? The One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year? So what’s left? A slimmer bill. But don’t let that fool you. When it comes to special interest giveaways and taxpayer risk, this one is punching well above its weight class. Even though it’s only 5% of the overall farm bill, the overall farm bill is one and a half trillion dollars, so that 5% is quite a lot. Here to break it down with us is our director of research and policy and Mr. Agriculture himself, Josh Sewell.
Josh Sewell:
Hey, Steve, glad to be here.
Steve Ellis:
Josh, set the scene for Budget Watchdog AF Faithful. The most expensive farm programs already got funded in reconciliation, as I mentioned. So what exactly is HR 7567 and why does it still matter to taxpayers?
Josh Sewell:
So basically what HR 7567 does is this is all of the also rans in the farm bill. So as you mentioned, things that weren’t passed in reconciliation. So it’s still a lot of programs. It’s not the most expensive ones, but it really sets our federal agricultural policy in a lot of places. So we’re talking energy policy, rural development, agriculture research. A lot of things, if you’re concerned about hemp, if you’re concerned about animal welfare, this is the part of the farm bill that really does that. Not the biggest costs, but a lot of important policies.
Steve Ellis:
So Josh, the vote was 3417 bipartisan. And as I mentioned, seven Democrats voting yes, along with all Republicans. When you see that kind of margin after a 20-hour markup, what does that tell you about the politics here? And should taxpayers read that as a sign that this is a reasonable bill or that special interest did their homework?
Josh Sewell:
A little more of the latter. Farm bills are always “bipartisan”. I mean, you’re always going to get at least a handful of members from both sides of the aisle voting for a farm bill. Historically, you used to get a lot. You actually used to get a majority of both the Republicans and Democrats on farm bills because really foreign policy typically falls along regional lines, not whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. But honestly, this time, some of it seems to be gamesmanship. We actually heard from some folks who wouldn’t go publicly on this that the Democrats, there’s a handful of those Democrats who actually don’t expect this to get to the floor, don’t expect to actually have to vote for it, but they’re all up for reelection again. So some of those farm state Democrats might be looking to not take a hard vote right away.
Steve Ellis:
Yeah. When you think about the big farm bill, the main one, you always talked about the unholy alliance between the “Ags” and the “Urbans”, and that was because SNAP food stamps was also part of it. And then that was all dealt with in different ways in the reconciliation bill over the summer.
Josh Sewell:
Yeah, exactly. And I didn’t watch every minute of the markup yet. I’m going to go back and do some of that. But there was still a lot of discussion about SNAP. There’s a lot of holdover there. And so I think it’s pretty clear that while this bill is more narrow in that it’s not directly affecting SNAP, it’s not directly affecting the farm subsidy programs, at least reauthorizing them. There still was an opportunity and a push mostly from Democrats to undo some of those changes or to make some other changes to the programs. And so it’s a push and pull. There’s definitely some, I’m not going to say hurt feelings, but definitely some holdover and some major policy disagreements and actually probably some hurt feelings because things got pretty personal.
Steve Ellis:
Yeah, absolutely. So Chairman Thompson has said that the bill could hit the House floor by Easter and that’s just a month away. Meanwhile, the Senate hasn’t started its version. How does that timeline shape what we’re likely to end up with?
Josh Sewell:
Well, Chairman Thompson, he’s been an optimist the whole time. He’s been seeing a Farm Bill around the corner for the last three years. So take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. However, you’ve been doing this for a while too, and farm bills have really, they’d have a history of falling apart and then rising from the ashes, sometimes when you don’t even expect it. So we also know a lot of our listeners probably know my track record on predicting certain things like shutdowns. I’ve stopped trying to predict whether farm bills will happen or not, or at least the timelines. But I think you should expect to see the chairman and the supporters of the bill pointing to the Democrats who voted for it saying, “Hey, we have a bipartisan package. Let’s move on. ” And the Senate is certainly saying, “Well, now we have to do something because the House has moved.” So they don’t want to look like they’re sitting on the sidelines.
So I would expect something to move, but let’s be clear. There’s a lot of other stuff on Congress’s agenda. So we are definitely looking, expecting a farm bill to move, but if it doesn’t, we’ll continue to educate folks.
Steve Ellis:
Yeah. I think that it’s an election year. And so there’s some time in the next several months where the gears kind of grind to a halt until it’s after the election, because then it all of a sudden it seems like, oh, you’re going to help this lawmaker or that lawmaker in a tough reelect or whatever. And so it’s just not the time to be moving legislation, but there’s always the lame duck. All right, let’s get into specifics. Taxpayers for common sense has identified the worst provisions in this bill, the ones that deserve real scrutiny. Let’s start with something almost too strange to be true, shrimp. There’s a provision in here about shrimp imports. Walk us through this and explain why this is a pattern that we’ve seen before. It’s deja vu all over again.
Josh Sewell:
So the specific provision you’re mentioning is actually section 3312, and that requires the government accountability office to report on policy solutions to address illegal shrimp imports and related inspections, as well as policy solutions to promote and protect the domestic shrimp industry. It’s a report. The GAO will do it at some point, but this is really an effort to mimic something that has been done for another water creature, catfish in the south, which is something known as a USDA Catfish Inspection Office. So this is a playbook from an industry that wants some protections from foreign competition in order to sort of tilt a playing field towards themselves.
Steve Ellis:
Yeah. And if I recall, that was, well, one is we worked with Senator McCain trying to, late Senator McCain trying to stop that provision. And it was also about getting catfish out from underneath the FDA governing it versus the USDA, which was viewed as more pliable.
Josh Sewell:
Yeah. And in this instance, we’ve had, for the last few years, there have been folks who’ve been trying to reduce the amount of competition, and just be frank about it, from foreign countries that are producing shrimp faster and more efficiently than the US domestic industry is. And so we actually saw, I believe it was either two, it might’ve been three years ago, I forget now. In the appropriation cycle, a former member of Congress who was no longer there, Mr. Graves, he is also from Louisiana. He tried to get a provision that would have done a similar thing. It would have required a study, but also would have required the USDA to purchase excess shrimp. So this idea that we have cheap shrimp coming in from foreign countries and it’s, so now people aren’t buying that better quality and then just better in general, according to them, shrimp from the Gulf.
And so it would have required more tariffs and it would require the USA to purchase what they called excess shrimp. And then I guess what we do with excess shrimp usually shove it onto usually school lunch programs. So I don’t know if this would have, you would have had some shrimp cocktails for those free breakfast programs or what, but they would have done something to dump the shrimp domestically. But this is just another protectionist playbook where folks who don’t … Sometimes there are grains of truth in these things where there may be foreign subsidies that are promoting those, giving an unfair competition to those competitors, but usually it end up being that they’re just cheaper. They’re just better at producing it for whatever reason. They have some sort of competitive advantage. And so rather than figuring out how you make your industry more competitive, hey, let’s go to Uncle Sam to block those people from coming in or give us a leg up.
And let’s be honest, this administration is probably a little more amenable to some of those manipulations than some of the past ones.
Steve Ellis:
Absolutely. Well, while we’re talking about sweeteners, let’s go to the sugar provision, Section 1008, which essentially ensures that the sugar and cotton loan processing continues even during a government shutdown by declaring it an emergency involving public safety. How does something like that end up in a farm bill and what’s the real world impact on taxpayers?
Josh Sewell:
Hey, man, the industry with the sweetest deal gets even sweeter. So sugar holds a special place, we’ll call it, in agriculture policy. They are the only commodity that benefits from … This is before this bill, benefits from tariff quotas. So we limit, as a country, the amount of sugar that can come into this country, country by country. So Haiti can only provide a certain amount. The Dominican Republican only export a certain amount to us, but there’s also the federal government limits the amount of sugar that domestic processors can actually process through a quota system. And if those two things don’t, and the loans that we provide the producers, if all those things don’t keep the price elevated to the level that they want that’s actually in law, then there’s a program that the USDA buys, again, excess stock and then sells it at a loss to ethanol manufacturers.
And so the reason this is in the farm bill is because sugar is powerful, full stop. Sugar cane producers, which are almost all in Florida now. There’s a handful in Louisiana and like seven in Texas. And then sugar beet producers who are all throughout the upper, Midwest and into those plain states. So over to Idaho, a handful in Utah, but really the upper Midwest, including over to Michigan, but the Dakotas, those folks are a powerful lobby. It’s a concentrated industry and they think because of all the sort of manipulations and the gyrations in the market, they’re just trying to guarantee that they have access to these cheap loans and these payments that they can get. But it’s galling that I guess maintaining our sugar supply is the one thing at USDA that would be deemed essential in a government shutdown in the future. And so not any other food product, not any conservation programs, and those meat inspectors, they would still be working, just not getting paid.
But those good sugar guys, they’ll get their sweet deal.
Steve Ellis:
Yeah. Americans pay a lot more for a pound of sugar than anybody else pretty much in the world. And it’s because of these programs. And certainly it is one of these examples of a different unholy alliance where you’ve got, like you said, like the Minnesotas and the Dakotas, and then you have the very politically powerful Florida kind of coming together and pushing this through.
Josh Sewell:
Yeah. And it does have real costs. And that’s one of the reasons it’s been tough. There’s a couple of reasons it’s been tough to reform sugar. And we’ve been on the right side of this issue in the past and still are, is that it is a concentrated industry and the costs are dispersed, right? We all pay a little bit more for the stuff that we buy that has sugar in it, not just candy, but also any baked product, any manufactured, basically most processed foods have some amount of sugar, but it’s a really small amount, so you don’t see it. But the benefits really go to the folks who are benefiting. And so it’s been hard to reform and it’s easier for them to get a few more goodies.
Steve Ellis:
So Josh, the bill expands the definition of quote, precision agriculture to include equipment purchases, which would open the door to farm businesses receiving conservation program funds or taxpayer subsidized loans for buying equipment. Why is that a problem, especially when these programs are already oversubscribed?
Josh Sewell:
So this is an area where the policy itself isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that the fiscal ramifications as well as the impact on farmers and ranchers is harmful, most likely. And what I mean by that is that precision agriculture is perfectly fine. And what that basically means is being more efficient with your inputs. So not just broadcasting fertilizer and seed everywhere, but being very precise about how to do it. And in order to implement precision agriculture, it usually requires technology, it requires education, and at times it requires different management practices, just how you do it, but also different equipment. And so in the past, certain equipment wasn’t made eligible. And the reason for that is because equipment, like everything in this economy now, is extremely expensive. But in agriculture, farm implements, tractors, plows, disks, those things are extremely expensive. You could be talking half a million to almost a million dollars for some of these specific pieces of equipment.
So once you add precision agriculture as a covered, as an eligible product, if you add that into these conservation programs, what it means is instead of dollars that are going to, say, integrated pest management where someone learns how to better apply their pesticides and how to rotate crops or for cover crops or for these different things that are not nearly as expensive, you’re going to be sucking up huge amounts of cash just to a farmer to buy a new plow or to buy a drill to put the seeds into the ground. So maybe in the past you had something like in the eQIP program, which is an environmental qualities incentives program, you can get up to a $450,000 contract with the government to implement these practices over five years. Most of those contracts are a lot smaller than that. But if you start adding in the purchase of equipment as one of the qualifying things, just buying the equipment could suck up that $450,000 because they also increased, which I don’t think I mentioned to you earlier, we now can cover up to 90% of the costs as opposed to 60% as it was, or 50% on some practices.
And so if we as taxpayers are covering 90% of the cost, all of a sudden you’re going to get a lot fewer people are able to participate in a program because this may surprise you, Steve, they didn’t add any money to eQIP. They didn’t add any money to these conservation programs. They actually cut them. So it’s a smaller pool, higher limits, means less people are going to benefit.
Steve Ellis:
And generally, it’s the bigger fish, not to mix our two areas of the topic that are going to be able to access these programs and be able to grab the most cash.
Josh Sewell:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s the challenge is that typically large farms, they are often more complicated, but they’re also more effective at navigating USDA programs. Sometimes the reality is some of the largest farms have people, that’s all they do is navigate both federal and state programs to figure out how they can get more assistance legitimately or not. And so yeah, this is likely going to lead to the smaller producers, the ones who arguably could use it would even have a better impact, a greater impact on their bottom line and their environmental output. They’re not going to benefit from this.
Steve Ellis:
So Josh, there are also significant expansions for the timber industry. People might be surprised that’s part of the farm bill, but it is. Grant programs getting bigger, higher federal cost shares, more eligible uses. And on the biofuel side, the bill actually declares certain biomass to have a greenhouse gas emission rate of zero, essentially writing scientific conclusions into law. What’s your reaction when Congress starts legislating scientific facts?
Josh Sewell:
War is peace, freedom of slavery, ignorance is strength.
Steve Ellis:
Oh, 1984.
Josh Sewell:
Yeah. And to be fair, this predilection to dictate what science is or to just ignore what reality is and say, “Well, this is what we want. ” This predates this administration and this farm bill when it comes to agriculture. But this comes from the playbook of if you can’t get the science to work, change the science instead of changing your approach or trying something new. And it’s pretty galling when it comes to biofuels and some of the forestry stuff because what we’re essentially doing is we’re saying we’ve had a long history on corn-based ethanol. We’ve had a long history as a country in growing wood products and using them, millennia in fact, but the science around this is pretty clear that cutting trees, turning them into wood pellets in order to generate electricity is not carbon neutral. In fact, it actually, it’s polluting and corn ethanol, as much as our corn friends don’t like to admit it, it is not revenue neutral.
It is not carbon neutral. It is a greenhouse gas emitter, but this is just the most recent instance of saying, “Hey, science be damned. We like these subsidies. We like this entrenched indicia.” So these new programs that are out there, sustainable aviation fuel, which is we’re going to try to put ethanol and biofuels into all of our airplanes and this idea of biomass as a renewable energy source, we really want to jump on this train. So we’re just going to dictate that these are. By law, we’re going to declare in statute these things are green.
Steve Ellis:
All right, Josh, foreign food aid, this one concerns me. Section 3102 would require that 50% of food assistance be in the form of commodity purchases, meaning US crops shipped on US flagged vessels be sent to wherever the humanitarian crisis is. But we know that in a humanitarian emergency, speed matters and also purchasing closer to where the event is, can be cheaper and more effective. So what does mandating commodity purchase do to the effectiveness and cost of the food aid program?
Josh Sewell:
Well, it likely makes them less efficient. This is a debate we’ve been having as a country for as long as I’ve worked on this and long before I started working on ag. There’s a time when basically all of our foreign aid was purchased domestically and shipped overseas. Now, let’s be frank, there’s still a role for that. You can pre-position, they call it, commodities in certain areas. You can assist folks with US excess crops or stuff growing in the United States if necessary, but no offense to you as a Coastie, ships are slow. Stomachs aren’t. And that’s one of the real things that you have to deal with in these humanitarian crises or these, whether it’s famine or response to war, response to just environmental issues, so growing problems throughout the world. Sometimes you need to just … It’s certainly more efficient. It’s quicker and sometimes it’s actually even cheaper to purchase either within country or within the region.
And so moving this, mandating that 50% has to go here, this actually goes against the grain of what we used to have, which was there was a movement away from … It was actually getting less and less of a mandate. So it used to be 100%. It was down to 75% and then it dropped to 50%. And so now there’s a fear that this is going to go back up and say, the goal of foreign food aid is not to be efficient and keep people from literally dying, but it’s really just going to become another special interest handout. And I think you can’t look at this without thinking about what happened, I mean, about this time last year, the elimination of USAID. And so a lot of the USAID stuff that they used to be in charge of as far as the food is now a part of USDA.
And this bill officially changes some of the authorizations. And so there’s a real concern, again, that it’s the United States Department of Agriculture, it’s not the United States Department of feeding people in foreign countries efficiently because they’re about to die. And so the inherent interests at USDA are probably not the best place for this program to be. Yeah.
Steve Ellis:
Considering all that happened in food aid over the last year, turning it into a program to dump US commodities is not a good step forward. So Josh, there’s a pattern running through this bill. Increases in federal cost shares, higher loan ceilings, expanded subsidy rates, but no reforms to accountability are targeting. Conservation program cost shares going from 65 to 90%, like you mentioned. Loan limits jumping from $700,000 to $1.75 million for farm ownership loans, and from $750,000 to $3 million for operating loans. What does it say about the direction of agriculture policy when we keep raising the ceiling without fixing the floor?
Josh Sewell:
Well, I think it says a few things, and one is … Yeah, I really want to emphasize that increasing loan limits isn’t necessarily … It’s not a bad thing. I mean, inflation is real, agriculture’s expensive. Sure. I mean, what’s not expensive right now? I mean, there’s some reality that you do need to adjust programs up, but they’re not adjusting baselines up. They’re not providing a greater pool of funds, which you could if you cut something somewhere else. And so I think that’s just a question of equity and efficiency is the safety net, especially in the farm safety net going to be benefiting a smaller and smaller number of people? And if so, then that excludes the majority eventually. And it really squashes actual opportunity and dynamism, innovation in the markets. And that’s a concern in something like agriculture where you are constantly bombarded by markets, by pests, by pestilence.
You are always having to adjust. And if you don’t, you become scleratic and you can’t move into the future. And that’s my biggest concern with some of these, especially in the loan areas, is that there’s a tendency in the mandates, in the purchase requirements, in the increased loans. You have a tendency to look to rich Uncle Sam instead of figuring out how to adjust to a new market. Instead of finding your niche to figure out what you can do better, you’re just like, “I’m not going to do better. I’m going to get a payout.” And I don’t think I’ve ever met a farmer who would admit to that, at least not publicly, but that’s a human tendency sometimes. And so I think we just have to be very careful in these programs to make sure it’s a safety net. And like Paul Ryan, you say not a hammock or like some other folks, not a springboard into the stratosphere of profitability when you really need to adjust because you won’t be able to survive without that assistance because you fail to meet the market.
Steve Ellis:
Right. You farm to the government program rather than the market. So Josh, the payment limit provisions are particularly alarming. If I’m reading this right, the bill would create a two-tiered system where someone who earns more than 75% of their income from farming could receive a payment of no less than $900,000 with the secretary having the discretion to go even higher. How does that square with the original intent of farm support programs and who ends up benefiting?
Josh Sewell:
Yeah. Well, the beneficiaries are going to be big farms, complicated farms. It’s not going to be your farmer at the farmer’s market. It’s not going to be most of the folks you think of as a farmer. And honestly, it’s not even going to be the average farmer. So this particular provision, this is a congressional response to, in part, to many years of ad hoc disaster aid being provided by Congress. And those rules, every time there’s an appropriation spill with a quote emergency supplemental that is there to help whatever it is, in this case, farming, the secretary has a lot of discretion to set the rules for that. Bear in mind that underlying payment limits for commodity programs, it’s $125,000 until last year, and they increased it substantially to $155,000. Now we have seen some in COVID and in some of the disasterated programs where you might have had specialty crop limits of 250 in a couple programs and you can double that through certain, like if you’re a corporate farm to 500, but this actually says for the specialty carpenters, which is fruits and vegetables mostly, $900,000, it’s not a payment limit, that’s the minimum payment limit.
So the secretary could set a payment limit of one million or two million. And the truth is, in specialty crops, there are some massive farms. A lot of them, not just in California, but a lot of things in California and other places, California, Florida, and Georgia, there are some very large production farms that have tens of millions of dollars of production every year, and at times, profit that level. And so that is who’s going to benefit. It’s going to be these massive corporate farms, some of them family owned, doesn’t matter. They’re still a massive corporation. It’s not who the intent is for a lot of these specialty crop programs, which is the small diversified farmer who is selling to the farmer’s market, who is selling directly to consumers, or who has a regional distribution to Whole Foods or something, or even just your local grocery store.
This is where the difference between the big guys and the majority of the small guys is just, it’s degrees of magnitude, and this is not going to help anyone but the largest producers.
Steve Ellis:
Wow. And then there’s crop insurance. The bill mandates research into a long list of new insurance products, wine grapes, mushrooms, Kamalina, wildfire smoke coverage, cold weather index policies. Josh, you know crop insurance as well as anyone. When you see the government being directed to create new products for industries that don’t currently have them, what’s the risk to the federal crop insurance program overall?
Josh Sewell:
Well, there’s a few risks. Crop insurance is already the costliest federal support for farming in a typical year. It’s about 12 to 15 billion in a good year right now. So in a bad year, it could be $20 billion in costs, maybe 25 if we have a catastrophic year right now. And so the first risk is that it just brings more … It increases the taxpayer liability, the potential costs. If it was a good program that actually reduced risk for farmers and ranchers, as well as taxpayers, like it was run as an actual insurance program, the amount of liability wouldn’t be a concern. The problem is crop insurance isn’t insurance, it’s cash assurance. So basically 60% of the premiums for most farmers are covered by taxpayers, not the farmers. There’s a lot of documentation that it actually increases risk taking. So farmers will plant in somewhere, if they couldn’t get insurance, if they had to self-insure, they wouldn’t plant a crop.
“Oh, we’re going to cover two thirds of the cost. Well, I might as well try because I won’t be out that much money. “It’s all upside for them and all downside for us. But especially now that something like 99% of corn is covered by crop insurance of some level, it is completely saturated. The Big, the commodity crops, if you want crop insurance, you’ve got it. There are places where it’s a handful of people who just don’t want the crop insurance. That’s the only people who don’t have crop insurance. So the only way to add more policies is to get into new things like crop insurance for lambs, crop insurance for sugar beet quality loss. So not even that you lose your sugar beets, it’s that you grew sugar beets that didn’t have enough sugar in them so you don’t get paid as much. And it’s like these very narrow things that there’s no public data.
There’s no futures where we can predict the cost of it where there’s a market signal. It’s all done on internal data. Some of it’s company specific data and some of it’s just faith. And so it really gets into, frankly, you’re gaming the system even more than you are now. And so you’ll see people who can just basically buy policies knowing they’re going to get a payout and then they won’t buy it in other years. Frankly, it gets kind of detailed and boring even for people like me who love crop insurance and the details, but it’s gotten to a point where you just got to say, enough is enough. We can’t create crop insurance for every single thing under the sun, including things not under the sun like mushrooms and mushroom growing medium, which is what they want to create a crop insurance policy for. So you can’t cover everything under the sun, under the moon, and under the sea.
It’s just not what crop insurance is for.
Steve Ellis:
All right, Josh, let’s talk about what’s not in the bill. No actively engaged in farming rule fix, no meaningful payment limit reform, no serious accountability provisions. TCS has been pushing these changes for years. Why do these fixes keep getting left out? And what does their absence tell us about whose interest this bill is actually serving?
Josh Sewell:
I think part of the reason these have been harder to get support on the last couple of years is because of the partisan nature of the farm bill. The farm bill is more partisan than it used to be. And the reforming of it is the inverse. It has been harder to get … When it becomes a partisan vehicle, it becomes a little more difficult to get bipartisan reforms. And so some of that is just we need to continue to work and educate people about, and legislators, especially about the shortcomings of not just the current policies, but viewing the farm bill, foreign policy, nutrition policy, education, research as a partisan issue. So that’s a big part of it. And I think the absence tells you that there’s just a lot of work for us to do. There’s a lot of work for legislators to do. And I think this is the area of this debate where I am still an optimist.
Because as this process, now that we’ve … It hasn’t concluded yet because again, the House hasn’t passed it. Senate hasn’t even started. But if this farm bill ultimately gets adopted sometime this year before this Congress ends, then that will be, in my opinion, the official death knell of the bipartisan farm bill. And the next one’s going to have to be completely different. We’re going to rethink the coalition, maybe rethink the whole composition. And maybe we won’t have omnibus farm bills. Maybe we’ll have food policy bills and we’ll have food subsidy bills, food production subsidy bills. And we’ll have to think differently as a country of how to do that. It might be better. It might not.
Steve Ellis:
We certainly talked about bifurcating the process and having the debate over SNAP nutrition programs separate from the debate over farm policy and that we might get a better result and potentially more reforms, but maybe not. But it’s hard to think that it’s going to get, considering how this has just kind of gotten worse and worse and worse over the last three decades, then we got to try something different.
Josh Sewell:
Yeah, completely agree.
Steve Ellis:
Last question, Josh. Leaving aside your skepticism of the bill maybe moving forward this year, let’s assume this package moves towards the House floor and eventually the Senate negotiations. What are the two or three things you’ll be watching most closely and what would it take to make this bill actually serve taxpayers rather than special interests? Or is that too big of an ask from this package?
Josh Sewell:
I think the couple things I’m watching the most closely would be, one, looking for those grains of bipartisan reform, not necessarily on this bill, but for the next one. See folks who are … And the flip side of that, the people we got to watch out for the next time in a bipartisan negative way. But basically the people who have some acknowledgement that this isn’t a partisan bill and it’s not a partisan interest. And I think those are coming out. But the other thing to look for is what wildcards the Senate will throw in. There’s a strong push in both the House and the Senate to do this year round E15. We talked about this liquid fuel that’s blended at 15% ethanol. They want to make it year round, the ability to sell it. That’s not included in the Farm Bill. There was actually a Democrat from Illinois brought it up.
Mr. Sorensen said, “We want to do this. ” The committee said correctly, this is not in our jurisdiction. That ethanol energy policy is part of energy and commerce committee, and so it was voted down. They all love it. Most of them on the committee love it, but they couldn’t include it under the house rules. Senate is one of those things that could potentially sneak in. So those kind of wildcards that you don’t expect that may really throw a wrench into the process is another thing to watch out for. But again, ultimately it’s really to see what the Senate, if the Senate wants to be a little more sane, they sometimes can be on whether they’re going to simply take the House bill and add more money, or are they going to look at it and say, “Let’s actually have a deliberative process here and figure out what can we do moving forward without spending a ton of money and actually in the interest of taxpayers, consumers, producers, and the users of these commodities and foods.” And so I’m looking forward to another robust debate as they like to say on these issues, but I’m also a realist, so I’m ready to do the hard work and find some new champions.
And that’s what we need more than anything, is folks who want to engage on this because it’s a fun issue. It really is. And so, but we need new lawmakers to actually engage, not just from the states that are going to get money, but from the states that are going to pay for it too.
Steve Ellis:
Exactly, exactly. Josh Sewell, Mr. Agriculture, thank you for bringing your expertise to bear on this one. As always, nobody reads the bills like TCS does.
Josh Sewell:
Thanks, Steve. I really do appreciate this.
Steve Ellis:
And there you have a podcast listeners, The Farm Bell Lives. This is the frequency, market on your dial, subscribe and share, and know this. Taxpayers for Common Sense has your back America. We read the bills, we monitor the earmarks, and we highlight the wasteful programs that poorly spend your money and shift long-term risk to taxpayers. As promised, we’ll be back with a new episode soon. I hope you’ll meet us right here to learn more.
