New Farm Bill, Same Subsidy Schemes

Feb 12, 2014 | 3 min read | Print Article

Taxpayers, meet your new farm bill, same as the old farm bill.

Despite claims by the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, the notion that the recently signed $956 billion farm bill (H.R. 2642) is a reform bill crumbles under scrutiny. In addition to its paltry $16.6 billion in speculative savings that is likely to never be realized, the bill comes nowhere near to achieving Sen. Stabenow’s claimed “about 100 different authorizations and programs we eliminated.” Many current farm bill programs are simply being consolidated into existing, or newly created, programs. Other expensive government programs, like direct payments and the myriad dairy subsidies, are eliminated with one hand and replaced with costly new government programs by the other.

When you finally sift through the thousands upon thousands of words in this bill you see that for all the reform bluster there is very little bite taken out of our nation’s bloated spending on parochial agriculture programs. Even when the Committee’s did terminate a program, or more often revoke an authorization, the majority of these were programs or studies that were not very costly, never initiated, or will save no money by having their authorization revoked.

The Committees have tidied up their legislative room a bit, but they’ve done nothing to put our fiscal house in order. In fact by creating three new shallow loss income entitlement programs, burdening the federally subsidized crop insurance program with parochial carveouts for everything from poultry to peanuts, and failing to repeal outdated subsidies, this farm bill actually makes things worse.

Taxpayers deserve a more transparent, cost-effective, accountable, and responsive agricultural safety net. The 2014 farm bill is a step in the wrong direction.

Download: Farm Bill Terminations (Excel)

A summary of Taxpayers for Common Sense’s analysis of claimed terminations in the 2014 farm bill:

5 large subsidy programs are repealed and replaced with 5 large subsidy programs projected to cost at least $32 billion
10 programs are consolidated yet the basic functions continue
Of the 31 clear terminations, 16 are in the Research title and simply revoke “studies” or programs that were never initiated, had minimal costs, or will save negligible, if any, dollars by being terminated.

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