Posted by: Phillip Fraas
April 10, 2008
Topic: REPORTS ON 2008 FARM BILL STATUS--January 2008 To Enactment

After weeks of delay due to problems in finding funds to pay for increases in farm bill spending, the House of Representatives last night named conferees to the farm bill conference. The Senate had named its conferees earlier. The first meeting of the conference (which is an ad hoc committee convened to negotiate compromises on differences between the Senate and House-passed farm bills) will be this morning.

There are a total of 49 House conferees, 33 of which are members of House committees other than the Committee on Agriculture who are conferees only on limited parts of the bill that touch matters beyond the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Committee. You can view the entire list of conferees by going to the House Agriculture Committee web site, www.agriculture.house.gov.

The Senate conferees, all from the Committee on Agriculture, are Democrats Harkin (Iowa, committee chairman), Leahy (Vermont), Conrad (North Dakota), Baucus (Montana, also Chairman of the Senate Committe on Finance), Lincoln (Arkansas), and Stabenow (Michigan), and Republicans Chambliss (Georgia, ranking Republican), Lugar (Indiana), Cochran (Mississippi), Roberts (Kansas), and Grassley (Iowa).

While the problems with funding haven't been resolved, in conjunction with the naming of conferees, the House leadership, it is reported, has put forward a funding proposal (details not public yet) that would provide $5.5 billion in new farm bill spending above the budget base line. The "base line" is the amount of spending that would occur over the next five years to be covered by the new farm bill if current farm programs were just extended without any changes.

This latest proposal is $4.5 billion less than the farm bill budget contained in the "framework" put forward by the Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, Collin Peterson of Minnesota in March. This substantial reduction from $10 billion in increased spending proposed earlier might be a difficult sell for the Senate conferees who have been supportive of the $10 billion increase, but it is an amount that will be much easier to find new funding for.

With the clock ticking away--some current farm bill programs expire next Friday, April 18--the conferees will have their hands full in resolving the many differences between the House and Senate farm bills and coming up with a package that the Bush Administration will find acceptable. Look for more postings in coming days on how they are progressing.

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BRIEF UPDATE PART II--House Conferees Named, Meeting Scheduled

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