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Without agreement, lawmakers look to extend farm bill until April 18 |
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The House and Senate are expected to pass another one month extension of the current farm bill, as negotiators continue to try to hammer out an agreement on new legislation.
Farm bill negotiators have been working against the clock to reach agreement on funding and parameters before the farm bill extension expires this Friday. But with no agreement in sight, the chairmen of the House and Senate Agriculture committees said last night they would seek another short-term extension until April 18
The House is expected to include the extension on its suspension calendar before the end of the week, and the Senate will likely pass it by unanimous consent, Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said yesterday.
The rewrite of the five-year bill overseeing farm, conservation, energy and nutrition programs has been gridlocked, as the House and Senate try to trim down the reauthorizations they each passed last year and find offsets for new spending.
The two chambers and the Bush administration reached a tentative agreement to work toward a bill that would spend $10 billion over the current bill's baseline for the next 10 years -- significantly less than the House or Senate had included in their bills. But Democrats and the White House have yet to reach agreement on the scope of those cuts and the revenue-raisers that will offset the new funding.
The leaders of the Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee have been trying to find offsets for the bill that the Bush administration could accept. Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), one of the key negotiators, said yesterday the work on financing has hit a "lull."
"Our biggest problem is we don't know where the money is coming from, but we can't control that," House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said yesterday.
Harkin and Peterson said they hope to iron out all the numbers by the end of the week, but leaders of the tax panel said that deadline is unlikely.
"It won't be worked out by Friday," Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said in an interview yesterday. "I hope so, but I don't think so."
'We have some ideas'
Meanwhile, Agriculture Committee negotiators have not yet figured out how to squeeze their proposals into the $10 billion-over-baseline figure. Democrats from the House and Senate side said they are within sight of their goal, but still need to find another $3 billion to $4 billion in cuts.
"This is not insurmountable," Harkin said. "We have some ideas, we can cut here, cut here, and do a little more."
Peterson said negotiators had a spirited debate yesterday about limits for how much large farms can receive in federal subsidies. Most other farm programs are still on the table, the chairman said, as they look for new cuts. At least part of the $10 billion will go toward a new disaster program, according to Harkin and Peterson.
As negotiators crunch numbers, they face the prospect that the entire baseline could be thrown out of whack by new scores from the Congressional Budget Office. The new scores could throw the committee for a loop, essentially giving them less money, according to House aides.
The chambers have based their calculations on the March 2007 scores for the bill, but CBO issues new scores for ongoing legislation each March. The House pay-as-you-go rules require lawmakers to use the new numbers, though Senate rules allow them to rely on the numbers they have been working with.
House and Senate aides said they are still basing their work on the 2007 numbers and hope they can find a way to make them acceptable in the House rules. Peterson said yesterday that the issue is "still up in the air."
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 13 March 2008 )
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