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House and Senate negotiators made cuts to crop subsidies and conservation spending in their framework for the farm bill yesterday, in response to harsh criticism of the bill from the White House.
The leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees and other key negotiators met in closed-door sessions to revisit their framework for the farm bill and work on a plan to cut off farm subsidies for wealthy landowners. The lawmakers are trying to overcome a Bush administration veto threat lurking over the measure.
"We basically worked everything out, and everything is going to take a further reduction," House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said after the meeting.
Peterson and Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) plan to discuss the agreement with other farm bill conferees this morning and declined to offer details of the plan last night.
The work on the bill yesterday came as President Bush blasted it as a "massive, bloated" measure that would do little to solve the problem of rising food prices. In remarks in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, Bush called on Congress to reduce subsidies and eliminate payments to "multimillionaire farmers."
Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer told reporters yesterday that Bush would veto the bill unless lawmakers could resolve several issues to the administration's satisfaction. The White House still objects to its spending levels, funding sources and reforms, Schafer said in remarks at an Agriculture Department conference.
Schafer and Deputy Secretary Chuck Conner came to the Capitol yesterday to meet with lawmakers and voice their concerns about the bill. Lawmakers said that Schafer laid out the list of policy changes and reforms the administration included in its "parameters of a successful farm bill" sent to Congress in February. That list included requests to get rid of a sugar-to-ethanol program and lower the income limits for farm subsidy recipients.
The House-Senate negotiators said they are trying to respond to the administration's concerns. But Schafer and Conner were not there at the close of the negotiations and have not signed off on any of the agreements made among lawmakers.
"We hope the White House doesn't think they get 100 percent of what they want, that would be irrational, just like we don't get 100 percent of what we want," said Harkin. "We have come further toward the White House than they came toward us."
'A farm bill you can sign'
Senate Republicans are hoping they can change Bush's tune on the farm bill. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) has requested a meeting with the president for a group of Senate Republicans to plead their case.
Chambliss' message? "We've got a farm bill you can sign," he said.
Chambliss requested the meeting on behalf of four other GOP Agriculture Committee members: Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Pat Roberts of Kansas and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. All are on the conference committee except for Coleman, a freshman senator up for re-election, who wants to take the farm bill back to his home state.
Their hope is that a face-to-face meeting with Bush might sway him to support the bill.
"I like the guy," Chambliss said of the president. "We need for him to understand that this is good policy. They've got some questions that we need to answer."
'Reductions of significance'
Lawmakers hunkered down in closed-door sessions yesterday for much of the day and into the evening.
At issue in the negotiations were overall spending levels and income limits for crop subsidy recipients. Late last week, lawmakers agreed to a framework for the farm bill that includes $10 billion in extra spending over 10 years. But the Bush administration has complained that with funding shifts and other changes to the bill, the total spending would be closer to $18.5 billion over the 10-year baseline.
Negotiators yesterday worked to scale down overall spending on the bill. The lawmakers said they went through all of the commodity and conservation programs to look for savings. "We made reductions of significance in both titles," said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.).
The biggest hurdle for negotiators has been income limits for crop subsidy recipients -- the chief area of reform the White House has insisted on.
The framework lawmakers agreed to last week would have lowered the cap for people who make most of their income outside the farm, but they had no limitation for on-farm income. The Bush administration wants lawmakers to place some limit on farmers.
The White House proposed barring anyone who makes more than $200,000 per year from farm supports, and USDA officials have said they would accept a $500,000 level.
The Senate's version of the farm bill, approved in December, had no income caps for farmers. The House bill would cut off payments for farmers whose adjusted gross income is more than $1 million. Both the House and Senate bills had lower limits for landowners who make more than half of their annual income from sources outside the farm.
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