The Farm Bill and the shameless lies about it
The Farm Bill and the shameless lies about it
I will write plenty more after I have studied what happened yesterday and today, and have had a look at what actually got passed.
Been travelling and really tired. So I will be excessively brief, and promise to study up on it and provide a more comprehensive view soon. None of the media have yet put it all together.
-
There has only been a Farm Bill introduced in the House, which passed today with amendments. There is none that has been introduced in the Senate. The controversial provisions (many) in the House bill led it to be a weathervane for the Senate of what might be able to be passed. The Senate will require 60 votes for passage, while the House only needed a majority. I don’t know why that is, yet. The House bill as passed today is extremely unlikely to get 60 Senate votes.
-
The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) contained most of the spending that is usually included in the 5-yearly Farm Bill. So this year’s Farm Bill, while still very long and complicated, was truncated/superceded by the OBBB and thus contained only a part of the total farm funding and nutrition benefits funding.
-
The passages that gave the pesticide industry a liability shield were stripped out with an amendment by Anna Paulina Luna, but many bad EPA-pesticide provisions remain that give pesticides special treatment.
-
This Farm Bill involves 5 years of spending. So when you read that $60 billion was given to farmers, divide that by 5 years to get an idea of how much extra farmers are getting.
-
Similarly, when you read that $180 billion was stripped from food stamps (SNAP) benefits, divide it by 5 years. Some of you may recall I did a deep dive into the food benefit programs of the federal government 13 months ago, and I will be discussing the SNAP reductions in light of what I learned and wrote last year, once I have gotten some sleep. RFK implied to Congress that the reduction was to inflation and expansion of the program and not stripping baseline benefits. I will try to parse this for you asap.
-
The lies that Mike Simpson told last year about how this was absolutely not a liability shield, just a way to standardize the labels—well, they were repeated by other members last night. This in-your-face lying by members ought to get their constituents to fire them. We must make a big stink about this, I think. We cannot allow our elected reps to spit in our faces without being called out. Here the NYT documents it:
