Congressional leaders unveiled a catch-all, year-end package Tuesday night that would provide disaster aid along with stopgap funding to keep the government running through mid-March. Heavy rains from Hurricane Helene caused record flooding and damage on Sept. 28 in Asheville, North Carolina. (Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders unveiled a catch-all, year-end package Tuesday that would provide more than $100 billion in disaster aid and give lawmakers more time to wrap up overdue work on government funding, the farm bill and a handful of other issues they decided not to finish.

The disaster aid section of the package will bolster funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration and several other federal agencies to continue their ongoing response efforts following a slew of natural disasters during the last two years.

The 1,547-page package would give Congress until mid-March to complete work on the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.

It also extends the farm bill through Sept. 30, 2025. In a victory for corn growers, the bill includes a provision to allow nationwide sales of a gasoline blend that includes up to 15% ethanol throughout the year.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said during a press conference before the bill was publicly released he had hoped the year-end stopgap spending bill would simply extend current funding until next year, when the GOP will hold the House, Senate and White House.

“But a couple of intervening things have occurred. We had, as we describe them, acts of God. We had these massive hurricanes if you know, in the late fall — Helene and Milton and other disasters,” Johnson said. “We have to make sure that the Americans who were devastated by these hurricanes get the relief they need. So we are adding to this a disaster relief package and that’s critically important.”

“Also important is the devastation that is being faced by our farming community,” he said. “The agriculture sector is really struggling. They’ve had effectively three lost years and commodity prices are a bit of a mess. And you have input costs that have skyrocketed because of Bidenomics.”

Johnson defended his decision to attach the other provisions in the stopgap spending bill, also known as a continuing resolution. Numerous Republicans have expressed frustration with his choice to bundle all the bills together in one package, instead of moving them individually.

“We have to be able to help those who are in these dire straits and that’s what the volume of the pages to this is,” Johnson said.

House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, said in a written statement she would support the bill when that chamber votes on it later this week.

“While I — and so many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle — wish we were voting on full-year funding bills, I am pleased that this package includes important resources for American farmers, emergency defense investments, investments in the Virginia Class submarine program, and increased funding for child care,” DeLauro wrote. “It also includes outbound investment protections I have long fought for to prevent American dollars from fueling the Chinese Communist Party’s policies with our capital and capabilities.”

“However, I am concerned that we could not agree on additional funding for veterans health care, and we must be vigilant in ensuring that the incoming Administration does not ration care promised to every affected veteran,” DeLauro added. “The passage of this bill should mark the beginning of negotiations on final 2025 funding bills. The start of a new Congress does not change the reality that any funding bills will still need the support of Democrats and Republicans in the House and in the Senate in order to become law.”

Hurricanes, tornadoes, bridge collapse

President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve nearly $100 billion in emergency aid to bolster the accounts of several agencies that are helping residents, small businesses, farmers, and local and state governments recover from dozens of natural disasters.

The emergency supplemental request came shortly after Hurricanes Helene and Milton caused widespread devastation throughout Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

The funding will also help communities recover following tornadoes throughout the Midwest; the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland; and severe storms in Alaska, Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The disaster response section of the spending package would include:

• $29 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund

• $21 billion for disaster assistance for farmers and ranchers

• $12 billion for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grant program for disaster assistance

• $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers and ranchers

• $8 billion for the Department of Transportation to provide disaster relief for federal highways

• $3.25 billion for State and Tribal Assistance Grants for water infrastructure repairs.

• $2.2 billion for the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program

• $1.3 billion to replace the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland

Congress headed for finish line

The package is expected to pass the House and Senate before members depart for their holiday break on Friday. Biden is expected to sign the bill into law.

When Congress convenes again on Jan. 3 for the start of the 119th Congress, the Senate will flip from Democratic to Republican control. The House will remain red, though with a slightly smaller majority and very little, possibly no, room for GOP lawmakers to vote against partisan bills.

Republicans hope they can use unified control of Washington, which will begin after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, to move through sweeping changes to federal spending and policy.

That is one of the reasons, Congress included a second continuing resolution in the package released this week. That stopgap spending bill will avoid a partial government shutdown until at least March 14.

That part of the bill is necessary since Congress has brushed off its responsibility to fund the government by failing to complete work on the dozen annual appropriations bills before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1.

Lawmakers approved another stopgap spending bill in late September to keep funding levels mostly flat through Dec. 20, but did not use the extra time to negotiate a compromise between the Republican House and Democratic Senate.

GOP leaders have opted to hold over those full-year government funding measures until they control both chambers of Congress next year, in hopes they’ll be able to more closely align the final versions of the 12 bills to their goals.

But Republican leaders will still need Democratic support to get the final spending bills, or another stopgap spending bill, through the Senate next year if they want to avoid a partial government shutdown.

The Senate requires at least 60 lawmakers to vote to advance major legislation toward a final, simple majority passage vote. The GOP will hold 53 seats next year, short of the requirement. Several Republican senators have also staked their reputations on consistently voting against any spending bill, making Democratic votes necessary to avoid a shutdown.

Republicans in the House will also likely need Democrats to move government funding bills through that chamber, given they too have a significant faction of members who refuse to vote for the full-year spending bills and often vote against the short-term stopgap bills as well. 

Farm bill extension

The end-of-year catchall bill released Tuesday also includes another extension for the farm bill through next year, a new version of which Congress was supposed to pass more than a year ago.

Instead, lawmakers in both chambers have prioritized other interests, delaying work on the legislation that authorizes agriculture and nutrition programs.

Congress last approved a farm bill in December 2018, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said at the time would cost $428 billion during the five years it was supposed to cover.

Funding for nutrition, crop insurance, farm commodity programs and conservation accounted for about 99% of the mandatory spending in the law, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Nutrition has become one of the higher price tag items in the farm bill during the last few decades and accounted for about $326 billion of the mandatory spending in the 2018 farm bill. Another $38 billion went to crop insurance, $31 billion to commodities and $29 billion to conservation during the five-year window that has since lapsed.

The nutrition funding goes toward several federal food programs for lower income people, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP and the Emergency Food Assistance Program. 

The Republican House and Democratic Senate have been unable to work through their differences on a new five-year farm bill, despite giving themselves more than a year of extra time.

The bill lawmakers are set to approve this month will give unified Republicans in control of Washington another year to get the work done.

D.C. Deputy Bureau Chief Jacob Fischler contributed to this report. 

A new report from Union of Concerned Scientists pushes for wetland protections in a new Farm Bill. (Photo courtesy of USDA)

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found wetlands in the Upper Midwest region are “in peril” due to recent legal challenges and a lack of state-level regulation. The report looks to a new farm bill as a vessel to protect wetlands.

The report, authored by Stacy Woods, the research director for the Food & Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said industrial agriculture has inflicted “devastating damage” on wetlands across the country and that Iowa has more than 640,000 acres of wetland.

These wetlands, along with those in states across the Upper Midwest region, act as “natural barriers” to flooding. The report found this flood protection equates to nearly $23 billion in annual residential flood protection. Iowa’s wetlands alone could mitigate $477 million worth of flood damage to residential areas.

These estimates in the report are extrapolated from a 2022 study that found one acre of wetland was the equivalent to $745 in benefits from prevented flood damage.

The report alleges the Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “stripped” Clean Water Act protections from wetlands that are not connected to federally recognized bodies of water.

The new interpretation of the law, combined with the “absence of state-level wetland protections” in Iowa and other Upper Midwestern states makes wetlands “particularly vulnerable” to pollution or drainage, the report found.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2020, the Conservation Reserve Program had restored more than 3 million wetland acres across the country since the program started in 1985.  The same program has restored over 118,000 acres of wetland in Iowa and enrolled 66,000 acres as “buffer” in farmable wetlands, according to data collected by Environmental Working Group.

A hope for Farm Bill protections

The report looks at the Farm Bill as a place to implement wetland regulations to stop “large-scale commodity growers and corporate agribusiness interests” that “exploit wetlands for agricultural expansion.”

Farm bills in the past have established protections for wetlands, including the Conservation Reserve Program and the “swampbuster” provision that linked a landowner’s eligibility for USDA incentive programs to their preservation of wetlands.

An Iowa landowner recently sued the USDA over the provision and several groups including Iowa Environmental Council, Iowa Farmers Union, Dakota Rural Action and Food & Water Watch, sought to intervene in the lawsuit, which a federal judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa approved Tuesday.

The lawsuit alleges swampbusters created an unconstitutional condition for a farmer to receive USDA benefits, while the now-approved intervenors say without the law, there would be little to no protections for wetlands from farmers seeking to expand their croplands.

In addition to swampbuster, the report details other Farm Bill provisions that have protected wetlands, including conservation and wetland easement programs and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, which “enhance(s) wetlands” by promoting soil and water conservation.

The report calls for the next Farm Bill, which Congress has been unable to agree on and pass for more than two sessions now, to “enhance” existing conservation programs and implement new incentives that “foster soil and water health.”

These suggestions include: increasing the Conservation Reserve Program acres to 45 million acres; increasing funding for the Conservation Stewardship Program from $1 billion to $4 billion annually; expanding funding to historically underserved, disadvantaged and new farmers, and to link the Federal Crop Insurance Program to a farmer’s participation in conservation practices.

According to the report, investments from these recommendations constitute “only a fraction of the significant annual value wetlands deliver.”

“Integrating these initiatives into the next food and Farm Bill will fortify USDA programs that safeguard wetlands from industrial agriculture, ensuring these vital ecosystems thrive and continue to mitigate flooding, purify water, and support our communities and our climate,” the report said.

Groups across the country and political parties, including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, and Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin have urged Congress to reauthorize the Farm Bill, rather than extend the 2018 bill for a second time.

Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde in the 2024 Senate campaign debate | Screenshot via Youtube

Eric Hovde doesn’t know much about the Farm Bill, he told the moderators of his debate with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, whom Hovde is running to replace. Investigative reporter Dan Bice called it “the worst moment” of the only debate between Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate candidates. Baldwin immediately cut an ad highlighting Hovde’s profession of ignorance.

Hovde says he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?” he griped to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna. McKenna was sympathetic. “Every debate is rigged against Republicans,” she said. Anyway, the Farm Bill, McKenna and Hovde agreed, is just a big boondoggle. “It’s a bill about food stamps,” McKenna said contemptuously. 

“It’s all for big corporations, food stamps, everything else,” Hovde added vaguely. “And by the way, Sen. Baldwin, I bet, wouldn’t know one-tenth of what’s in the bill.”

In fact, Baldwin wrote a number of provisions of the Senate’s Farm Bill framework, including dairy business innovation grants, protections for farmers who face a sudden drop in milk prices or increase in the cost of feed, mental health supports for agricultural communities, a federal program to track foreign investment in U.S. farmland, upgrades for rural drinking water infrastructure and funding for rural hospitals, child care and economic development.

In the debate, she said she was disappointed by the delay in passing a new Farm Bill. (Congress takes up a new Farm Bill every five years. Because the House and Senate failed to agree on the 2023 bill, the 2018 bill has been extended.) But deep cuts to federal food assistance in the House version are unacceptable, she added. 

This is the sort of nerdy policy discussion that made Baldwin the first Democrat to receive the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation in 20 years. But it doesn’t make for sexy talking points in the campaign

Hovde, as Erik Gunn reports, is running a campaign fashioned in the image of former President Donald Trump, who gave Hovde his “complete and total endorsement”

His focus is on how “the American Dream is slipping away” and the country is in “decline” because of President Joe Biden’s “disastrous” stewardship of the economy and “the worst border crisis in our nation’s history.”

Unlike Baldwin, with her detailed policy proposals and long list of legislative accomplishments, Hovde is mostly running on a throw-the-bums-out mood of disaffection which appeals to Trump voters.

A lot of those voters are in rural parts of the state, where, as Hovde observed during the debate, you can see huge Trump and Hovde signs waving over farm fields along the highway

But those same areas have produced surprising margins for Baldwin, as split-ticket voters have repeatedly supported her, even as they cast their ballots for Republican presidential candidates. That’s because she regularly shows up to listen to them and gets deeply in the weeds on rural issues.

This year, like the presidential election in battleground Wisconsin, the Senate race is a tossup. No one knows how voters will weigh wonky policy proposals against outrage and showmanship. 

Nowhere is the disconnect between concrete policies and the politics of the current election more glaring than on the issue of immigration. Trump’s promised “mass deportation” would be a death blow to Wisconsin dairy farmers, removing 70% of the dairy industry’s labor force who are immigrants, mostly with no legal work authorization because Congress has not extended agricultural visas to year-round farm workers — including the people who milk the cows on Wisconsin dairies.

Baldwin has discussed that issue in public forums on the Farm Bill. But like other Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign for president, she is not pushing back that hard against the Republican “border crisis” message. In the debate she focused on the importance of stopping fentanyl from crossing the border, not the degree to which Wisconsin farmers depend on undocumented immigrant labor. 

From a campaign perspective, Democrats have apparently decided that defending the immigrants who prop up so much of the U.S. economy is a losing strategy. As with the broader issue of the economy, including low unemployment, surging job growth and a dramatic recovery from the pandemic thanks in large part to the Biden administration’s aggressive investments (which, among other feats, cut child poverty in half while the nation experienced COVID lockdowns), Democrats are not swimming against the tide. They know people feel that prices are high and things aren’t going their way, and they don’t want to sound callous or out of tune by saying the economy is actually in good shape.

It’s up to voters to make up their own minds. As the Republicans say, are you better off than you were four years ago? Another question we’ll all have to answer: Do you think government policies like the Farm Bill can make things better or are you ready to throw a rock at the system and see what happens? The answer to that question will determine which radically different path we take in the future.

A farmer stores grain near Eldridge, Iowa, on Sept. 28, 2024. (Kathie Obradovich | Iowa Capital Dispatch)

WASHINGTON — Sweeping legislation that would set food and farm policy for the next five years is in limbo, waiting for lawmakers to decide its fate after the election.

The latest deadline for the farm bill passed unceremoniously at midnight on Sept. 30, without a push from lawmakers to pass a new farm bill or an extension.

Congress will have to scramble in the lame-duck session set to begin Nov. 12 to come up with some agreement on the farm bill before benefits run out at the end of the year — which if allowed to happen eventually would have major consequences.

The law began 90 years ago with various payments to support farmers but now has an impact far beyond the farm, with programs to create wildlife habitat, address climate change and provide the nation’s largest federal nutrition program.

Ag coalition in disarray

The omnibus farm bill is more than a year behind schedule, as the bipartisan congressional coalition that has advanced farm bills for the last half century has been teetering on the edge of collapse.

Congress must approve a new federal farm bill every five years. The previous farm bill from 2018 expired a year ago. With no agreement in sight at the time, lawmakers extended the law to Sept. 30, 2024.

The delay creates further uncertainty for farmers, who are facing declining prices for many crops and rising costs for fertilizer and other inputs.

Lawmakers have some buffer before Americans feel the consequences of the expiration.

Most of the key programs have funding through the end of the calendar year, but once a new crop year comes into place in January, they would revert to “permanent law,” sending crop supports back to policy from the 1938 and 1949 farm bills.

Those policies are inconsistent with modern farming practices and international trade agreements and could cost the federal government billions, according to a recent analysis from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.

‘Groundhog Day’ cited by Vilsack

The stalemate between Democrats and Republicans over the farm bill has centered on how to pay for it and whether to place limits on nutrition and climate programs.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters in a press call on Saturday that the process “feels like Groundhog Day” — because he keeps having the same conversations about it. Vilsack said Republicans “just don’t have the votes” on the floor for legislation passed in the House Agriculture Committee, which is why it has sat dormant in the House for four months.

“If they want to pass the farm bill they’ve got to get practical, and they either have to lower their expectations or raise resources. And if they’re going to raise resources, they have to do it in a way where they don’t lose votes, where they actually gain votes,” Vilsack, a former Iowa governor, said.

The Republican-led committee approved its farm bill proposal largely on party lines at the end of May, amidst complaints from Democrats that the process had not been as bipartisan as in years past.

Partisan division is not uncommon in today’s Congress but is notable on the farm bill, which historically brought together lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. Bipartisan support can be necessary for final passage because the size of the $1.5 trillion farm bill means it inevitably loses some votes from fiscal conservatives and others.

Shutdown threat  

Lawmakers are on borrowed time with both the farm bill and the appropriations bills that fund the federal government.

The House and Senate both approved stopgap spending bills at the end of September to avoid a partial government shutdown. The short-term funding bill, sometimes referred to as a continuing resolution, or CR, will keep the federal government running through Dec. 20.

Some agriculture leaders had asked for the continuing resolution to not extend the farm bill, to help push the deadline for them to work on it when they return.

The day after they approved the CR and left the Capitol, 140 Republican House members sent a letter to congressional leadership asking to make the farm bill a priority in the waning weeks of 2024.

“Farmers and ranchers do not have the luxury of waiting until next Congress for the enactment of an effective farm bill,” the letter states, noting rising production costs and falling commodity prices that have put farmers in a tight spot.

House Democrats also say they want to pass a new farm bill this year.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, listed the farm bill as one of his top three priorities for the lame duck. Also on his list were appropriations and the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policy for the Pentagon.

“It will be important to see if we can find a path forward and reauthorize the farm bill in order to make sure that we can meet the needs of farmers, meet the needs from a nutritional standpoint of everyday Americans and also continue the progress we have been able to make in terms of combating climate crisis,” Jeffries said in remarks to reporters Sept. 25.

Nearly 300 members of the National Farmers Union visited lawmakers in September to ask for passage of a new five-year farm bill before the end of 2024.

“Family farmers and ranchers can’t wait – they need the certainty of a new farm bill this year,” National Farmers Union President Rob Larew said in a statement after the meetings. “With net farm income projected at historic lows, growing concentration in the agriculture sector, high input costs and interest rates, and more frequent and devastating natural disasters, Congress can’t miss this opportunity to pass a five-year farm bill.”

Disagreements over SNAP formula

The key dispute for Democrats this year is a funding calculation that would place limits on the “Thrifty Food Plan” formula that calculates benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP.

It would keep SNAP payments at current levels but place a permanent freeze on the ability of future presidents to raise levels of food support. Democrats have characterized it as a sneaky cut to vital support for hungry Americans that makes the bill dead on arrival.

Republicans are using the limits as part of a funding calculation to offset other spending in the bill. The bill would raise price supports for some crops like cotton, peanuts and rice.

“They have to do one of two things,” Vilsack said of lawmakers. “They either have to recognize that they can’t afford all the things that they would like to be able to afford, if they want to stay within the resources that are in fact available … Or another alternative would be to find more money.”

Vilsack recommended finding other sources of funding outside the farm bill, like changes to the tax code.

“You close a loophole here or there in terms of the taxes or whatever, and you generate more revenue, and you have that revenue directly offset the increase in the farm bill. … That’s the correct way to do it. And that’s, frankly, the way Senator Stabenow is approaching the farm bill,” Vilsack said, referring to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich).

The Senate Agriculture Committee has had no public markup or formal introduction of a bill. But leaders say committee staff have been meeting weekly to discuss a path forward. Stabenow has not publicly disclosed the offsets for the money she says is available to be moved into the bill.