As Congress feuds over farm bill, growers are ‘stuck in limbo’

WASHINGTON — Congress is feuding over a new farm bill, making lawmakers likely to punt the matter for another year and leave American farmers and families on food assistance without an update to the legislation that controls how much federal support they receive.

Republicans and Democrats agree it is time for an updated bill. The last one was written in 2018 and expired two years ago, meaning American farmers are trying to run their businesses based on 6-year-old policy.

But the two parties cannot get past a core dispute over how to pay for it. Republicans want to cut nutrition assistance for the poor to pay for bolstered financial support for farmers, while Democrats refuse to reduce food support for low-income people. The disagreement is likely to only deepen next year, with President-elect Donald Trump in the White House and Republicans in total control of Congress.

“A lot has changed in our world since 2018 and the last farm bill,” said Robert Guenther, a former House Agriculture Committee aide and an agriculture policy expert who represents tomato growers in Florida. “We’re kind of stuck in limbo with old policy that needs to be modernized and reinvigorated.”

Underneath the policy fight also lies a political subplot. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., the chair of the Agriculture Committee who has been her party’s leading voice on the issue for more than a decade, will retire in January.

With her legacy on the line, Stabenow has refused to sign off on any deal that involves taking money from the main federal food support mechanism for the poor, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, even as she concedes that Republicans are likely to force through such a change once she is gone.

“I’m not going to do it just so they don’t; I am going to continue to do what I think is right,” Stabenow told reporters last week, speaking about Republicans. “They’re not doing it on my watch. They will be responsible for it if they do it.”

As the dispute drags on, Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, is preparing to introduce a simple one-year extension of the existing bill that would not update subsidies or food support, effectively postponing the fight.

He conceded that failing to overhaul farm policy in the waning days of the current Congress could have harmful consequences for farmers, given that they would have to compete for time and resources next year with all the legislative priorities of the Trump administration.

“There’s going to be a lot of competition,” Thompson said, adding that it would be “a service for President Trump” to get a “good, conservative farm bill done now.”

The bill, a package of several hundred pages that Congress typically passes every five years, provides a federal safety net to farmers affected by unexpected weather or tariffs and to low-income Americans struggling to feed themselves and their families. The measure often requires lengthy bipartisan negotiations between House and Senate Agriculture Committee leaders to get over the finish line.

This year, though, with a presidential election hanging over everything and the two parties dug into their positions, compromise was impossible. Republicans and Democrats blame each other for stalling progress, and Republicans fault Stabenow and her staff in particular for holding up the negotiations by waiting until after the election to officially release their proposal. Democrats, on the other hand, say Republicans are negotiating in bad faith and moving the goalposts.

Since farm bill talks began two years ago, Republicans have repeatedly said they want to “put more farm in the farm bill” by funneling more dollars into price supports and crop insurance. About 80% of farm bill spending goes toward SNAP, which helps feed more than 42 million Americans. That proportion has grown significantly since a nutrition title was first added to the farm bill in 1973.

“It’s all being centered around nutrition,” said Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., the ranking member of the Agriculture Committee. “Surely, we can find a few dollars for farmers.”

Agriculture lobbying groups are sounding the alarm as well, saying their producers cannot wait for an update to the programs they rely on.

“Wheat growers need a long-term farm bill passed before the end of this year, period,” Chandler Goule, the CEO of the National Association of Wheat Growers, said in a statement provided by a spokesperson. “The 119th Congress will have a busy schedule at the start of 2025, and the farmers can’t afford for the farm bill process to be dragged out even longer.”

The House version of the bill would increase “reference prices” — the floor below which market prices must fall to prompt subsidy payments to farmers — by 10% to 20%. That measure, backed primarily by Republicans, places particular emphasis on a few Southern crops like rice, peanuts and wheat. The version from Stabenow limits those hikes to 5% across the board.

To pay for those increases, Republicans want to roll back SNAP funding and bar future administrations from unilaterally expanding benefit levels.

The proposal is an effort to prevent what happened in 2021, when the Biden administration put in place the largest permanent increase in the program’s history. It did so by updating the Thrifty Food Plan, a list of two dozen food groups the government has used since 1962 to estimate the cost of an economical and nutritious diet, to bring it more in line with how Americans eat today. As a result, SNAP benefits increased by an average of 25%, which Democrats and anti-hunger advocates said was long overdue.

The Republican bill would bar any such updates unless they were cost-free. Although Republicans argue that their bill would not cut any family’s existing benefits, Democrats point to a Congressional Budget Office estimate that shows their plan would ax nearly $30 billion in projected future spending toward the program.

“Even a modest reduction in SNAP benefits has a multiplier effect on demand at food banks that we simply don’t have the resources to meet,” said Vince Hall, the chief government relations officer at the nonprofit food bank network Feeding America.

Many SNAP recipients still rely on charitable food assistance because their benefits do not cover their full monthly food needs, Hall said.

“It really is a shame that Congress can’t work together to get this done,” said Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., a member of the Agriculture Committee.

“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” she added. “I would say there was some feet-dragging waiting for the election.”

On the other hand, Craig said she would prefer to extend the 2018 bill and wait another year to “get it right” rather than settle for Republicans’ proposed SNAP cuts, which have faced resistance even from some members of the party.

“If House Republicans had the votes for their bill, it would have already been to the House floor,” Craig said. “And it hasn’t.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.