WASHINGTON - A House plan to make major cuts to food stamps would be scaled back under a bipartisan agreement on a major farm bill, a near end to a more than two-year fight that has threatened to hurt rural lawmakers in an election year.
The legislation, billed as saving $24 billion through food-stamp cuts and the end of a direct-payment program for farmers, was announced Monday by the House and Senate Agriculture committees. It preserves food-stamp benefits for most Americans who receive them and continues generous subsidies for farmers. The House is expected to vote on the bill Wednesday, with the Senate following shortly after.
The compromise was expected to cut food stamps by about $800 million a year, or about 1 percent. The House in September passed legislation cutting 5 percent from the $80 billion-a-year program. The House bill also would have allowed states to implement broad new work requirements for food-stamp recipients. That has been scaled back to a test program in 10 states.
The Democratic-led Senate had twice passed a bill with only $400 million in annual food stamp cuts and had signaled it would not go much higher. The White House had higher. The White House had threatened to veto the House level of food stamp cuts.
The final bill released Monday would cost nearly $100 billion a year over five years, with a cut of about $2.3 billion a year overall from current spending. Committee aides said they were still waiting for final numbers from the Congressional Budget Office to assess exactly how much the bill would cost.
Republican House leaders said they would support the deal. After wavering for several years, the GOP leaders were seeking to put the long-stalled bill behind them and build on the success of a bipartisan budget passed earlier this month. Leaders in both parties also were hoping to bolster rural candidates in this year’s midterm elections.
Still unclear, though, was how Republicans would get the votes they needed to pass the final bill on the House floor. The full House rejected an earlier version of the farm bill in June after conservative Republicans said cuts to food stamps weren’t high enough - and that bill had more than two times the cuts than those in the compromise bill announced Monday.
Almost half of all food-stamp redemptions are in big-box supercenters like Wal-Mart, while most of the rest are in chains such as Safeway, according to data collected by Bloomberg.
The farm bill would also forbid food stamps for lottery winners, an idea supported in both chambers, and restrict aid for college students. Not included was a Republican plan to tighten state eligibility requirements, a projected savings of $11.6 billion, or a $19 billion reduction by reducing waivers states can give childless adults who would otherwise face work requirements or time limits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the technical name for food stamps.
Negotiators agreed to tighten a provision that let states give residents as little as $1 a year in heating assistance to qualify them for an average of $1,080 in additional nutrition aid.
Republicans successfully sought to lift the “heat and eat” threshold to $20, while Democrats proposed $10. The higher level creates about $8.5 billion in savings, with about $500 million plowed into other food-stamp-related initiatives, said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.
Food stamps used at retailers such as Target and Supervalu cost a record $76.1 billion in fiscal 2013, or about 12 percent of the $650 billion a year Americans spend on groceries. About 47.4 million Americans used the program in October, the most recent month available, the U.S. Agriculture Department said Jan. 10.
Some of those conservatives were certain to oppose the lower cuts to food stamps, along with many of the farm subsidies the bill offered.
While many liberal Democrats were expected to vote against the legislation, saying the food stamp cuts were too high, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and his Senate counterpart, Stabenow, have attempted a balanced bill to attract votes from the more moderate wings of both parties. They have touted the bill’s overall savings and the elimination of a $5 billion-a-year farm subsidy called direct payments, which are now paid to farmers whether they farm or not.
The bill would continue to heavily subsidize major crops - corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton - while shifting many of those subsidies toward more politically defensible insurance programs. That means farmers would have to incur losses before they received a payout.
While those subsidies may be easier to defend, they may not cost less money. Subsidies for cotton and rice would be higher, and more money would be directed to the national crop insurance program.
The bill also would overhaul dairy policy and create a new insurance program for dairy farmers. The proposed program would do away with current price supports and allow farmers to purchase a new kind of insurance that pays out when the gap between the price they receive for milk and their feed costs narrows.
But the new dairy program would not include a so-called stabilization program that would have dictated production cuts when oversupply drives down prices. The idea was to break the cycle in which milk prices drop and farmers produce more to pay their bills,flooding the market and forcing prices down further. But House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, strongly opposed the stabilization idea, calling it “Soviet-style.”
Boehner said Monday that he had hoped changes in the bill would go further, but “the status quo is simply unacceptable.”
The legislation is “worthy of the House’s support” Boehner said.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said he would support the bill, while blaming the Senate for not accepting the House’s attempted changes to the food stamp program. Still, he said, the legislation would “extend these important agriculture programs, achieve deficit reduction, and help give many Americans an opportunity to achieve independence and get back to work.”
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. said the compromise “will reduce the deficit and cut waste and fraud, all while protecting hungry children and families.”
Despite the congressional inertia and the short timeline, there were early signs Monday some lawmakers and groups would work to build opposition.
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., a longtime proponent of food stamps, said the cuts were too high. He said he would vote against the bill and would encourage his colleagues to do the same.
“They are trying to ram this thing through before anyone has a chance to read it,” he said.
A coalition of powerful meat and poultry groups, generally strong supporters of the legislation, said Monday they would work against the bill after the heads of the agriculture panels did not include language to delay a labeling program that requires retailers to list the country of origin of meat.
Companies including Tyson Foods Inc. have asked that country-of-origin labeling, a part of farm bills since 2002, be weakened after complaints about the labeling from Mexico and Canada before the World Trade Organization. Last year the USDA tightened the rules, eliminating the ability for companies to merely say the beef was from North America and requiring separate disclosures to say where beef, lamb, pork, chicken and goat were born, raised and slaughtered.
Information for this article was contributed by Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press and by Alan Bjerga of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/28/2014