House Defies White House by Passing Farm Bill

The House defied the White House on Friday by passing an expensive farm bill that would spend $170 billion over 10 years, primarily to subsidize grain, soybean and cotton farmers in the Plains states and Texas.

The measure was adopted easily, 291 to 120, despite opposition from the Bush administration, which urged the House to refrain from even debating the measure at such an uncertain time.

But when final legislation emerges from Congress, it likely will reflect the wishes of the White House and Senate leaders to distribute funds to a broader group of farmers and increase funding for programs that help farmers reduce pollution from working fields, administration and Senate officials said.

The final version also may call for less spending. The $170-billion figure--which includes $73 billion in new spending over a decade--was negotiated when the government was still predicting large surpluses, officials said.

The administration criticized the substance of the bill, its price and the timing of the debate.

“Today’s economic uncertainty makes this the wrong time to lock in $170 billion in long-term spending,” the White House said in a position paper on the bill.

But supporters of the measure stressed that American farmers already have been hurt badly by slumping prices, drought, flooding and international competition, and need dependable assistance from the federal government in coming years.

“It’s time to react to a very serious situation in farm country,” said Rep. Jim Nussle (R-Iowa), chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Conditions have been so tough that Congress has sent multibillion-dollar emergency aid to farmers in each of the last four years. This year the aid was $5.5 billion.

“How do you expect farmers to survive under this kind of situation?” Nussle asked.

They also sought to justify the funding for large farming operations.

“The reason that some people get more money is they produce more,” said Rep. Larry Combest (R-Texas). “They are not hobby farmers; they are heavily at risk.”

The Senate has yet to draft its version of the farm bill, and passage this year is far from certain because of concerns about the shrinking budget surplus and the possibility that the current Senate session will adjourn early in response to the terrorist acts. The current farm bill does not expire until next October.

Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) are determined to distribute federal dollars to a broader group of farmers than the House bill would and to ensure that the neediest farmers receive funds. The Senate version would include more funding for conservation programs that help farmers pollute less, said Seth Boffeli, spokesman for the Agriculture Committee.

In the House, an effort to shift $1.9 billion a year from crop subsidies to conservation programs failed Thursday, by a vote of 226 to 200.

The Senate and administration officials believe that as written, the expansive crop subsidies in the House bill may jeopardize some of the nation’s international trade agreements.

In addition, the administration wants Congress to include measures to improve nationwide protections against pests and disease and to ensure food safety.

“We want to make sure we have systems to protect against things like foot and mouth disease,” said Agriculture Department spokesman Kevin Herglotz.

House action on the farm bill indicated that, for all the issues and political dynamics that have been scrambled by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, politics as usual continues in many corners of the Capitol.

In one respect, the new political environment made it easier to pass the bill. Critics earlier had expressed concern about the bill’s financial impact, after budget analysts predicted that its $170-billion cost over 10 years would force Congress to break its bipartisan promise to avoid tapping Social Security surpluses to pay for other programs. But in the wake of the terrorist attacks and the subsequent worsening of the economic outlook, that promise has been abandoned.