Top Democrats and Republicans are already shooting down President Obama’s plan to cut farm subsidies, dealing a blow to one of the cost-savings promises he laid out in his congressional address Tuesday night.
“We’ll have to see what specifically the president is talking about, but we just finished the farm bill last year, and I don’t think we’ll open it up,” said Rep. Collin C. Peterson, Minnesota Democrat and chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.
Likewise, the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, said the farm bill, which lasts for five years, “should not be changed midstream.”
“I believe it is premature to make any sweeping changes to the makeup of the farm safety net before we have even had the chance to implement the current farm bill,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.
The pushback came a day after Mr. Obama called for cutting subsidies to farm businesses in his address to Congress, one of a few examples of how he can save $2 trillion from the federal budget over 10 years, and as other Democratic leaders took issue with what they see as White House moves into their domain.
The president demanded that there be no explicit earmarks in the $787 billion economic stimulus package passed last week, but the same discipline is not carrying over to the regular appropriations bills.
The omnibus spending bill passed by the House Wednesday contains thousands of earmarks, requested by lawmakers of both parties. The specific items funded are almost always for programs, grants or other federal projects directed to the state or district of the lawmakers requesting them.
In his Tuesday address, Mr. Obama said new spending on health care, energy and education would be matched with cuts to “education programs that don’t work,” an end to no-bid contracts in Iraq, and an assault on waste and fraud in Medicare.
But the farm payments pledge was his most specific. “In this budget, we will … end direct payments to large agribusiness that don’t need them,” Mr. Obama said.
The ranking Republican on the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Frank D. Lucas of Oklahoma, said Mr. Obama didn’t seem to understand the agribusiness programs he was talking about.
“With the president last night calling for, in essence, what he referred to payments to big agribusiness – I’m not sure he really appreciates or understands the definition of that phrase,” Mr. Lucas said, noting that direct payments go to entities that own farms and grow crops, not conglomerates that process them. “If he’s referring to other things, then that’s not the direct payment program.”
He said Mr. Obama’s comments build on a speech earlier this month by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in which the former Iowa governor urged farmers not to rely on direct payments.
“It’s kind of ironic that the secretary and the president are talking about doing away with relatively small amounts of money compared with [the financial and automaker bailouts] that help assure us of the safest and most abundant food supply in the world,” said Mr. Lucas, who expressed his concern in a letter to Mr. Vilsack late Wednesday.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama had proposed limiting direct payments to only farms with incomes of $250,000 or less. That’s just a third of the current $750,000 farm income limit set in the 2008 farm bill.