Failure to Enact a New Farm Bill Renews "Can't Do Caucus" Membership for Iowans in Congress
2018 Farm Bill expired two years ago, but a new one continues to gather dust on Capitol Hill
If anyone doubts that the US House of Representatives is now in the hands of a majority that is utterly unable to govern, look no further than the Farm Bill - must pass legislation for farm states like Iowa - a bill which continues to gather dust in Congress.
The five year 2018 Farm Bill expired in 2023. It was supposed to have been updated and re-written that year. Yet the Republican controlled US Congress couldn’t get it done. The best it could do was kick the can down the road with a promise to “get right on it” when they returned in early 2024 for the second session of the 118th Congress.
The new year arrived - right on time - but Congress never got around to re-writing or updating the nation’s basic farm and food nutrition programs in 2024 either.
Now another year has come and gone.
Congress just wrapped up its work for 2024 and along with it, the work of the 118th Congress. Yet, a new Farm Bill is still gathering dust. It never made it to the House or Senate floor for consideration, debate, or a final vote. If nothing changes by early next year - and there is little reason to think anything will change for the better by early next year - farmers will head to the fields in 2025 with a basic federal farm program that hasn’t been updated in seven years.
I’m reminded of that old Daily News headline back in the 1975 when then-President Gerald Ford denied New York City the federal assistance it needed to avoid bankruptcy. “Ford to City: Drop Dead” was the Daily News headline over its coverage of the story.
NOTE: In fairness, Ford never actually said those words, “Drop Dead” but they did sum up the essence of and bottom line of his speech in which he announced his opposition to federal help to New York City to surmount its financial crisis.
Similarly, Congress has never actually used such blunt language to tell America’s farmers that it is uninterested in their needs or problems - but how else do you describe it when the all important five year Farm Bill - which is essential for farmers to plan their farming operations this year and beyond, is in its seventh year and Congress still hasn’t gotten around to updating it?
It’s not like nothing has changed since 2018 for farmers.
The federal farm program needs updating but it was forced to hobble along on a simple one year extension last year and needed another one year extension to make it through next year. All the while wrapped in promises that Congress would get right on it and enact a new updated one.
It never did.
It’s also not like farm country isn’t facing new challenges.
In July, a panel of witnesses told a House Agriculture Committee hearing of the “dire outlook” facing agriculture. “Plummeting crop prices, escalating input costs, worsening credit conditions, and sustained natural disasters are creating a “perfect storm” of headwinds for farm country, is how House Ag Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson (R 5th PA) summarized the testimony.
Sounds like conditions that absolutely cry out for Congress to dawdle some more, right?Clearly with all that mayhem barreling down the road at farmers the thing to do is not pass a new Farm Bill in 2024 - which they promised they would pass in 2023, but didn’t; promised they would pass in. 2024, but didn’t - and punt it to 2025, right?
I mean, what’s the rush?
The House Agriculture Committee completed its work on a new Farm Bill in May of 2024. But no one on the committee - not its chairman, nor the two Iowans who serve on the committee, Reps. Zach Nunn (R- 3rd IA) and Randy Feenstra (R-4th IA), were ever able to convince Republican House leaders to schedule it for debate and a vote on the House floor.
The hold up all along has been over the issue of how to pay for it. Times are tough, you see, when you are planning more big tax breaks for billionaires. In other words, Republican ideology got in the way, and pennies must be pinched to pay for the next round of big tax breaks first.
Anyone who thinks that unelected “Acting President Elon Musk” is going to make finding a way to “pay for” the Farm Bill any easier as he promises to cut $2 trillion - nearly a third of all federal spending in the Fiscal Year that ended on September 30, 2024 - from the federal government needs to think again.
Clearly the best time to pass a reasonable Farm Bill was now. That time has now passed.
More giant tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk and his acolyte Donald Trump are more worthy, as they see it. Farmers clearly didn’t anticipate this when many of them voted, including those in Iowa, but they are likely to be among the ones paying for the tax cut boondoggle for billionaires when the time comes.
Which brings me to my next point: The way the Farm Bill has been kicked down the road time after time has resulted in an anti-democracy circumstance where whatever is enacted by the next Congress - assuming something eventually is - will be a Farm Bill uninformed by any, apparently, inconvenient actual vetting and public debate in an election campaign by candidates and actual voters.
The 2024 campaign was pretty much devoid of any serious discussion about a new Farm Bill. That’s because Republicans were still advancing the fiction that they’d get around to it before this Congress ended.
They did not get around to it.
So now a new Congress will convene in January, composed of members many of whom won their seats in Congress without so much as even once saying the words “Farm Bill” in their campaigns. There was little to no debate, no discussion, no vetting of ideas, no talk about needed updates.
Which leaves the field wide open for people like Elon Musk who is used to doing things without consulting anyone else about anything.
Iowa’s congressional delegation is far from innocent in all of this.
Both Iowa US Senators - Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) - are members of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
As noted earlier, two Iowans - Reps Nach Nunn (R-3rd IA) and Randy Feenstra (R-4th IA) serve on the House Agriculture Committee. The other two members of the Iowa delegation talk a lot about the importance of agriculture to Iowa’s economy.
But what did any of them do that was effective in getting the Farm Bill considered, debated and enacted by Congress? Clearly not enough. The result speaks for itself.
They all had a responsibility to do all in their power to advance the Farm Bill to its promised enactment. Not urge its enactment. Get. It. Done. That is what they promised at the close o 2023. It was their responsibility to Iowa and to agriculture to keep that promise: Get. It. Done.
Perhaps they did do all that was within their power, but if they did, it was clearly lacking something - voltage, persuasiveness, persistence, know-how, certainly effectiveness.
How many years do they think to have to fail at this basic task of convincing their chamber to even vote on a new Farm Bill that is already two years overdue? All while farmers wait in the limbo of a series of single year extensions of a federal farm program that is getting seriously out of date.
Simply put, the failure to enact a new Farm Bill is part of the dysfunction of the Republicans who control the House of Representatives. They apparently think they have more important things to work on than getting a Farm Bill passed. Two years late.
Even the Iowans in Congress, who have been unable or unwilling to change that mind set. Of course, they’ve all got their excuses. But they all also had a responsibility to get a new Farm Bill across the finish line before Congress adjourned. They failed.
People elect members of the U.S. House and Senate to make policy. They do not elect their members of the House and Senate to make excuses. Yet that’s what Iowans are getting from its congressional delegation on their failure to get the Farm Bill work done and onto the president’s desk for his signature.
When former President Lyndon Johnson was a member of the US House of Representatives (1937 -1949) he had special cards made up that he presented to staffers who failed to get some task or project done at all, on time, or right. The card certified that the staffer was a member of the “Cain’t Do Caucus” (“Cain’t” apparently was how folks in the part of Texas Hill Country that LBJ came from pronounced the word “can’t.”) The idea was that the “membership” card might spur them to do better next time. Accumulate too many of those cards, and the staffer soon found himself or herself out of a job.
Apparently it worked often enough that even then LBJ had a reputation as a Member of Congress who, with his staff, got things done.
Iowa’s congressional delegation failed at what was arguably its most important priorty in the 118th Congress: convince Congress to enact a new Farm Bill - two years after the old one expired. This should have been a slam-dunk, a no brainer. But they failed.
Iowa congressional delegation: Here’s your card, re-punched for another year of membership in the “Can’t Do Caucus.”
Do better Iowa delegation. And see that you don’t collect too many more of these “Can’t Do Caucus” cards.
As a constituent in Iowa’s 4th district, all I have seen from representative Feenstra this year about the farm bill is his whining that the Senate failed to do anything. No mention that the House as a whole failed to act. Yet he joins with other Iowa U.S. representatives on visits to ag related companies back home bragging how he is so “good for agriculture.”
Thank you for keeping this issue in view.
We need the farm bill. However, are the folks in the rural red districts getting what they voted for? They bought the lie, and now they own it.
I was reading Vilsack's letter to the Agriculture Department yesterday. I realized that President Musk won't understand the vital role of these agencies, and our country will be worse off as a result. The next Congress promises to be even worse.
Are we ready for a 91-year-old President Grassley? He automatically becomes president as President Pro Tem if they don't have a Speaker on the 20th.