House Farm Bill Includes Gaping Hole: Food Stamps

WASHINGTONThe U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a five-year farm bill, but lawmakers omitted spending for food stamps.

The more than 600 pages of legislation, which narrowly passed by a vote of 216 to 208, only encompasses about 20% of traditional farm bill spending since it left out funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Debate over the nutrition piece of the legislation may have been too contentious in order to get a bill passed through the House, which rejected a farm bill last month that would have stripped about $21 billion from the food-stamp program.

The House legislation as not a real Farm Bill and an insult to rural America", Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat, said in a statement.

We will go to conference with the bipartisan, comprehensive Farm Bill that was passed in the Senate that not only reforms programs, supports families in need and creates agriculture jobs, but also saves billions more than the extremely flawed House bill," said Stabenow, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Lawmakers can address SNAP through the appropriations process, Stabenows counterpart in the House, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), pointed out on the floor of his chamber before the vote.

No one ever went without a benefit they qualified for," he said. 

Agricultural interests weren't pleased with the bill. Pam Johnson, president of the National Corn Growers Association, griped that the legislation "is now stuck in a morass of petty bickering and political gamesmanship."

"We do not believe that the link between farm programs and nutrition programs should be severed," she said in a statement. "We see benefits beyond the political in keeping the ties between those who produce food and those who need it."

If Congress fails to pass a new farm bill before the current one expires at the end of September, farmers would operate under a 1949 law.

The principles of the bill entail supply management, allotments, quotas prices based on parity from 1910 to 1913," Lucas told his colleagues on the House floor. "Wasnt Taft President back then? It is not workable language."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) appeared to be outraged that Republicans had omitted SNAP from the bill.

"The audacity to split off the nutrition parts of this bill is so stunning, it would be shockingexcept this is a house of shocks," she said on the House floor.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, was displeased with the legislation as well but for different reasons, noting that "some of the costliest and most indefensible programs no longer expire after five years, but live on indefinitely." 

The Senate passed a farm bill in June that would generate roughly $24 billion in cuts. Nearly 100 federal programs would be nixed as part of the comprehensive reforms. Among the most notable reforms would be the elimination of a direct subsidy program to farmers.

"Under the Direct Payments Program, payments to land owners and farms are unrelated to their actual production or crops raised," according to a report from George Mason University. "In other words, farmers receive the payment even if they have a great year with crop prices near record highs, as they are now."