WASHINGTON — A Senate panel rejected several major spending cuts President Donald Trump’s administration proposed to agricultural and rural development programs, as two key appropriations bills advanced Thursday.
One of the two money bills that passed the Senate Appropriations Committee also includes policy tweaks to a dairy farm insurance program.
Dozens of aides and policy experts lined the committee room as the 31-member committee convened Thursday to complete its work on two of the 12 annual appropriations bill.
The panel went through and passed with broad bipartisan support one bill setting spending amounts on agriculture, and another bill on water and energy spending.
The agriculture appropriations bill, which totals $145.4 billion in spending, won unanimous approval from the committee.
The bill would put spending levels in the next fiscal year $7.9 billion below the current year. However, it also sets appropriations at $4.9 billion higher than Trump proposed.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., vice chair of the committee, pushed to include policy language in the bill that updates the Margin Protection Program, an insurance program that aims to protect dairy farmers from fluctuating milk and livestock feed prices.
In an effort to make the program work more effectively for farms that opt in, the bill would tweak the calculations used in the program, lower premium costs, and more.
Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Anson Tebbetts said the policy changes proposed to the program in the spending bill are “significant.”
“I believe that was progress in offering farmers a safety net,” he said Friday.
The changes to the program likely would not happen until the next farm bill goes through Congress, which could take a couple years. Adopting the policy changes in the agriculture spending bill would begin to improve the program in the meantime, Tebbetts said.
Diane Bothfeld, director of administrative services and dairy policy at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, said that though there was strong initial interest in the program after it was created by the last farm bill in 2014, the program has not always performed as expected.
“It hasn’t worked as everybody hoped it would,” Bothfeld said.
In many cases, the program has not paid out to farmers at times when they are cash-strapped because of high feed costs or low milk prices, she said. The changes to the program in the bill would be “a good start” toward making the program more effective, she said.
The package the committee approved included increased funding for agriculture research and maintains funding at the current levels for the Food and Drug Administration.
Several food benefit programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and a nutritional program that serves women and children, are fully funded in the bill, despite proposals to cut funding to those benefits.
The other bill, related to spending on energy and water, was voted out with 30 senators in favor, one opposed. The package totals $38.4 billion — $4.1 billion more than Trump’s proposal. It’s an increase over the current fiscal year budget of $629 million.
The bill increases funding for the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy and for nuclear security.
The bills still must be approved by the full Senate. The House also has not yet voted on their versions of spending bills.
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