House Spending Bill Cuts Key USDA Research, Market, and Equity Initiatives
Last week, the House Appropriations Committee advanced a bill to fund the Agriculture Department and Food and Drug Administration through fiscal year 2024. While two key organic programs, the National Organic Program and the Organic Transitions Program (an organic research program) are level-funded, this partisan bill cuts nearly $8 billion from the agency’s budget and contains deeply harmful cuts to research, technical assistance, market opportunities, and equity initiatives. The bill also includes multiple riders. One would halt the Biden administration’s efforts to increase competition in the agriculture industry. Another would restrict use of Commodity Credit Corporation funding, a source that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has tapped to launch climate-smart funding initiatives.
“While organic-specific programs were not the target of funding cuts, the across the board funding reductions in this bill will impact numerous USDA programs,” said Abby Youngblood, National Organic Coalition Executive Director. “Everyone will be impacted by these cuts, including the organic sector.”
An amendment to the bill was adopted that would rescind unobligated balances from a program to provide assistance to underserved farmers and those who have faced historical discrimination by USDA that had been authorized in the Inflation Reducation Act.
The bill also includes cuts to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as the WIC program, and eliminates a program that boosted WIC recipients’ purchasing power through the fruit and vegetable voucher program.
What’s Next?
Next, this bill will be taken up by the full House chamber, where it will be voted on and eventually conferenced – or reconciled – with the version resulting from a similar process in the Senate.
However, given the partisan nature of the House proposal, it is unlikely to move forward unchanged after the conference process with the Senate bill. The Senate has indicated that it will begin marking up its own FY 2024 appropriations proposals in June. The deadline to pass spending legislation before the end of the current fiscal year is September 30, 2023.