Just to Make a Point

October 4

Sen. Pat Roberts isn't letting up on Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman. Roberts led a group of 53 senators who wrote Glickman a letter urging him to support the ag appropriations bill's method of distributing supplemental income checks for farmers. Roberts and Glickman have been conducting a very public debate over payment methods.

Glickman has held that payments should not be made unless the crop actually was planted; Roberts and other senators hold that to do it that way would take way too much time. Instead, they insist that payments be made on the basis of a farmer's transition payments under the 1996 farm law. USDA can cut checks in days, not weeks, by doing it that way, they say.

The final version of ag appropriations spells out that the transition payment method be used, but Roberts' group of 53 senators wrote a letter to Glickman anyway urging that the Clinton Administration support the method.

"Last year, USDA distributed supplemental income payments through the (transition) payment mechanism less than three weeks after Congress approved the emergency assistance legislation," they told Glickman. "However, USDA then used its own formula to deliver disaster assistance, and it took more than seven months for payments tor each producers. That experience shows that USDA cannot create a new payment mechanism that will make those payments as quickly as they are made through" using the transition payments.

A Capitol Hill source close to the process says Roberts is trying to make a point with 53 signatures on the letter. That's close to the 60 senators needed to override any veto President Clinton might decide to use against the appropriations bill. However, there have been no public indications Clinton will veto the measure.