Senate-House Appropriations Conference Begins

September 22, 1999

Senate and House conferees began deliberations last evening on ironing out differences in their agricultural appropriations bills. After four hours of talking, they quit for the night to come back this morning. The cost of emergency farm aid has increased -- $500 million likely will be added for disaster assistance.

That would make the package worth about $8 billion in direct payments, disaster aid, crop insurance assistance, Step 2 cotton subsidies and varying amounts of assistance for soybean, tobacco, livestock and dairy, peanut and sugar producers. Conferees also discussed including $500,000 for a study on a national cooperative for pork producers.

One provision of the draft compromise bill is an increase of $5.5 billion in spending authority for USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation on Sept. 30. The next day, Oct. 1, the authority would return to $30 billion. But the one-day increase has the effect of spending $5.5 billion in emergency aid in the current fiscal year.

The National Journal's CongressDaily said Senate Budget Committee Director William Hoagland spent the weekend trying to achieve that goal. But he advised Chairman Pete Domenici that such an approach would be "the height of gimmickry." Reports have been floating around for several weeks now that allowing some of the relief money to be spent in fiscal 1999 would be one way to avoid spending beyond the $14 billion surplus and dipping into the Social Security trust fund.

Some members of the conferences want to include dairy provisions in the appropriations bill, such as one to mandate a change in how USDA prices milk at the farm. Other dairy provisions also loom large before the conferees: expanding regional dairy compacts is another controversial proposal. There were indications last night that conferees had not come to an agreement on how to handle the dairy issues and that stalemate forced adjournment until today.