CBO Acknowledges $6.1 Billion Mistake in Farm Bill Estimate

March 8, 2002

The spending gap between the House and Senate farm bills widened Thursday when the Congressional Budget Office admitted it made a $6.1 billion mistake in estimating the cost of the Senate-passed bill. The farm bill, H.R. 2646, is now in a House-Senate conference, and until yesterday lawmakers had thought their competing proposals were about $10 billion apart over the next 10 years.

CBO now says the Senate bill will actually cost almost $80 billion over 10 years, well over the $73.5 billion in new spending agreed by Congress last year. Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) chided CBO for the error but said work on the farm bill should proceed.

"It is a disappointment that CBO has made an error of this magnitude in scoring the Senate farm bill," Harkin said. "However, this error by CBO should not stand in the way of the progress we have made so far and our efforts to complete a conference on the farm bill very soon."

Although some lawmakers had criticized the large number of amendments added to the Senate bill during floor debate - changes that eventually expanded the bill's length by hundreds of pages - the error did not involve floor amendments, but part of the bill that had been constant for months.

CBO assumed, mistakenly, that income payments would be made on 85% of farmers' acreage bases, as under current law and the House farm bill. But the Senate's bill plainly said the payments would be made on 100% of the acreage.

"Unfortunately, despite our repeated checking with CBO to ensure that we had the most accurate information possible, we now learn that this information has been repeatedly misread by CBO," Harkin said. "Congress has no alternative but to rely on CBO scoring of legislation. All we can do now is to continue to move forward and address this issue in conference."