FARM BILL UPDATE: Not Good:
FINAL STRETCH FOR 2018 FARM BILL TALKS: With less than three weeks until Congress plans to adjourn for the year, House and Senate farm bill negotiators are short on time to resolve their differences and write a final version of the legislation in time for both chambers to pass it. (There are only a dozen days left when both chambers are scheduled to be in session.)
Time crunch: As the 2018 calendar keeps shrinking, aggies are on the lookout for signs of an impending House-Senate deal. But policy disputes were still lingering last week with lawmakers away for Thanksgiving, including a partisan spat over forestry regulations and wildfire prevention.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and embattled Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called on Congress last week to give them broader authority to conduct prescribed burns and forest-thinning efforts, to help prevent Western wildfires like the deadly blazes in California. That’s in line with House Republican efforts to expand forest management techniques and scale back certain environmental restrictions in the farm bill.
— Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat on the farm bill conference committee, accused the secretaries of using the devastation to advance anti-environmental policies, our Liz Crampton reported.
— Perdue told NPR in an interview that the government has been “litigated into paralysis about being able to do the common-sense thinning and underbrush cleaning that needs to happen.”
On your radar: Perdue and Zinke are set to visit Paradise, Calif., today to survey the catastrophic Camp Fire damage — so keep an ear out for more on the farm bill forestry provisions.
