House Agriculture Chair Glenn Thompson said Tuesday that the spending cuts his panel is expected to make toward a budget reconciliation deal next week will probably be less than predicted.
Speaking to an annual gathering of agriculture reporters at the Capitol, Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, said he thinks the amount the committee will be asked to contribute toward spending cuts will come in below the $230 billion in the House budget resolution, easing some of the pressure on lawmakers to squeeze programs such as low-income food assistance.
“Would I feel more comfortable with a number less than $230 billion? You bet,” Thompson told the North American Agricultural Journalists.
Thompson met earlier in the day with committee Republicans for an update on the budget reconciliation bill. The GOP majority hopes to deliver to President Donald Trump a party-line deal on tax cuts, border security, energy and other priorities.
House panels are beginning to mark up portions of the package this week. Agriculture and other panels are expected to get in on the action next week.
Thompson said his basic goal hasn’t changed: to use the reconciliation process to help advance a long-overdue five-year farm bill.
The farm bill, which expired in 2023 and has been extended twice by Congress, covers programs throughout the Department of Agriculture, including conservation, forestry and rural energy and development. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated its total cost at about $1.5 trillion over a decade.
Budget reconciliation and the farm bill are riding a complex path together, with some programs allowed to be included in the budget package and others not, depending on complicated rules around the process.
Only mandatory, not discretionary funding, can be included in reconciliation.
Although juggling the two bills may be complex, Thompson said, in time, “it all gets put back together” into a five-year plan for agriculture programs.
The main reconciliation fight in the Agriculture Committee will be over the Republican majority’s efforts to rein in the future costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Thompson hopes to see a new farm bill emerge in the first half of this year, though time is running short on that front. He said other programs are likely to resemble the version the committee passed a year ago with a few Democratic votes.
That includes conservation, which he said will benefit from leftover Inflation Reduction Act funds being shifted into the legislation, which totaled around $10 billion at the end of the Biden administration. Thompson has said he’ll defend the conservation money so it’s not taken out in reconciliation.
That move would permanently boost the budget baseline for programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, although the IRA’s mandate to spend the money on emissions-reducing practices will likely go by the wayside.
“I think conservation is in a really good place going forward,” Thompson said.
‘All hell has broken loose’
While Thompson and Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) laid out an optimistic scenario for the farm bill, Democratic lawmakers who addressed the agriculture reporters said they’re uncertain about the bill’s prospects and worried about the Trump administration’s cuts to agriculture agencies that aren’t raising many public objections from Republicans.
Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) said she’s “petrified” by staff reductions and frozen grants and contracts at the Forest Service. Her home state is dominated by privately owned forest that benefits from the Forest Service’s state and private forestry programs — a “great legacy industry in our state,” she said.
Among the effects in Maine, and other states, has been the freezing of wood innovation grants to mills, provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Pingree, who’s on both the House Agriculture and Appropriations committees, said the Agriculture panel could write a bipartisan farm bill on its own but that the reality of passing legislation on the floor and satisfying the Republicans’ right wing complicates the picture.
Thompson, she said, has been a “great” chair who hosted bipartisan listening sessions. “The committee is pretty reasonable at figuring these things out,” she said.
Now that lawmakers are juggling reconciliation and a farm bill together, Pingree said, “all hell has broken loose.”
Senate Agriculture ranking member Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Republican lawmakers have become more likely to complain privately or to the administration through back channels as they see the home-state effects of suspended grants and staff losses.
Voting against Trump administration priorities is a different matter but would be the only way to block some of the actions with biggest impact in farm country, Klobuchar said. Only on tariffs, she said, have Senate Republicans begun to show more public resistance to the administration.
