Supporters of the Inflation Reduction Act’s conservation funding are determined to protect it from GOP attempts to steer some of the money into other priorities.
The bill provided $18 billion for four programs – the Conservation Stewardship Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Regional Conservation Partnership Program and the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program – to increase adoption of climate-smart farming practices. There is additional funding for technical assistance and measurement of greenhouse emissions from agriculture.
The bill passed in 2022 with no Republican support, and the GOP has been vocal about its frustrations with the package ever since.
But even the strongest advocates of the IRA and its conservation funding have acknowledged they would like to move the funding into the farm bill so that it could be reallocated to permanently increase conservation program funding levels. Under the budget rules used to pass the IRA, none of the money can be spent after 2031, and it does nothing to increase long-term funding levels for the programs.
The National Association of Conservation Districts supports moving the funding into the farm bill, but only if the dollars are kept within the legislation’s conservation title. NACD CEO Jeremy Peters says the conservation “needs are not going away,” and the organization wants to make sure the IRA funding is part of the new farm bill’s baseline.
“We want to make sure that we're taking advantage of this opportunity while we have it,” he told Agri-Pulse. “This is historic, this is something we've been working on literally for decades to get to this level of funding for conservation programs.”
Jeremy Peters, NACD“With the IRA legislation, I feel like Congress got it right,” Peters added. “And we want to preserve that intact as much as we can.”
But many congressional Republicans are just as eager to redirect the funding. House Ag Committee Republicans want to shift a substantial portion of the funding to other titles of the farm bill. Senate Ag Committee ranking member John Boozman, R-Ark., wants to keep the IRA funding in conservation programs but remove the climate-related restrictions on how the money can be spent.
The issue played out in a pair of dueling op-eds submitted recently to Agri-Pulse. House Ag Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., argued the IRA funding is currently “riddled with climate sideboards and federal bureaucracy” and should be “refocused toward programs and policies that allow the original conservationists – farmers – to continue to make local decisions that work for them.”
But Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., countered that the committee’s Democrats, which he leads as ranking member, are vehemently opposed to reallocating the conservation dollars and a separate GOP idea to reduce nutrition spending.
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“House Democrats are as likely to budge on those issues as House Republicans are to roll back their Trump-era tax giveaways to Wall Street to pay for the farm bill enhancements,” Scott wrote.
Speaking to NACD members this week in San Diego, USDA leaders expressed confidence in their ability to distribute the IRA funding. Terry Cosby, chief of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, said that “99.8% of those funds were put on the ground” in the most recent fiscal year.
USDA Undersecretary Robert BonnieThe Congressional Budget Office doesn't think USDA can spend all of the funding by 2031, particularly the amount allocated to the Regional Conservation Partnership Program.
Speaking broadly on the subject of the IRA, the more than $3 billion invested through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, and other ongoing administration efforts to invest in agricultural conservation, USDA Farm Production and Conservation Undersecretary Robert Bonnie said the department is well aware of the close watch many are keeping on how the funding is being used.
“We've got resources to do good things right now, but at the same time, we're under some pressure to do that well and to get those resources put out into the field in a way that obviously works for the environment, works for our customers – the producers – and works for the taxpayer,” he said.
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