President Joe Biden gives his State of the Union address this week as Congress faces a new Friday deadline to pass half its fiscal 2024 spending measures, including the bills needed to fund USDA, EPA and the Interior Department.
On Sunday, congressional leaders released a package of six spending bills, including Agriculture and Interior-Environment, that must be enacted by the weekend.
The Agriculture provisions include full funding for the WIC nutrition assistance program at $7 billion and the rejection of a GOP-backed pilot program testing restrictions on foods that can be purchased with SNAP benefits.
Republicans also laid claim to some wins in the package, including a provision to improve the tracking of foreign land purchases and the addition of USDA to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Republicans also were able to trim funding from FY23 levels for some agencies, including EPA.
Biden’s Thursday night speech will be a critical chance for him to state his case for reelection and comes amid struggles with the twin crises in Ukraine and the Middle East and the heavy political pressure that’s on him to slow down illegal immigration.
The speech comes as Congress finally appears to be making some progress to wrapping up at least some FY24 spending bills more than five months into the fiscal year. Last week, congressional leaders announced agreement on the first six annual spending bills, which led to Congress passing a stopgap funding bill that keeps the departments and agencies funded by those six measures until Friday.
Departments and agencies funded by the remaining six bills, including Defense, Labor, and Health and Human Services, are temporarily funded until March 22. According to the minority side of the House Appropriations Committee, that package should be released in the coming days.
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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says the threats of government shutdowns have forced senior officials at the department and within individual agencies to repeatedly set aside other tasks to plan what they will have to do if funding does run out, including deciding which workers would be retained and which ones wouldn’t, depending on the situation.
Talking to biofuel industry officials at Commodity Classic in Houston Friday, Vilsack suggested the shutdown threats had played a role in the administration’s decision to delay release updates to the GREET model that’s used to assess the carbon intensity of biofuel feedstocks.
“It's not as if we wait until the minute the government shuts down and then go into action and decide how do we manage this. It actually has to take place before the shutdown,” Vilsack said, adding that agency shutdown plans have to be adjusted each time one becomes a possibility, depending on the particular situation. “It's just crazy. It's crazy,” he said.
The White House is expected to release the president's fiscal 2025 budget proposal on March 11.
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission is set to vote Wednesday on a final, scaled-back version of its controversial rule that would require publicly held corporations to start disclosing greenhouse gas emissions.
According to a report by Reuters in February, the final rule is expected to drop a requirement that companies report Scope 3 emissions, those that originate in their supply chains. That would be a big victory for the American Farm Bureau Federation and other farm groups.
Even if the SEC drops its Scope 3 reporting requirement, companies may still have to deal with a new California law that requires “full-scope GHG emissions data reporting” for corporations that do business in the state and have annual revenues of more than $1 billion.
Also this week, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on the America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act, which would provide $320 million a year for state and tribal wildlife conservation programs as well as habitat restoration and forest management projects.
A summary of the bill says it would “empower states by giving them the opportunity to develop recovery strategies for species that are listed as threatened or are candidates to be listed. These recovery strategies give states an active role in developing regulations for threatened and candidate species and could become the regulation that governs the management of these species.” At least 15% of the state funding would be devoted to endangered species funding.
The bill will empower states and local communities to use proven practices to restore and maintain habitat, which will benefit species in their state’s wildlife action plans,” committee Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., said in a press release on the bill last week.
Here is a list of agriculture- or rural-related events scheduled for this week in Washington and elsewhere (all times ET):
Monday, March 4
School Nutrition Association legislative action conference, through Tuesday, JW Marriott.
Tuesday, March 5
Wednesday, March 6
10 a.m. — House Agriculture Committee hearing with Rostin Behnam, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 1300 Longworth.
10 a.m. — Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on consumer packaging, 406 Dirksen.
10 a.m. — Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on global food security, 419 Dirksen.
10:15 a.m. — House Natural Resources Committee hearing on the America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act, 1324 Longworth.
Thursday, March 7
8:30 a.m. — USDA releases Weekly Export Sales report.
9 a.m. — House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party hearing, “Growing Stakes: The Bioeconomy and American National Security,” HVC-210 Capitol.
9 p.m. — President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address.
Friday, March 8
Noon — USDA releases monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates and the monthly Crop Production Report.
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