Late last Friday, Senate Ag Chair John Boozman announced a last-minute farm bill markup will take place just before the senate’s long summer recess. The announcement came well after business hours and followed Boozman’s telling reporters in June.
“Before August, work hard to actually have a vote and get it out of committee.”
But setbacks in July, including Republican Mitch McConnell’s health absence and Democratic objections to the timing of state SNAP penalties, delayed farm bill action.
This Thursday is Boozman’s last chance to move just before the Senate leaves for a five-week recess. But he had to make concessions to Democrats with the tie-breaking McConnell vote still unavailable.
Boozman agreed to give all states more time to rein in SNAP overpayments, which was Democrats’ top demand.
States with ten percent or higher payment error rates will now have until September 2030 to do so, or they must pay 20 percent of SNAP costs—higher than before to offset an extra year’s delay.
And the revised bill permanently authorizes nationwide year-round E15 sales, something Boozman backs but first wanted to do separately.
“Vote on it alone, vote on the farm bill alone. That’s why we haven’t combined it, out of again, trying to respect the House, what they had to do.”
The bill still improves commodity, dairy, disaster, conservation, research, and rural development programs.
And it modernizes farm loan and USDA high-speed broadband programs, and more than doubles the MAP and FMD foreign market promotion programs.