Agri-Pulse Daybreak won’t publish Friday in honor of Independence Day. It will return Monday, July 7.
House Agriculture Committee Republicans aren’t happy with some of the Senate’s changes to their SNAP reconciliation provisions. But they say other parts of the Republicans’ bill outweigh those concerns.
The Senate’s reconciliation bill slightly scaled back the House’s state cost-share requirement by lowering the range requiring states to pay into the program and not imposing costs on states with SNAP error rates below 6%. A last-minute change in the Senate text also gave states with some of the highest error rates two additional years before the cost-share kicks in.
“I don't think they should have done it, but they did it,” said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., of the delayed implementation. “The other parts of the bill are more important than that.”
Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., worries it could disincentivize states with higher error rates to take action.
But House Ag Chair Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., said states will still need to take action or they risk a “very high cost-share” after the two years. He added states still must pay penalties to USDA for persistently high error rates.
Still, LaMalfa hopes Congress will come back to the state cost-share issue and potentially move it closer to the House proposal in future reconciliation or farm bill efforts.
Take note: The Senate bill also raises the age of children for parents to be exempt from work requirements from 7 to 14. House Ag Democrats had major issues with setting the age at 7 throughout the markup.
Rep. Josh Riley, D-N.Y., said it’s about making room for tax cuts. “You got parents who are doing everything they can to get food on the table for their kids and a roof over their heads,” Riley said. “We should be just giving folks a break instead of stomping on them even more, which is what this bill is going to do.”
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Report: Millions could be hit by SNAP provisions
Roughly 22.3 million families could be affected by the changes to SNAP in the budget bill, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute.
The analysis looks at the impact of the major policy modifications in the reconciliation bill, including work requirements, limits on eligibility for immigrants, the state cost-share, and a cost-neutral requirement for future benefit adjustments.
Based on preliminary estimates, 5.3 million families would lose at least $25 in monthly SNAP benefits. Within this group, 3.3 million are families with children, 3.5 million are working families and 1.7 million are families with a full-time, full-year worker, according to the report.
EU expects trade pact before tariff deadline — but watching for retaliation
The European Union is heading into trade talks between Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and senior U.S. officials today hopeful of securing a deal.
“We do have the sense that we won’t necessarily have a fully comprehensive final … agreement in the next week. What we may have is kind of a framework from which we have certain baseline components — including potentially a baseline tariff. And then here will be further sectoral negotiations to work out details for the rest,” Olof Gill, trade spokesperson at the European Commission, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday.
Gill added that while nothing is set in stone, that is “our expectation.”
A European Commission official said the two sides reaching agreement on a set of principles for further discussions is “the likeliest outcome” ahead of next week’s deadline.
Take note: A commission official also stressed that if a deal doesn’t come together and the EU chooses to retaliate, it could pursue novel countermeasures. “If potential countermeasures on goods fails to yield any good result, then we switch to services. That hasn’t been done before,” the official said. “We are not afraid of that possibility.”
NOAA plans to terminate climate programs
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would see its climate programs eliminated in the next fiscal year, according to a newly released budget document.
The Trump administration released a summary version of its proposed fiscal 2026 budget earlier this year, but the budget justification now posted online goes into more detail.
NOAA is planning to eliminate the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and transfer some of its activities to the National Ocean Service and National Weather Service.
“The FY 2026 budget eliminates all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes,” the document says. “It also does not fund Regional Climate Data and Information, Climate Competitive Research, the National Sea Grant College Program, Sea Grant Aquaculture Research, or the National Oceanographic Partnership Program.”
The goal, NOAA said, is to “streamline program management and focus on NOAA’s weather mission.”
Final word
“Some of the Senate changes were fascinating. I guess you'd have to say certain senators are better horse traders than others in the way their home states were addressed.” — Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla.
Rebekah Alvey and Oliver Ward contributed to today’s Daybreak.
