WASHINGTON, Aug. 31, 2016 - Congress
ends an unusually long summer break next week facing critical unfinished
business and little time to complete it. Dominating the to-do list is funding for the federal government in fiscal
2017, which begins Oct. 1.
A series of critical tax subsidies for
the biofuels industry also are slated to expire at the end of the year. Unless Congress renews them, the tax benefits
will be left in limbo when a new president and Congress take office in January.
An important potential development in
agricultural trade with Cuba will also be at stake this fall: Shortly before
lawmakers left town in July for the national party conventions, Rep. Rick
Crawford, R-Ark., announced that he had reached a deal with key GOP colleagues
to lift important financial restrictions that have impeded U.S. agricultural
sales to Cuba. He’s hoping for congressional approval before the end of the
year. No action has been scheduled yet.
Also pending
is a comprehensive energy bill. The
question is whether there is enough time for the House and Senate to work out
differences between bills passed by the two chambers. The Senate appointed its conferees
shortly before lawmakers left town in July. The House negotiators were named in
May.
Senate Democrats resisted going to
conference until Republicans agreed on restrictions on what could be part of a
final deal. With that fight resolved, negotiators “are working to reconcile
differences and produce a final bill that can clear both chambers. “The energy bill is one of the few policy
issues that may be resolved before the November election,” said
Democratic lobbyist Heather Podesta.
Many in agriculture would dearly love
to see Congress approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the lame-duck session,
but so far House and Senate GOP leaders have ruled that out. Hillary Clinton
says she opposes the 12-nation trade deal in its current form, and Donald Trump
has made opposition to the TPP a keystone of his GOP campaign.
Both the House and Senate will be back
in session Sept. 6, but the House will shut down for the election at the end of
the month, and the Senate is scheduled to break for the election after the
first week in October.
Congress
hasn’t enacted a single one of its dozen appropriations bills for fiscal 2017,
so lawmakers will have to pass a continuing resolution in September to keep the
government running until after the election.
Such stopgap spending measures are a
bit less contentious in election years – neither party wants to shut down the
government with voters headed to the polls – but the appropriations process has
bogged down in a partisan fight over funding to fight the Zika virus. Democrats
have blocked a Republican funding agreement over restrictions it would put on
Planned Parenthood. The fight could flare again when the stopgap bill is
released for debate.
The bigger question is what Congress
does in a lame duck session about funding the rest of fiscal 2017. House GOP
leaders would like to do what they did the past two years and pass a government-wide
omnibus measure that funds the remainder of the fiscal year, freeing the new
president and Congress to start working on fiscal 2018 issues.
But some
conservative advocacy groups and their allies in the House have been pushing to
block any omnibus from being passed until the next president and the new
Congress take office. Heritage Action opposes “any funding
legislation that necessitates a lame duck session,” said spokesman Dan Holler.
But conservatives could change their
tune if Democrats take over the Senate and Republicans lose seats in the House.
“Circumstances are going to have to
dictate what you decide you’re going to do during that lame duck period,” said Bob Young, chief economist and
deputy executive director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau
Federation.
If Democrats were to take control of
the Senate, “would you be all that excited to say, ‘Let’s
wait and write an omnibus in the next Congress?’ I’m
not sure how excited Heritage would be about that,” he said.
A number of
policy provisions will be at stake in the decisions that are made about the
spending legislation. They include policy riders in House
and Senate bills that would block the implementation of the “waters of the
United States” rule. Another provision sought by farm groups and contained in a
House-passed Interior-Environment bill would bar EPA from allowing designated
representatives of farm workers to demand records from farms on pesticide
usage.
A continuing resolution, or CR, is
unlikely to include any such policy provisions. The only way they could get
included is in a post-election agreement with the White House to pass an
omnibus, or series of smaller such bills.
Also at stake in that debate will be
an increase in spending to help the Food and Drug Administration implement the
Food Safety Modernization Act, which is imposing a series of new regulations on
farmers and food and feed manufacturers. The Senate’s FY17 Agriculture spending
bill would increase FSMA funding by $40.2 million, $15 million more than
President Obama requested. The
House version of the FY17 bill contains an increase of $33 million.
Prospects
for the biofuel tax extenders are even cloudier.
A sweeping spending and tax bill that Congress passed last December provided
long-term extensions of a tax credit for wind power as well as expensing and
bonus depreciation allowances widely used by farmers, but tax incentives that
subsidize biodiesel, cellulosic ethanol and biofuel pumps were only extended
through 2016.
House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin
Brady, R-Texas, opposes considering any tax extenders this year, a spokeswoman
said, but the National Biodiesel Board isn’t giving up hope.
Congress has
repeatedly allowed biodiesel’s $1-a-gallon tax credit to lapse for extended
periods and that’s “very disruptive” to the industry, said Ben Evans, a spokesman for the industry. “There’s
clearly some opposition in the House,” he acknowledged. “There’s always been
opposition in the House to doing extenders.”
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