WASHINGTON, Dec. 14, 2016 - The Senate
closed out the 114th Congress in the wee hours of last Saturday, passing a
water projects bill, the last of a series of legislative achievements that will
have far-reaching implications for agriculture. Topping the list was the GMO
disclosure legislation approved last summer, but Congress also enacted
permanent tax benefits for farmers and authorized major agricultural and food
aid programs for the first time.
But there were big whiffs, too, none
bigger than the failure of Congress to act on the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
the 12-nation trade agreement that President Obama finalized in 2015 but could
never get Congress to consider after it became a whipping boy in the
presidential campaign.
Congress also failed to reauthorize
child nutrition programs or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or to
agree on energy policy.
Here’s a look at the hits and misses
of the 114th Congress:
HITS
GMO
Disclosure. Vermont forced Congress to get
involved in the GMO labeling debate by enacting a labeling requirement that
took effect July 1. It took that deadline and some intense negotiations between
Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts and the committee’s ranking Democrat,
Debbie Stabenow, with support from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, to enact
a preemption law. In the end, the food and biotech industries got most of what
they wanted. Disclosure is mandatory but companies will be allowed to put
digital QR Codes on food labels, the basis of the industry’s SmartLabel system,
rather than wording. The law was also written to limit the types of
bioengineering and products that would be subject to disclosure.
Global Food
Security Act. The legislation, enacted
this summer, writes into law President Obama’s
Feed the Future initiative and the new Emergency Food Security Program launched
by USAID. The law ensures that the
programs will live beyond the Obama administration. EFSP represents a
significant reshaping of food aid policy. The program provides cash assistance
or locally procured foods rather than U.S.-grown commodities, the central
feature of the longstanding Food for Peace program. House Agriculture Chairman
Mike Conaway, R-Texas, won assurances that the EFSP authorization wouldn’t be
used to force changes in the way that Food for Peace is operated.
Permanent
tax benefit. A year-end tax-and-spending package enacted in December 2015 made permanent and indexed for
inflation the enhanced Section 179 expensing allowance used by farms to offset
the cost of tractors, combines and other new equipment. The legislation also
extended a popular bonus depreciation allowance.
COOL
repealed. The same legislation repealed the
country-of-origin labeling requirement for meat to avert more than $1 billion
in retaliatory tariffs that the World Trade Organization had authorized Canada
and Mexico to levy.
Wind power,
oil exports. In an unusual deal benefitting both
fossil fuels and renewable energy, the 2015 legislation lifted the 40-year-old
ban on oil exports and extended and phased out over five years the production
credit for wind power. The extension for wind power was intended to serve as a
bridge to the Obama administration’s greenhouse gas emission limits on electric
utilities. The incoming Trump administration is committed now to killing those
carbon rules.
Water projects
authorization. The Water Infrastructure Improvements
for the Nation Act, passed early Saturday, authorizes new waterway projects,
includes long-sought drought relief for California’s Central Valley and would
benefit rural electric cooperatives by allowing states to regulate coal ash.
The drought provisions would increase irrigation water supplies for farms.
Long-term
highway bill. Congress in 2015 enacted the first
long-term surface transportation bill in 10 years. In addition to funding road
and bridge improvements, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act
included a provision to allow for higher weight limits when transporting fluid
milk.
Grain
inspection, price reporting. Congress
reauthorized USDA’s grain inspection services and mandatory livestock price
reporting program just ahead of their expiration date in 2015. The grain
inspection provisions include a key compromise sought by grain traders that
could allow private inspections of grain when government inspectors are
unavailable because of a labor disruption. The price reporting program was
expanded to include more information on swine and lamb transactions.
INCOMPLETE
Trade. The most consequential whiff by far was the failure of
Congress to approve the TPP, which could expand exports of a range of
commodities, including beef and pork, while imposing new disciplines on food
safety measures and trade in biotech products. President-elect Donald Trump has
promised to withdraw from the TPP but he’ll still be empowered to renegotiate
that deal and enter into others because Congress passed trade promotion
authority in 2015.
MISSES
Energy bill. There were big hopes that Congress would pass the first
major overhaul of energy policy since 2007, and negotiations continued into the
final days of the 114th Congress. But Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Chairman Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said last week that the House pulled out of
the talks. The Senate-passed bill included provisions to modernize the
electricity grid, address cybersecurity concerns and promote smart buildings
and advanced composite materials. The House bill included provisions to expand
fossil fuel production and usage.
Child
nutrition. The Senate Agriculture Committee in
January advanced a bipartisan deal to reauthorize child nutrition programs, but
Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., says he was ultimately unable to get a floor vote
on it because of opposition from Democrats. Even if he had managed to push it
through the Senate, it was never clear he could get a deal with the House,
where conservatives would like to roll back the school meal standards
implemented under the Obama administration. Some conservatives would even like
to turn the program over to the states to run with their own rules. The failure
of the Congress to act leaves the Obama meal standards in place. Roberts says
he’ll try to move a new bill next year, but Senate Democrats likely can block
any legislation that undermines the Obama-era rules.
CFTC. The failure of Congress to reauthorize the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission is a bad thing only if you support GOP efforts to
weaken the agency’s Dodd-Frank regulations. The agency doesn’t need congressional
authorization to continue its work, so there was no downside for Democrats in
blocking consideration of a GOP authorization bill. The agency, meanwhile, took
some of the political pressure off of Congress to pass a bill by reworking key
rules to address industry concerns, including position limits and an exemption
for bonafide hedging.
Biofuel tax
extenders. The $1-a-gallon tax credit for
biodiesel as well as tax incentives for cellulosic ethanol and biofuel pumping
equipment will expire Dec. 31 after Republicans rebuffed pleas to extend them
another year. Their fate may rest on whether they get included in a tax reform
package that House and Senate leaders are committed to doing next year. The
biofuel industry faces a cloudy future, however, in Congress as well as with
the Trump administration, where allies of the oil and gas industry will
dominate key positions, including EPA.
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