Dive Brief:
- Congressional budget officials on Thursday denied a plea to hire additional staff, which agriculture leaders say is necessary to address a backlog of requests holding up the 2023 Farm Bill.
- The Congressional Budget Office has reassigned analysts to assist with the farm bill and taken other steps to deliver budgetary estimates needed to write the law, Director Phillip Swagel wrote in a letter. However, hiring additional staff "is not practical at this point."
- House and Senate agriculture leaders earlier this month expressed concern about the "volume of outstanding requests" related to the farm bill, asking the CBO to use all available resources to avoid further delays.
Dive Insight:
Lawmakers are scrambling to finish up this year's farm bill before the current law expires Sept. 30. However, technical delays and political clashes over spending have made it more unlikely that the bill will be passed on time.
All laws up for consideration must receive a budgetary estimate from the CBO. However, the breadth and scale of the farm bill has overloaded the office with hundreds of requests.
Budget analysts have already provided over 1,000 estimates and plan to deliver hundreds more in the coming weeks, Swagel wrote in the letter. The department has tapped staff across departments to "devote extensive resources to analyzing the farm bill."
Bringing on additional staff would only slow the process further, Swagel wrote, because of the time needed to onboard new hires.
Farm bill delays aren't uncommon, and both the 2018 and 2014 bills were ultimately passed in December. Although the legislation expires at the end of September, the effects aren't expected to be felt until the end of the calendar year.
Rep. Glenn Thompson, who leads the House agriculture committee, told Farm Journal that Congress will likely need to extend the current farm bill and that he will personally meet with Swagel in the coming weeks. Thompson expects the House to begin the markup process — the final step before legislation is sent out for consideration — after lawmakers return from August recess.
