Farm Bill Programs Without a Budget Baseline Beyond FY2018 (CRS Report for Congress)
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| Release Date |
Revised May 2, 2018 |
| Report Number |
R44758 |
| Report Type |
Report |
| Authors |
Jim Monke |
| Source Agency |
Congressional Research Service |
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Summary:
The 2014 farm bill (the Agricultural Act of 2014, P.L. 113-79) provided mandatory funding for
many programs. Some of these programs have a budget baseline beyond the end of the farm bill
in FY2018, while others do not. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline is a projection
at a particular point in time of what future federal spending on mandatory programs would be
under current law. This baseline is the benchmark against which proposed changes in law are
measured. This report identifies mandatory programs in the 2014 farm bill that lack a budget
baseline and explains the significance of this for enacting a successor to the current farm bill.
Generally, a program with estimated mandatory spending in the last year of its authorization will
be assumed to continue in the baseline as if there were no change in policy and it did not expire.
However, some programs may not be assumed to continue in the budget baseline, because the
program had estimated mandatory spending less than a minimum $50 million scoring threshold in
the last year of the farm bill, or the Budget Committees and/or Agriculture Committees
determined that mandatory spending shall not extend beyond expiration.
Having a baseline essentially gives programs built-in future funding if policymakers decide that
the programs should continue. Programs without a continuing baseline beyond the end of farm
bill do not have assured future funding. As such, any extended authorization of these latter
programs would be scored as new mandatory spending.
The 2014 farm bill contains 39 programs that received mandatory funding that do not have
baseline beyond FY2018. These programs had estimated mandatory spending totaling $2.824
billion over the five-year farm bill. While this total may be a relatively small fraction of total farm
bill spending (0.6% of the $489 billion five-year total projection), the effect may be particularly
important to specific farm bill titles and to the programs’ beneficiaries.
Notable programs among this group include certain conservation programs; most of the
bioenergy, rural development, and research title programs; various nutrition title pilot programs
and studies; organic agriculture and farmers’ market programs; trade promotion programs; and
outreach to socially disadvantaged and military veteran farmers. If policymakers want to continue
these programs in the next farm bill, they may need to find budgetary offsets to pay for the costs.
