AGRICULTURE, ENVIRONMENT, AND ENERGY UPDATE
Volume 2, Issue 6- April 4, 2008
An Information Service of the Agriculture, Environment, and Energy Committee
 Previous Issues
POSSIBLE MOVE FOR THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE? The 103-year-old U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands, is part of the Department of Agriculture, and agencies with related missions--the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manage 84 million acres, 96 million acres and 258 million acres of public land, respectively-- are in the Interior Department. At the request of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, the Government Accountability Office this month began examining whether it would make sense to move the Forest Service from the USDA to Interior's purview. The Subcommittee has jurisdiction over both agencies.
The five agencies have overlapping missions that include fire prevention and suppression, natural resource conservation, fostering recreational uses, and regulating commercial activities such as logging, drilling, mining and
livestock grazing. "The public perceives them as being very similar," said Robin M. Nazzaro, director of the Natural Resources and Environment group at GAO, which is conducting the study. "They've just asked us to look at, could any money be saved, and would it result in a more efficient, effective and coordinated management of federal lands and the natural resources?"
This is not the first time that moving the Forest Service has been discussed, sometimes as part of broader discussions of bureaucratic reorganization. In 1991, then Representative Leon E. Panetta (California), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed combining the Interior, Agriculture and Energy Departments into a new Department of Natural Resources, as part of a larger plan to collapse 14 Cabinet-level departments into six. In 1983, a commission appointed by President Ronald Reagan to find remedies for waste in government recommended combining administrative functions of the Forest Service and the BLM. And in 1970, a bipartisan commission created by Congress suggested folding the Forest Service into Interior and renaming it, as Panetta later wanted to, the Department of Natural Resources.
One argument in favor of such a move is that the Forest Service no longer is chiefly devoted to managing the harvesting of timber. "Today the evolution of our forests has gone away from production and more towards preservation, and it seems to me that the natural move has made it over under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior rather than the Department of Agriculture," Representative Todd Tiahrt (Kansas), the top Republican on the Subcommittee, said at a Feb. 12 hearing on the Agency. Representative Norm Dicks (Washington), the panel's chairman, believes such a move would help shore up the Forest Service's budget and align agencies with similar missions, said his spokesman, George Behan. Opposition to plan could arise, however, if moving the Forest Service to Interior sends the message that national forests are to be managed with preservation and recreational use trumping harvesting and development of these lands. If so, the timber industry might try to prevent the move. Neither the USDA nor the Department of the Interior have a public position on the matter in advance of the completion of the study.
FARM BILL NEGOTIATIONS YIELD NEW FUNDING FRAMEWORK BUT NO FINAL HARVEST; NEW MANDATORY FUNDING FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT IS ZEROED OUT IN FRAMEWORK. A tentative new framework for allocating $10 billion in new spending would substantially increase disaster funding, but would reduce spending increases in several key areas, including programs in the Rural Development title. The new framework announced by Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees provides $10 billion over the baseline, increases disaster funding from $2.24 billion to $4.05 billion and cuts increases for conservation, specialty crops, energy and rural development. Farm Bill negotiations seem to have a new sense of urgency with Congress back in town and facing a deadline of April 18 to complete work on reauthorization. April 18, of course, is the date on which the current extension of farm programs expires.
The earlier framework allocated $4.95 billion to increase conservation programs, while the new proposal reduces that amount to $4 billion. The framework also provides no new resources for community development for rural America. The earlier plan allocated $1.42 billion for specialty crops while the new one provides $1.35 billion. The increase in energy programs would go from $1 billion to $900 million. The $9.5 billion increase in nutrition programs -- including food stamps, school snack programs and international food aid -- is the same in both frameworks. The new framework increases the amount for commodity programs from $1.4 billion to $1.68 billion and reduces the cut in the crop insurance program from $3.9 billion to $3.2 billion. In addition, $700 million would be saved from unspecified adjustments to commodity, crop insurance and disaster aid programs and $400 million would be saved from the new average crop revenue election program, which will be known as ACRE. Savings from shifts in the timing of payments outside the five-year period of the farm bill remain the same at $4.4 billion.
Negotiators are still awaiting Congressional Budget Office scores for some programs and the numbers in the new framework are in no way final. And there are other issues: a funding mechanism must be agreed to, the fate of Senate Finance Committee added tax measures must be decided, an agreement on stricter payment limits must be reached, and remaining policy issues between the House and Senate must be resolved before a conference agreement can be finalized.
Also, the Administration previously stated that if there was not a bill by April 18, a one-year extension of current law should be enacted. Agriculture Secretary Schafer has more recently said that a one-or two-year extension bill is not desirable, especially for nutrition programs and specialty crops. However, the Administration has not backed down on its insistence that the bill not be funded by measures it deems tax increases, and continues to press for more reform of payment limits.
Farm Bill negotiators need to hear about the importance of the Rural Development Title programs in your communities. Currently, there is a $2 billion project backlog for rural development programs. At this juncture, there is a danger that we could lose the rural development improvements in the House and Senate passed bills, particularly the $400 in mandatory funding in the Senate bill.
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