Co-Porkers of the Month
Press Release
As Washington returns to business in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the spectacle of congressional leaders cynically proposing the same old special interest handouts under the new guise of enhancing security is enough to make a citizen sick. For October, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) names U.S. Reps. Larry Combest (R-Texas) and Charles Stenholm (D-Texas) Co-Porkers of the Month for forcing a massively wasteful farm bill, H.R. 2646, the Farm Security Act of 2001, to the House floor.
The chairman and ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, respectively, Combest and Stenholm had no compelling reason to press the farm bill at this moment, since the present legislation won't expire until September 30, 2002. In fact, the White House explicitly asked the committee to delay action on the bill because it would cost too much - $170 billion, last too long - 10 years, encourage overproduction, jeopardize foreign markets, and provide benefits to big farm operations least in need of them.
The reason for the Combest/Stenholm bipartisan push was pure political opportunism plus fear the surplus would disappear. A new period of austerity might have led to greater questioning of whether adding another $73 billion in subsidies (an outrageous 65 percent increase!) to the already-existing $95 billion 10-year base was really prudent.
And worse, Combest and Stenholm had the audacity to claim their actions were "budget conscious." Conscious of the need to grab as much of the budget for their favored special interests is more like it.
H.R. 2646 represents a dramatic backward step in farm policy. Gone is any pretense of ever getting farmers off the dole. It not only subsidizes the same old products and restores subsidies Congress had actually managed to eliminate in the past, it also creates new subsidies for products that have never before been subsidized.
Combest and Stenholm worked like Siamese twins to squelch efforts to modestly reform the archaic sugar program, a program of little benefit to the vast majority of farmers, with at least 40 percent of all program benefits going to just the wealthiest one percent of sugar farms. The dynamic duo went into high gear to defeat an amendment to shift funding from the largest, wealthiest cotton and rice farmers to conservation efforts. They also pulled out all the stops to defeat an amendment to close a loophole allowing the largest farmers to circumvent payment limits.
Never before has there been a ten-year farm bill, but the Farm Security Act is an effective way to lock in record-high farm spending so it can’t be touched. According to the Bush Administration, this will limit flexibility to address the rapidly changing agriculture sector over the next decade.
For pushing a farm bill at this time when there is no need for it, for boosting federal spending at a time of great uncertainty, for taking a dramatic backward step in farm policy, and for directing handouts to the wealthiest farmers instead of those most in need, it would be difficult to find any two members of Congress more deserving of the title Co-Porkers of the Month for October 2001 than Reps. Combest and Stenholm.