Fights over biofuels and pesticides are primed to drive the debate over a five-year farm bill in the House — if the measure can reach the floor of the divided chamber this week.
After two days of wrangling over the parameters of floor debate, the House Rules Committee on Tuesday cleared the way for those issues to dominate the discussion around updating agriculture programs.
Tuesday’s Rules Committee meeting lasted for hours as Democrats offered farm bill amendments the panel’s Republican leaders had already signaled wouldn’t be allowed for floor consideration. The majority swatted the proposals away one-by-one into the evening.
Meanwhile, the fate of the farm and biofuels legislation is caught up in the Republican majority’s difficulty in passing any major bill this week — also including a renewal of intelligence programs and a budget reconciliation plan to fund immigration enforcement.
The biofuels issue — to lift summer restrictions on the sale of 15-percent-ethanol fuel — hinges on lawmakers’ willingness to accept an agreement between ethanol and oil industry supporters.
The proposal would also give small refineries breaks from biofuel-blending requirements, but at a price: The Congressional Budget Office said it would add billions of dollars to the deficit, a flaw likely to repel fiscal hawks.
Expanding E15 availability alone doesn’t carry a cost, but the attached provisions on small refinery exemptions would, by CBO estimates.
“There are no cost implications with passing a year-round fix,” said Emily Skor, CEO of the ethanol group Growth Energy, in a statement Tuesday.
Skor added, “A permanent fix that allows year-round, voluntary sales of higher blends like E15 saves American drivers and taxpayers alike. Unfortunately, opponents have been successful in their efforts to misrepresent where the true costs are.”
Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) seized on the budget effects Tuesday, saying, “It’s extraordinary to me” that the Republican-led committee would entertain the idea, given the cost.
“None of it’s offset,” McGovern said.
Splitting the bills
Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) pushed back. While the CBO did make such an estimate, he said, “As you know, CBO’s scores are almost always wrong.”
After the meeting, Scott told POLITICO’s E&E News that regardless of the debate about cost, boosting E15 is an important issue for farmers facing economic strain. He declined to predict the measure’s odds on the floor.
The cost of the proposal comes on top of the usual political challenges around mandating crop-based fuels, dividing lawmakers along regional, ideological and home-state industry lines.
It also imperils a promise Agriculture Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) has long made to ensure that the farm bill doesn’t increase the budget deficit.
The scenario laid out by Republicans on the Rules Committee will allow the House to avoid adding the ethanol provision directly to the farm bill as an amendment. Instead, the chamber will vote separately on each, then combine them into one measure to send to the Senate for consideration, assuming they pass.
The American Coalition for Ethanol, an industry group that’s sought year-round E15 sales for years, supports the House leaders’ unusual approach, said CEO Brian Jennings, although he acknowledged that the industry usually likes to avoid risky stand-alone votes on ethanol legislation.
“We will do our best to help rally the votes from Republicans and Democrats in support of it,” Jennings said.
The ethanol proposal faces stiff opposition from small refining companies and, in some cases, labor unions and other organizations connected to them. The proposal doesn’t offer sufficient safeguards to unionized refiners, the United Steelworkers said in a letter to the Rules Committee on Monday.
Pesticide amendment
The pesticide debate tests lawmakers’ support for the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, particularly Republicans reluctant to split with MAHA-affiliated loyalists to President Donald Trump.
The Rules Committee allowed for an amendment to strike a provision giving pesticide manufacturers limited protection from liability for illnesses blamed on their products, and blocking states from requiring their own pesticide health warning labels that go beyond federal requirements. Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) are the main sponsors of that amendment.
Other amendments cleared for consideration would broaden the renewable fuel standard’s definition of “renewable biomass” to include low-value woody material taken from forests, as well as mill residue, and expand forest thinning around wildfire-threatened groves of giant sequoia trees, as in the “Save Our Sequoias Act.”
Many of the amendments Democrats offered to the farm bill Tuesday night were initially floated by Republicans whose support may be needed to pass the rules for debate in the House, including a proposal by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to boost certain payment rates for farmers enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program.
Democrats offered them to make a point about what they said was a closed process. “You have locked us out. You have locked your own members out,” McGovern said.
