Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Wednesday that she has reallocated funding originally intended for local schools and food banks to pay for the Agriculture Department’s response to a feared New World screwworm outbreak.
“If there’s a major urgent crisis like screwworm, we can move funds around to address that,” Rollins told reporters after a hearing in front of the Senate Agriculture Committee. The secretary said she also moved money from other accounts at USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which is in charge of handling the pest’s spread.
The funding strategy mirrors an approach USDA used last year when the department bolstered a $1 billion avian influenza response plan with hundreds of millions of dollars intended for popular programs that help school districts and food banks buy from nearby farmers, as POLITICO first reported.
The money comes from the Commodity Credit Corp., a New Deal-era account that enables the Agriculture secretary to respond to farm crises and disease outbreaks as well as buy commodities more quickly. Lawmakers in both parties have pushed legislation to revive the local foods programs in the farm bill.
