Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, is back talking with the vice president of governmental affairs at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Ethan Lane, about using the appropriations process to shape policy.
Our coverage from the 2023 Cattle Industry Summer Business Meeting in San Diego is being powered by Farm Data Services of Stillwater.
“At the beginning of this Congress, we watched the speaker fight where they were negotiating the rules, and some of the rules they negotiated were around how the amendment processes would work,” Lane said. “Open amendment process leads to the kind of appropriations process we are seeing now. They have got to pass an appropriations bill to find the government every year, but if you have that in a really open format, sometimes it draws some pretty wild stuff out of the woodwork in the form of last-minute, half-baked amendments, and certainly, we have seen a few of those this week, including this amendment from Victoria Spartz, this congresswoman from Indiana.”
Lane said Spartz is seeking to stop the use of federal funding in Beef Checkoff programs, and any checkoff programs in general.
“We don’t use any federal funds to implement the Checkoff programs, so it is sort of an odd amendment, but unfortunately not necessarily out of character for what we see during these kind of wild open amendment processes,” Lane said.
Lane says that all the amendments to the Appropriations Bill must be reviewed by the House Rules Committee- chaired by Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole. It’s uncertain if that Committee will allow a vote on this amendment or not.
If the Rules Committee allows the bill to be considered, Lane said he would be surprised if the amendment from Spartz was popular on the floor, but he also said you never know.
In regards to the Ag Appropriations bill- “It is an important piece of legislation every year, and there are good things that are in it, and there are riders in there that are helpful to the cattle industry and are helpful to agriculture,” Lane said. “We are reauthorizing Livestock Mandatory Reporting. That has been riding along these appropriations bills for some years now since the five-year authorization lapse back a few years ago.”
Lane admits it would be nice to get a five-year reauthorization for LMR- but there seems to be little chance of that happening before the bill expires at the end of September- thus, the need for another extension in the body of the Ag Appropriations bill.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR at the top of the story for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
