Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, got the chance to visit with Tanner Beymer, Senior Director of Government Affairs at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, about Ag Appropriations.
“The appropriations process is how we fund the federal government,” Beymer said. “Very rarely does NCBA go to appropriators with a funding request.”
Beymer said that most of the time, they go to ask Congress to rein in federal agencies’ regulators who are creating ridiculous rules; however, after the Chevron Deference decision, new opportunities have been revealed.
“These federal agencies no longer have unilateral authority to broadly interpret vague statutes. That is a very positive step in the right direction,” he stated hopefully. “Maybe in the future, we will have to rely on the appropriations process less, which would probably make those bills function more like they are intended to, but until that happens, we heavily rely on that process to get Congress to rein in some of this regulatory red tape.”
In response to a question about the decades-old USDA Fairness Rule on the Packers and Stockyards Act, Beymer replies, “These rules are not new. They have been promulgated and USDA has attempted to put these rules on the books three or four different times in the last fifteen or sixteen years. They are right back at it trying to push these rules out that would have very harmful effects on cattle producers, which are the very people they claim the rules are there to help. Hopefully, we can get Congress to intervene through the appropriations process.”
He warned that the most dangerous of the rules is the one most recently proposed related to harm to competition. Comments from stakeholders on this proposal are open until September 11th. Beymer was quoted in a NCBA release reacting to a 15-day extension to accepting comments from the public, “While today’s extension is welcome, it is not nearly enough time to properly solicit public comment and review a rule that will have such an overarching impact on the cattle industry. The proposed rule is already a direct attack on producer profitability and now USDA is running down the clock to prevent meaningful input from cattle producers.”
Meanwhile, Congress’s next opportunity to work on ag appropriations will be after Labor Day- and Beymer says that NCBA will be working to block the Fairness Rule’s implementation ahead of the end of this calendar year.
Other policies that the NCBA Washington, D.C., office is working on are the CME Group, which is working on a live cattle contract review in addition to the price limit discussions, the Livestock Risk Protection Program, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service, about which he commented, “We are focused on discontinuing some of those big reports that they have been publishing for decades. We are trying to get them to republish some of those reports. We are having some really good success working with bi-partisan, bicameral members of Congress in order to accomplish that. We are banging on all cylinders as far as the policy arena is concerned.”
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.