Farm Bill Programs Without a Budget Baseline Beyond FY2018

Summary

The 2014 farm bill (the Agricultural Act of 2014, P.L. 113-79) provided mandatory funding for many programs. Some of these programs have a budget baseline beyond the end of the farm bill in FY2018, while others do not. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline is a projection at a particular point in time of what future federal spending on mandatory programs would be under current law. This baseline is the benchmark against which proposed changes in law are measured. This report identifies mandatory programs in the 2014 farm bill that lack a budget baseline and explains the significance of this for enacting a successor to the current farm bill.

Generally, a program with estimated mandatory spending in the last year of its authorization will be assumed to continue in the baseline as if there were no change in policy and it did not expire. However, some programs may not be assumed to continue in the budget baseline, because the program had estimated mandatory spending less than a minimum $50 million scoring threshold in the last year of the farm bill, or the Budget Committees and/or Agriculture Committees determined that mandatory spending shall not extend beyond expiration.

Having a baseline essentially gives programs built-in future funding if policymakers decide that the programs should continue. Programs without a continuing baseline beyond the end of farm bill do not have assured future funding. As such, any extended authorization of these latter programs would be scored as new mandatory spending.

The 2014 farm bill contains 37 programs that received mandatory funding that do not have baseline beyond FY2018. These programs had estimated mandatory spending totaling $2.607 billion over the five-year farm bill. While this total may be a relatively small fraction of total farm bill spending (0.5% of the $489 billion five-year total projection), the effect may be particularly important to specific farm bill titles and to the programs’ beneficiaries.

Notable programs among this group include certain conservation programs; most of the bioenergy, rural development, and research title programs; various nutrition title pilot programs and studies; organic agriculture and farmers’ market promotion programs; and outreach to socially disadvantaged and military veteran farmers. If policymakers want to continue these programs in the next farm bill, they may need to find budgetary offsets to pay for the costs.