Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) is guaranteed to win reelection this year after the South Dakota filing deadline came and went this past week without anyone else entering the race. This despite the efforts of former President Trump smearing Thune for failing to support his election position. Thune has a stockpile of campaign cash on hand and favorable approval rating which some believe positions him well to succeed Senate Minority Leader McConnell when the time is right.
Category: Legislative Updates
President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal 2023 would boost Agriculture Department spending by 9%, including significant increases for agricultural research and conservation technical assistance and a new round of funding for rural broadband expansion.
The $3.1 billion budget proposal for USDA earmarks $1.8 billion for climate-related programs, including $300 million in new funding for loans to convert rural electric cooperatives to clean energy sources.
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Agripulse and many other Washington political watchers are keeping their eye on Democrats’ talk about changing the nomination process for their candidates. Former Iowa Lt. Gov. Patty Judge says losing the Iowa caucuses would hurt agriculture and also harm the Democratic Party. The caucuses have long forced Democratic candidates to focus on ag policy. In the run-up to the Democratic caucuses in 2020, Judge took Democratic candidates on tours of ethanol plants to stress the importance of biofuel policy to the state.
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi used her leadership meetings this week to sound out her Democratic colleagues on the best way to address record-high gas prices. Some senior Democrats still hope the House can act next week before Easter recess but the path forward remains unclear.
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A bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress that would create a permanent office in the White House for rural prosperity issues. According to its proponents, the office would improve lives and livelihoods over time in rural America.
Earlier this month, U.S. Representatives Angie Craig (D-MN) and Dan Newhouse (R-WA) introduced the Rural Prosperity Act, which aims to streamline federal services for rural America and eliminate bureaucratic obstacles by establishing the Office of Rural Prosperity. The Office would be a permanent fixture in the White House tasked with coordinating federal efforts to support and connect America’s rural communities to federal programs and resources.
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More technical assistance and streamlined application processes for conservation programs would help farmers adopt practices to reduce greenhouse gases, lawmakers were told at a hearing on how the next farm bill should address climate change.
“It is about workforce,” former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota told the House Agriculture Committee on Thursday, recommending that the Natural Resources Conservation Service increase the use of partnerships with land-grant universities and other entities to get needed technical help to farmers.
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Elected officials in Washington and State Capitals are looking at reducing the federal gas tax in response to increasing prices at the pump. Industry and transportation planners counter that they need federal funding certainty for projects and forecasting. Stopping the federal gas tax (already at a 1993 rate) would impede these processes, said David Martin, President of the Arizona Chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) in a recent interview.
The gas tax generates revenue for the Highway Trust Fund (HTF), which provides federal dollars for the nation’s transportation system. Because America’s infrastructure requires assured investment, stakeholders are emphasizing that legislation to cut the gas tax threatens the momentum America is trying to make to improve infrastructure.
Reducing investment can actually negatively impact the United States’ fiscal health and mobility. Each dollar invested in infrastructure adds double to triple benefits to the economy overall, and crumbling infrastructure costs every American household. Furthermore, because there are fuel market forces policymakers cannot control, experts are cautioning against this move.
Prices of construction materials used in new nonresidential construction jumped more than 21 percent from February 2021 to February 2022, according to an analysis by the Associated General Contractors of America of government data released today. The association noted that more recent price announcements made after the February data was collected suggest contractors are experiencing even worse cost pressures this Spring.
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A new study in the journal Earth's Future led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that, since Euro-American settlement approximately 160 years ago, agricultural fields in the midwestern U.S. have lost, on average, two millimeters of soil per year. This is nearly double the rate of erosion that the USDA considers sustainable. Furthermore, USDA estimates of erosion are between three and eight times lower than the figures reported in the study. Finally, the study's authors conclude that plowing, rather than the work of wind and water, is the major culprit.
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A leading U.S. ag economist thinks the Biden administration may have to open up the Conservation Reserve Program to cropping this year because of grain shortages that could result from the crisis in Ukraine.
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