Category: Legislative Updates

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reminds communities, farmers and ranchers, families and small businesses in the path of Hurricane Dorian that USDA has programs that provide assistance in the wake of disasters. USDA staff in regional, state and county offices stand ready and are eager to help.

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Federal, state and local lawmakers recently had the opportunity to see the extent of erosion in Mentor, Ohio, which has lost more than 6 acres in the last decade. Mentor leaders emphasized the need for outside financial aid, which has proven elusive.  

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Our trading relationships need to ensure America’s farmers, manufacturers, and small business owners can succeed and compete on the world stage, and USMCA does just that.

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Ahead of the Aug. 12 USDA reports, traders and farmers expected this round of information to provide clarity to the unprecedented 2019 corn and soybean crops. Yet, this year’s August reports, which included more information than ever before, mostly created more questions.

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Attorney General Dana NESSEL joined AGs from all 50 states in urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week to encourage telecom providers to implement default call blocking technology and call authentication to block illegal and unwanted robocalls.

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A federal judge ruled this week an 1855 treaty "cannot plausibly be read" to create a 337-square-mile Indian reservation on lands in a northern Michigan vacation-destination area. The Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians sued the state in 2015, claiming the 1855 Treaty of Detroit established its reservation on lands that now include Petoskey, Charlevoix and Harbor Springs, and it wanted the court to pave the way to create a reservation there.

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Department of Health and Human Services officials are urging state residents to take greater care to protect themselves from mosquito bites after an outbreak of Eastern Equine Encephalitis has been detected in Kalamazoo and St. Joseph counties. While the two cases found both involve horses, neither of which was vaccinated and both have died, the disease can spread to humans. And while there is a vaccine for horses, there is none for humans. Earlier this month a woman infected with the disease died in Massachusetts.

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4 states seek to identify flooding choke points on Missouri River. Officials in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska are calling on the Army Corps of Engineers to study bottlenecks that contribute to Missouri River flooding so alternatives can be suggested. "We're not going to go back to the years in the past, where all of the sudden once the flood's over we go back to the same practices, the same ways that we have always done things," Missouri Gov. Mike Parson said.

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Louisiana's freshwater diversions, such as Davis Pond, are engineered to manage salinity, whereas sediment diversions like the ones proposed for Mid-Barataria and Mid-Breton are intended to reconnect the Mississippi River to wetlands, writes Bran Haase, executive director of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. "Once built, these sediment diversions will enable us to rebuild and sustain tens of thousands of acres of coastal wetlands," he writes.

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Another federal court has found the 2015 “waters of the U.S.” rule legally deficient, but language in the ruling could add another layer of controversy to the Trump administration's efforts to rewrite the rule. U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood in Georgia said in a ruling Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers overreached in defining their jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act, specifically in asserting federal authority over activities in interstate waters, tributaries and adjacent waters.

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