As part of the trillion dollar spending bill the Administration is pushing – in addition to the infrastructure bill that is awaiting a House of Representatives vote – the House Agriculture Committee began debate last week on what programs and what spending levels to send to the full House for consideration.
The Committee Democrats proposed $66 billion in new spending for agricultural research, renewable energy and forestry over strenuous objections of Republicans, who used the deliberations to highlight President Joe Biden’s proposal to increase taxes on inherited assets.
Votes on the Democratic measure and 30 GOP amendments were postponed until Monday morning.
Missing from the legislation was $28 billion in conservation spending that committee Chairman David Scott, D-Ga., said would be added to the measure before it is considered on the House floor. Scott said the omission was due to delays in getting cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. He didn't provide any details of the conservation title.
The combined, $94 billion measure is to be folded into a much larger $3.5 trillion tax and spending package that congressional Democrats are putting together to carry out Biden’s Build Back Better plan.
The amendments that Republicans offered during a nine-hour marathon meeting included several that sought to put Democrats on record in opposition to Biden’s proposal to tax capital gains at death, creating a tax on intergenerational transfers and effectively nullifying the benefit of stepped-up basis.
While fighting the GOP amendments, Scott repeatedly assured Republicans that he also opposes the tax proposal, which is under the purview of the House Ways and Means Committee, not Agriculture. Scott sent a letter to the White House in June warning Biden that the tax liability could be a "significant burden" on farms.
He said the tax proposal would be “devastating” to farmers and tried to assure Republicans that fellow Democrats were privately working to head it off. “We have enough Democrats on our side that we can make a difference” in the internal negotiations over the tax provisions, he said.