INDIAN WELLS, Calif. – The congressional budget committees are likely to instruct the House and Senate agriculture committees to achieve savings in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as part of a budget reconciliation bill, former House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas, said here Wednesday.

In a speech to the Independent Seed Professionals Association, Conaway, who is now part of the Conaway Graves Group, noted that the congressional budget committees send reconciliation instructions to each authorizing committee and said that prospects for getting a farm bill passed this year are “better if they can get SNAP taken care of in reconciliation.”

In the Senate, reconciliation requires only a majority rather than the 60 votes that most bills require. Because the Republicans have 53 seats, the Senate can pass reconciliation bills without the votes of Democrats. In the House, Conaway noted, reconciliation bills are likely to require almost unanimous Republican support because there will be only 217 Republicans to 215 Democrats in the lower chamber at the time reconciliation is considered.

---

---

Republicans from districts that Biden won and Democrats from districts that Trump won will have a difficult time deciding how to vote on reconciliation bills, Conaway said.

Last year, Republicans called for cuts to SNAP as part of writing a new farm bill, but both House and Senate Democrats said they would not go along with that idea. Republicans wanted to use budget savings from SNAP to pay for increases in farm programs, but if the SNAP cut is passed in reconciliation, that budget authority is unlikely to be available to the agriculture committees to increase farm programs in the farm bill.

---

---

The biggest issue in the farm bill is what the level of baseline funding will be, Conaway said. Farmers need help because input costs have gone up so much since the last farm bill was written in 2018 that “without new money” raising the reference prices “will be a challenge,” he added.

One part of the SNAP program that doesn’t function properly, Conaway said, is the Able Bodied Adults without Dependents section. Beneficiaries under that section can get benefits for only three months at a time unless they work 20 hours per week or are in job training. But a provision allowing states to waive the work rule in situations of high unemployment is abused, Conaway said.

Although President-elect Trump has said that he would prefer one reconciliation bill, Conaway said it is more likely there will be two bills. The first would cover many programs including SNAP, while the second bill would cover taxes. That second bill will be difficult, Conaway said. A key issue will be changing the state and local tax provision known as SALT. The tax bill passed when Trump was president limited the deduction to $10,000, but Republicans in high-tax states want to raise that deduction, Conaway noted. 

Trump is not concerned about whether there is one or two bills as long as the product is “big and impressive,” Conaway said.

Asked about Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on goods from other countries, Conaway said Trump “is always negotiating” and has gotten Mexico’s and Canada’s attention. Conaway added that Trump “doesn’t bluff a lot” and that “if he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll put the tariffs on.”

In the speech, Conaway noted that Trump had protected U.S. farmers from the negative impacts of tariffs on foreign countries. To provide that aid, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue used the Commodity Credit Corporation, USDA’s line of credit at the Treasury. Asked afterward by The Hagstrom Report whether the congressional committees are likely to restrict the use of the CCC, as Republicans proposed last year, Conaway said he thinks that’s unlikely but that he has “no insider information” on the thinking of either Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., or House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., on the issue.

Conaway added that he thinks the first Trump administration used the CCC to counter the tariffs in a meaningful way.

Conaway said Brooke Rollins, Trump’s choice as agriculture secretary, is moving her family from Texas to Washington.

Conaway said he is impressed with Rollins, a fellow Texan, and noted that she has a degree in agricultural development and grew up in a rural community. She is not steeped in agricultural policy but brings a “raw intellect” to the job of agriculture secretary, Conaway said. Her biggest advantage is her closeness to Trump since she worked in the White House in the first Trump administration, he added.

The biggest problem that Trump’s Cabinet secretaries will face, Conaway said, is opposition from the civil servants who believe they can avoid making changes because Trump will be in office for only four years. Civil servants engage in “passive-aggressive” behavior, he said.