Trump Administration's USDA budget proposal “fails agriculture”

As USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue outlined major department budget cuts, including a 10 percent overall reduction in personnel, representing 5,263 staff - 973 of them Farm Service Agency positions – for 2018, he didn’t mince words.  Perdue said. “I just don't think it's moral to continue to kick a $20 trillion debt down to our grandchildren without any relief. Overall farm bill spending would be cut $240 billion over a 10-year period. Approximately $46 billion of those reductions would come from agriculture programs – while the other $194 billion would be slashed from the nutrition programs. This includes funding cuts for Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children WIC, Rural Development, Forest Service, food safety, research, and conservation activities. It eliminates a number of programs including the Specialty Crop Block Grant program. Proposed 2018 funding for mandatory programs is  $7 billion below 2017.These outlays include crop insurance, nutrition assistance programs, farm commodity and trade programs, and a number of conservation programs. The Trump Administration’s 2018 budget also calls for new user fees to cover inspection, regulatory, and oversight activities of meat, poultry, and eggs, enforcement of animal welfare requirements, and user fees for grain standardization and a Packers and Stockyards license fee to cover program costs. Crop Insurance is also targeted for cuts in the 2018 budget proposal, including a proposed $40,000 cap on crop insurance premium subsidies for any one operation. Saying that agriculture has already done its fair share to help reduce the federal deficit during the 2014 Farm Bill debate, American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said the budget proposal “Clearly fails agriculture and rural America.”  “It would gut federal crop insurance, one of the nation’s most important farm safety-net programs,” Duvall argued. “It would drastically reshape important voluntary conservation programs and negatively impact consumer confidence in critical meat and poultry inspection. This proposal would hamper the viability of plant and animal security programs at our borders and undermine the nation’s grain quality and market information systems. It would stunt rural America’s economic growth by eliminating important utility programs and other rural development programs.”