Farm Bill First Reading Indicates Trouble on Political Horizon
Published: Friday, July 17, 2026
On June 23 Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry (ANF), released legislative text for the unfinished provisions of the traditional farm bill. Chairman Boozman is calling the legislation "Farm Bill 2.0." This article provides a first reading of the legislative text and some discussion about cuts to conservation proposed in it.
The legislation being considered in Congress for food and agricultural policy is effectively the unfinished business of the traditional farm bill. The 119th Congress broke apart the traditional farm bill last year with the Reconciliation Farm Bill included in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OB3) Act of 2025. In that legislation, Congress cut food assistance in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by nearly $200 billion over 10 fiscal years with a portion of those reductions used to offset the costs of substantially increasing support for farmers. With this, Congress broke the cardinal political rule of the traditional farm bill—i.e., that spending cuts for food assistance should not be used to fund spending increases for farm assistance and vice versa.
The Reconciliation Farm Bill also left behind all other titles and programs, including the Conservation Reserve Program. Congress has not reauthorized the bulk of the traditional farm bill, including every program for rural economic development, research, many trade and food aid programs, forestry, energy and the CRP. It is this unfinished farm bill business that Congress is now trying to address, belatedly and in the shortened legislative calendar of a difficult midterm election year. The House passed its version on April 30.
Chairman Boozman's draft constitutes the first step in the Senate. the legislation will struggle to make it through the difficult legislative process within the campaign-shortened legislative calendar (including the August recess), and may require a lame duck session of Congress to complete as in 2018. While Chairman Boozman's draft is a critical first step, it should also be noted that it is long overdue.
To recap, the 2018 Farm Bill technically expired in 2023, but the 118th Congress did not act. In 2024, the House Agriculture Committee reported reauthorization legislation that was not considered on the House floor. The Senate ANF Committee did not consider farm bill legislation in either year, former Chairman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and then ranking member Sen. Boozman released competing farm bill texts after the election. The committee also did not formally markup legislation for the Reconciliation Farm Bill that was added to OB3 in 2025. If the Senate ANF Committee marks up the legislation recently introduced, it will be the first such formal debate of legislation since 2018.
Chairman Boozman's discussion draft weighs in at 902 pages. A first reading reveals that it is a mostly typical reauthorization of all the programs not included in the Reconciliation Farm Bill, such as those for rural development and research. For example, the very first section extends the suspension of permanent price support authority in the 1949 Agricultural Act to 2031. There are myriad changes to programs throughout the titles that appear to be standard and likely uncontroversial. This conclusion awaits a closer read and the public deliberation a markup provides.
There is one rather puzzling exception, however. In the conservation title, Chairman Boozman's draft includes a nearly $2 billion cut to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). While a CBO score was not available as of this writing, it is presumed that at least some of that reduction is used to offset the costs of other changes to conservation programs, including a new program, the Forest Conservation Easement Program. There are multiple reasons this raises concerns and may spark controversy.
Cutting EQIP funding breaks the commitment to the program made in the Reconciliation Farm Bill last year; Congress rescinded the additional funds it had provided to EQIP in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, adding them to the longer-term baseline budget authority. This was essentially a trade-off for conservation investments for farmers, trading the short-term increase of the Inflation Reduction Act for the long-term budget authority in the CBO baseline. For that trade-off to benefit farmers, Congress would have to avoid cutting the budget authority in the future. It now appears that both the Senate ANF Committee and the House Agriculture Committee are willing to go back on the earlier deal. Doing so also opens the door to further cuts to conservation by this or a future Congress.
Table 1 details proposed cuts at issue, comparing the baseline budget authority with the Senate ANF revisions and the revisions that passed the House.
Not only do both bills cut EQIP budget authority, but both sets of reductions are front loaded in fiscal years 2027 through 2030, returning to the baseline level in FY2031. This preserves the baseline funding in the outyears of a 10-year CBO projection, but it forces the entire reduction in the next couple of years impacting farmers sooner rather than later.
The proposed cuts also highlight existing challenges for EQIP that will be made worse by reduced funding. The program remains oversubscribed with more farmers seeking funding than Congress makes available. EQIP, in fact, has consistently experienced a backlog of farmer applications that are approved for funding but not funded (valid unfunded contracts) because Congress has authorized too little for the demand for assistance from farmers. Based on data reported by USDA, EQIP has averaged 41,600 and over $1.5 billion in unfunded valid contracts in recent years (FY 2017 to FY 2023).
Table 2 summarizes the USDA data for this conservation bardo of EQIP unfunded valid contracts and amounts.
Each unfunded valid contract represents a farmer seeking assistance from EQIP to implement conservation practices on their farm. This on-the-ground, fundamental reality is too easily lost in the inside-the-beltway efforts to game the CBO scoring system. In total, the proposed reductions to EQIP funding in the Senate bill could result in over 56,500 valid farmer applications to go without funding in the next few fiscal years.
The state-by-state estimates for potential lost funding were calculated using historic allocations of EQIP funds, as reported by USDA and visualized by the Policy Design Lab. Those lost funds were divided by the average amount per unfunded valid contract for each state in the USDA data used for Table 2. For example, if the cuts to EQIP funding were enacted into law as proposed in the Senate legislative text, Illinois could lose nearly $27 million in EQIP funding in the next few years, equal to 755 more valid but unfunded contracts with farmers.
A Farm Bill 2.0 is necessary only because Congress did not reauthorize the farm bill in 2023. Congress chose instead to pay for increased payments to farmers with cuts to food assistance in SNAP and used the budget reconciliation process that left much of the traditional farm bill as unfinished business. While much of the proposed legislative text in the Senate appears to be uncontroversial, it cannot be divorced from this recent history. The controversies ignited by the Reconciliation Farm Bill complicate the enactment of the remaining authorizations and cast substantial doubt on the future of the traditional farm bill.
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