If you wonder what exactly is included in the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda, you aren’t alone. For agriculture, a key agenda piece is the so-called budget reconciliation bill.
Chip Flory, host of AgriTalk, asked Bill Northey on Tuesday to provide some perspective on the bill. The former Iowa agriculture secretary and former USDA under secretary weighed in by talking first about the sheer dollar amount it encompasses – a total of $3.5 trillion.
“It’s just a massive bill,” Northey said, noting it dwarfs the U.S. farm bill by comparison. “With the farm bill we spend a lot of time talking about a few hundred million dollars like that’s not a lot of money, though it is, and in this case, we’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars.”
According to the White House, the budget reconciliation bill is wide-ranging in what it could address. Dollars from the bill could be allocated for projects as diverse as long-term care, community college infrastructure and the auto supply chain.
Specifically for agriculture/forestry, $113.5 billion is currently earmarked but there are few details on how those dollars would be allocated.
“I just don’t know if we’re heading in the right direction with farm policy in the country based on the way this is working,” Flory said. He added that law makers have discussed allocating $28 billion from the budget reconciliation bill for conservation, a number that seems somewhat random.
Northey said while he would like to see more financial support for conservation measures, he is also concerned about the lack of allocation clarity. “Certainly, if we’re going to ask folks to do the kinds of things that we’d like to be able to have them do – address climate change, carbon, the water quality work and other kinds of things – we will need some more resources and more people. But this is a tough way to get it. And in fact, I don’t even know what we’re getting. No one knows what we’re getting.”
Listen to the complete conversation between Northey and Flory here:
