Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) acknowledged this week that the Senate will miss the September deadline to complete its version of the $1 trillion farm bill reauthorization.
McConnell, who serves on the Senate Agriculture Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee, made the comments at an event with the Kentucky Farm Bureau on Thursday. His remarks serve as the most high-profile acknowledgment to date that the must-pass legislation will not pass by the Sept. 30 deadline, when the current law expires.
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“We’ll figure it out,” McConnell said. "The Democrats are really not interested in rural America anymore, but somehow we'll put that together. Oh, not before Sept. 30, but we'll all put that together and look out as best we can for our rural and small-town America priorities.”
The farm bill is a mammoth package that sets policy for agriculture, forest health, food aid programs, conservation, and other areas overseen by the Department of Agriculture. The bill must be reauthorized every 5 years and is set to expire at the end of September, though Congress has the option of filing an extension.
A spokesperson for Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) did not respond to a request for comment on McConnell’s remarks, though the Michigan senator told the Washington Examiner in June that the bill would not be ready by September.
Stabenow said at the time that she was “hopeful” a bill would pass by the end of December, but pointed out that Congress had missed the farm bill reauthorization deadline before.
“It’s always extended, it's very routine,” she explained. “I've been through six farm bills, not one that's gotten completely done by the deadline. There's always some kind of extension.”
Not passing the bill by the end of next month is not particularly surprising, even with House and Senate Agriculture Committee staffers working on their respective bills over the August recess. Congress faces the threat of a government shutdown and a broader dispute about defense spending levels when it returns in September, both of which are likely to dominate leadership’s attention.
“The extension will not be because we have not done our job,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA) said after a farm bill listening session in Missouri earlier this month. “There’s a lot of competition for weeks on the floor in September with the appropriations bills and bills that expire just like the farm bill does.”
The federal government runs out of money on Sept. 30, and the House and Senate each have only 12 in-session days between now and then to find a resolution in order to prevent a shutdown. Further complicating matters, House and Senate appropriators have spent months marking up government funding bills at different spending levels.
Making matters more difficult for the farm bill are partisan disputes over provisions to the package that were agreed upon as part of President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) deal to avert a debt default in May.
The debt ceiling deal added new work requirements to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is funded through the farm bill. The moves were a win for Republicans. In a win for Democrats, the deal included some exceptions for veterans, the homeless, and adults aged 18 to 24 previously in foster care.
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House Republicans and Senate Democrats on their respective Agriculture Committees have been disputing the matter ever since, though Thompson has urged his GOP colleagues to not take up the issue.
"With the House, it's difficult to know,” Stabenow said in June of the dispute. “Some of these dollars that would have given us the flexibility that we thought we had to help us meet some needs were actually taken in the debt deal, and so our baseline is very tight.”