Washington, D.C.) – Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) named House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) and Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) its July 2012 Porkers of the Month for sponsoring the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act (FARRM). Like its counterpart in the Senate, FARRM is a massive waste of taxpayer dollars at a time of record profits for farmers, maintains the command-and-control system that has been in place for decades, and falls far short of the $180 billion in savings for the Farm Bill that was included in the House-passed budget resolution. The bill would reduce Farm Bill spending to $957 billion over ten years, a difference of $35.1 billion and a paltry savings of 3.5 percent.
While FARRM terminates many of the wasteful programs that were eliminated in the Senate bill, such as the Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE) program, direct payments, and counter-cyclical payments, many profligate programs are left largely unreformed and new ones have been created. For example, the Price Loss Coverage Program (PLC), set to replace the egregiously wasteful system of direct payments, would reimburse farmers for revenues lost due to lower commodity prices. In today’s climate of historically high prices, PLC will almost certainly come at a very high cost to taxpayers when prices inevitably drop.
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