Farm Bill DA - Emory 2024

Farm Bill DA & Answers – ENDI ‘24
1NC
Farm Bill DA---1NC
The Farm Bill is heading towards passage now, but it will require a bipartisan compromise.
David Sivak 5-26. Manages the Congress and campaigns team at the Washington Examiner, where he previously led the copy desk for three years. "Debbie Stabenow fights for Senate legacy with farm bill standoff". Colorado Springs Gazette. 5-26-2024. https://gazette.com/news/wex/debbie-stabenow-fights-for-senate-legacy-with-farm-bill-standoff/article_e65ad08b-ffe3-5b0b-843a-48520597ca42.html
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) risks leaving the Senate at the end of the year with a big question mark hanging over her almost three-decade career in Washington.
As the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, she is waging her third and final fight over the farm bill, which sets agriculture and nutrition policy every five years, yet she may retire with the latest package stuck in limbo.
The central holdup is hardly new. Republicans, who control the House, have sought to restrict the growth of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, after the farm bill ballooned to $1.5 trillion in recent years. The entitlement makes up 82% of the total bill.
Meanwhile, fights over “climate-smart” conservation funding and price supports for certain commodities have also delayed the legislation.
Stabenow said she would dedicate herself to passing the current farm bill in announcing her retirement from the Senate a year ago. But the impasse means she may not be at the negotiating table when the full, five-year reauthorization is finally approved.
Congress has already punted on the bill once, passing a one-year extension last fall, and could do so again later this year.
Stabenow, 74, has broken a series of barriers in her career, including her election as the first woman to represent Michigan in the Senate. She will end her tenure as the No. 3 Democrat in leadership in her capacity as chairwoman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.
But the farm bill is one of her biggest policy legacies.
Both parties say it is still possible to get a deal done before the Sept. 30 deadline. Each chamber has put out competing proposals, while the House passed its version out of committee on Thursday in a largely party-line vote.
Yet Stabenow’s retirement from the Senate is forcing her to decide whether to get the best deal she can in divided government or risk a weaker hand for Democrats in the next Congress.
The decision is not a hard one for Stabenow, she suggested in an interview. She would rather extend the current farm bill, which she helped negotiate in 2018, once again than accept something she views as an unacceptable product.
“I have an incentive to get a good bill done. I do not have an incentive to do a bad bill,” Stabenow told the Washington Examiner.
However, there is a distinct possibility that ranking member John Boozman (R-AK) will soon hold the committee gavel, given the favorable Senate map for Republicans in November. Meanwhile, control of the lower chamber and White House is viewed as a coin toss.
SNAP benefits friction
The dynamics underlying the farm bill are complex and largely bipartisan. The legislation reflects a careful balancing of interests, from farmers to environmentalists to food advocates.
Food stamps, though, have been a constant source of friction in talks. The bill exploded in size, to the tune of $256 billion, after the Biden administration raised the grocery cost estimate used to set SNAP benefits, and now Republicans want to force future changes to be cost neutral.
Democrats call that a cut to the program, citing the almost $30 billion reduction estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, while Republicans note the program, adjusted for inflation each year, would continue to grow.
“We're not talking about taking away anything from anybody. It's just slowing down the growth,” said Boozman. “I think by any measure certainly nutrition has been well taken care of.”
Stabenow predicted Republicans would have to abandon the changes if they want to get a farm bill done, citing past fights over SNAP. In debt ceiling negotiations last year, House Republicans won stricter work requirements but have been unsuccessful at other times.
“Never works,” Stabenow said. “They always come back and realize you have to have the whole farm bill coalition.”
Nonetheless, Republicans celebrated committee passage of the House bill on Thursday night as a sign of momentum. Four Democrats crossed over to vote in favor despite Stabenow and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) leaning on panel Democrats to oppose it earlier this month.
House makes progress
The vote marked a step forward more than a breakthrough. The bill faces a bigger hurdle on the House floor due to pockets of Republican opposition, while any eventual compromise still needs to pass the Democratic-led Senate.
“I don't know where the votes come from, on the Right or the Left,” Stabenow said.
Over in the Senate, Stabenow released a public summary of her committee’s farm bill at the beginning of the month, proposing, among other things, an expansion in food stamp eligibility.
But the baby steps — her committee is waiting for Senate Republicans’ blueprint to engage in negotiations — mean there is little time on the Senate calendar to get a bill done.
Boozman, who is aligned with House Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-PA), told the Washington Examiner there is a “good chance” a compromise with the Democrats can still come together.
Under one scenario, the two chambers agree to a short extension to the end of the year and then iron out a deal in the lame-duck session, the time between the November election and the start of the new Congress.
“I don't think it gets any easier next year,” Boozman said.
For the time being, the two sides seem as dug-in as ever. On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack accused House Republicans of attempting to “rob Peter to pay Paul” with their bill.
Democrats have criticized Thompson’s decision to restrict SNAP while pursuing a $47 billion increase in price supports for commodities like peanuts and rice.
Boozman called Vilsack’s comments “unprecedented” and unhelpful. “Out of the $1.5 trillion that we're talking about, we need more farm in the farm bill,” he said.
'Areas of concern'
Meanwhile, negotiators are at loggerheads over how to treat billions in Inflation Reduction Act dollars that Democrats want rolled into the farm bill. Republicans are open to doing so but want the money, currently slated for climate initiatives, to be available for conservation programs more broadly.
Stabenow said there are wide areas for agreement on the farm bill. She cited provisions on crop insurance that she said could be attractive to Republicans. But Stabenow sounded less bullish than Boozman on the chances of a breakthrough.
“I don't think we're close on the areas that, unfortunately, have really been the areas of concern,” Stabenow said. “I'm doing everything I can to try to get people at the table and to be realistic about what we can do.”
Asked about Stabenow’s retirement, Boozman praised her as a “great partner” and said both sides were working through their disagreements on SNAP in “good faith.”
“We've done some really difficult things in the nutrition space,” he said.
The conventional wisdom is that Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) will succeed Stabenow as the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee in the new Congress.
Changing AI copyright law is politically toxic in Congress, especially in an election year.
Steven Levy 24. Technology reporter for Wired. "Tech Leaders Once Cried for AI Regulation. Now The Message Is ‘Slow Down’". Wired. 4-1-2024. https://archive.ph/tRxfT#selection-2203.39-2203.44
Levie’s remarks fly in the face of what has become a standard position among Silicon Valley’s AI elites like Sam Altman. “Yes, regulate us!” they say. But Levie notes that when it comes to exactly what the laws should say, the consensus falls apart. “We as a tech industry do not know what we're actually asking for,” Levie said, “I have not been to a dinner with more than five AI people where there's a single agreement on how you would regulate AI.” Not that it matters—Levie thinks that dreams of a sweeping AI bill are doomed. “The good news is there's no way the US would ever be coordinated in this kind of way. There simply will not be an AI Act in the US.”
Levie is known for his irreverent loquaciousness. But in this case he’s simply more candid than many of his colleagues, whose regulate-us-please position is a form of sophisticated rope-a-dope. The single public event of TechNet Day, at least as far as I could discern, was a livestreamed panel discussion about AI innovation that included Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker and Michael Kratsios, the most recent US Chief Technology Officer and now an executive at Scale AI. The feeling among those panelists was that the government should focus on protecting US leadership in the field. While conceding that the technology has its risks, they argued that existing laws pretty much cover the potential nastiness.
Google’s Walker seemed particularly alarmed that some states were developing AI legislation on their own. “In California alone, there are 53 different AI bills pending in the legislature today,” he said, and he wasn’t boasting. Walker of course knows that this Congress can hardly keep the government itself afloat, and the prospect of both houses successfully juggling this hot potato in an election year is as remote as Google rehiring the eight authors of the transformer paper.
The US Congress does have legislation pending. And the bills keep coming—some perhaps less meaningful than others. This week, Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, introduced a bill called the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024. It mandates that large language models must present to the copyright office “a sufficiently detailed summary of any copyrighted works used … in the training data set.” It’s not clear what “sufficiently detailed” means. Would it be OK to say “We simply scraped the open web?” Schiff’s staff explained to me that they were adopting a measure in the EU’s AI bill.
The real puzzle of this bill, which Schiff himself referred to in a committee meeting this week as a “first step,” is that no one knows whether using copyrighted work for AI training is legal. (Maybe it’s not such a puzzle when one notes that Schiff is running for a US Senate seat and that the bill is supported by all of Hollywood’s unions and trade groups.) Despite the current lack of reporting requirements, multiple suits have been filed against AI companies by creators who have identified their works in the data sets. (I should disclose here that I sit on the council of the Authors Guild, which is among a horde of plaintiffs suing OpenAI and Microsoft, and a supporter of Schiff’s bill. I speak for myself here.) The success of those lawsuits ultimately depends on whether the courts determine that the companies are violating the fair use provision of copyright laws.
Whatever tack the courts take, it will be based on copyright law that didn’t anticipate an artificial intelligence that could suck up all the prose and images the world has to offer. Figuring out what fair use means in the age of AI is a job for Congress. That’s the kind of difficult decision that legislators need to make when dealing with an innovation that alters the landscape. And like privacy and other tech-driven modern problems, it is exactly the kind of decision that our 21st-century lawmakers manage to avoid. (Schiff staffers told me, “We are certainly waiting to see the fair use issue play out in the courts.”)
So it’s no wonder that Levie, when I reached him on the phone after his day in DC, told me he’s feeling pretty good about the system. “The overall message from Congress is, ‘Let's get this right, there's not a lot of points for moving too fast.’ They're taking it with a high degree of thoughtfulness, versus ‘Let's just rush to have something to say that we are regulating.’” It turns out that Levie didn’t have to stop the government single-handedly. It’s already hit the brakes.
BioD/Climate Impact---1NC
Biden’s political capital is key, specifically to keep environment-related provisions in the bill. That’s key to sustainability.
Leah Douglas 24. Washington-based award-winning journalist covering agriculture and energy including competition, regulation, federal agencies, corporate consolidation, environment and climate, racial discrimination and labour, previously at the Food and Environment Reporting Network. "Fight brewing over Biden climate funds that help farmers in Republican-leaning states". Reuters. 1-25-2024. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/fight-brewing-over-biden-climate-funds-that-help-farmers-republican-leaning-2024-01-25/
WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) - An effort by Republican U.S. lawmakers to reallocate $18 billion in climate-friendly agriculture funding under President Joe Biden's signature climate law would shift money away from programs that primarily benefit farmers in Republican-leaning states, a Reuters analysis found.
The Inflation Reduction Act money, earmarked for U.S. Department of Agriculture-designated "climate-smart" farm practices, is intended to support Biden's agriculture climate agenda, which relies heavily on storing carbon in the soil and lowering emissions through sustainable farming techniques.
About 65% of the new money due to be spent under the law on those climate-friendly practices would go to farmers in states that backed Republican former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, and about 70% would go to states with a Republican member on the House or Senate farm committees, according to a Reuters examination of projections by University of Illinois agricultural policy professor Jonathan Coppess.
Iowa stands to get the most money with $1.03 billion, followed by Texas ($772 million) and Arkansas ($723 million), according to the projections by Coppess, which used historical USDA funding data to estimate how the Inflation Reduction Act money would be distributed, opens new tab.
Republican House of Representatives Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn "GT" Thompson and the Senate Agriculture Committee's top Republican, John Boozman, want to reallocate the Inflation Reduction Act money to all conservation programs without the climate-related requirements.
Under Thompson's plan, some money also would be moved to crop supports and other farm programs, a committee aide said.
A spokesperson for Thompson expressed skepticism toward Coppess's findings and noted that he previously served as general counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee under Democratic leadership.
Representatives for both Thompson and Boozman said reallocating the funds could allow money to reach more farmers.
Democrats are opposed to the reallocation.
"Moving this funding away from conservation with its intended purpose - addressing the climate crisis - is a non-starter for me and does not have the votes in the Senate or the House," Democratic Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow said in an email to Reuters.
White House officials also have pledged a fight to preserve the money for climate-friendly practices.
Though Democrats control the Senate and White House, the typically bipartisan process of negotiating the farm bill - a package passed every five years to fund commodity, conservation, and nutrition programs - often involves compromise.
The dispute over the Inflation Reduction Act money could further delay progress on the overdue bill. The farm bill that was passed in 2018 expired on Sept. 30, and was extended for one year in November's spending deal.
The farm committees are still drafting their versions of the next bill.
The climate-friendly agriculture money would go to programs whose demand typically far exceeds their available funds.
For instance, the USDA in 2021 funded 29.9% of applications for its Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which funds practices that increase soil health, reduce erosion and mitigate drought, according to the department's most recent data. That program received nearly $9 billion for Inflation Reduction Act climate-smart farming grants.
Agriculture generates about 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, from fertilizer application, livestock manure and tilling land for crops, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Biodiversity loss and climate change cascade, cause nuclear war, and turn every impact.
Phil Torres 16. Affiliate scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. “Biodiversity loss: An existential risk comparable to climate change.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. http://thebulletin.org/biodiversity-loss-existential-risk-comparable-climate-change9329.
Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in 

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