The Senate Wednesday and the House Thursday passed a stop-gap continuing resolution (CR) that ends the threat of a federal government shutdown next week and keeps the government running through September 30, which is the end of the fiscal year. The spending resolution leaves in place the $85 billion across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester; however, the bill includes an amendment that provides flexibility to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to prevent furloughs of front line food safety inspectors at federally inspected meat and poultry plants.
The bill, the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations, which was approved 73-26 in the Senate and 318-109 in the House, is now on its way to President Obama’s desk, who is expected to sign the bill no later than March 27 when the current continuing resolution is set to expire.
An amendment was accepted on a voice vote from Senators Mark Pryor (D-AR), Roy Blunt (R-MO), and Chris Coons (D-DE) that gives USDA the authority to shift $55 million to the Food Safety and Inspections Service from other agency accounts to avoid furloughing meat and poultry inspectors. The $55-million amendment would take $30 million from the USDA buildings and maintenance fund and $25 million from funds that would upgrade school kitchen equipment.
Senators Pryor and Blunt argued that Congress should agree to the amendment because the furloughs would lead to the closure of nearly 6,300 food inspection facilities and that 500,000 industry workers would lose nearly $400 million in wages. Earlier this month, USDA had announced that meat and poultry plants could be shut down overall from 15 to 11 days, one day a week starting in mid-July.
“This is a victory that will ensure the federal government can continue to meet its core duties, protect jobs, maintain exports, prevent harm to rural America, and help keep food affordable for all Americans,” National Chicken Council Mike Brown said. “Senators Pryor, Blunt, Coons, Carper, and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Mikulski and Ranking Member Shelby, are to be commended for their bipartisan leadership and their work to avid this potential crisis.”
In a speech to the Agribusiness Club this week, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack endorsed the Pryor Blunt amendment, saying the amendment acknowledges that he would have had no choice but to furlough the inspectors under the Budget Control Act. Vilsack also discussed advancing a new system of poultry slaughter to create efficiencies that would help avoid furloughs in the future.
Also included in the CR is a provision that contains the three technical corrections to the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Act (GIPSA) that the National Chicken Council had asked to be included in the fiscal year 2013 House Agriculture Appropriations bill, which was never passed. The GIPSA provision would rescind the section placing pullets, breeders, and laying hens under the rule’s authority; rescind the section defining a capital investment as an amount exceeding $12,500 over the life of a growing arrangement; and rescind the requirement that a dealer provide notice 90 days before suspending delivery of a flock for more than 15 days.
Senators Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Richard Shelby (R-AL), Tom Carper (D-DE), John Hoeven (R-ND) were also instrumental in including the above GIPSA provisions in the CR.
