The so-called Super Committee created to try to curb the national debt abandoned its work and conceded failure on Monday. In a joint statement issued hours before a midnight deadline, the Democratic and Republican leaders said that they were “deeply disappointed” by their inability to reach an agreement.
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas and Senator Debbie Stabenow, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said in a joint statement, also on Monday, that the failure of the Super Committee also has ended the effort to produce an accelerated farm bill. The House and Senate Agriculture Committees leaders said they had developed “a bipartisan, bicameral proposal for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that would save $23 billion,” but since the Super Committee did not produce an overall deficit reduction package, the congressional agriculture leaders said they have abandoned immediate work on the farm bill. Lucas and Stabenow did not release the legislative language of what they had developed.
The current farm bill expires at the end of September 2012.
