Senate Farm Bill Stalls Again Over SNAP Funding Fight — SkimNews
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- Mitch McConnell returned to Congress after a three-month absence and cast a deciding vote in the Senate Agriculture Committee to advance the farm bill, but the bill still faces a near-certain floor-vote death
- Senate Democrats are blocking the bill primarily because it does not reverse the $186 billion in SNAP cuts enacted last summer under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law
- The draft also fails to delay a SNAP cost-sharing change that would raise states' administrative costs, forcing governors to choose between funding food assistance and other programs like education and transportation
- Jody Osmund of the FACE Ag Network argued that rural areas have higher SNAP uptake than urban ones, so the cuts directly hurt farmers whose customer base relies on benefits
- The Senate version excludes the Save Our Bacon Act, which would have loosened rules on caging and confinement practices for livestock producers—a bright spot for animal welfare advocates
- Osmund endorsed letting the bill die and continuing the 2018 farm bill via stopgap measures, calling no deal 'much better than a very, very bad deal' with Congress back to the drawing board in 2027
Why it matters: With Republicans needing 60 votes and midterm elections in November, the path to passage has effectively closed — meaning another year of stopgap extensions to the 2018 farm bill. Small and medium-sized farmers, already squeezed by rising input costs and unstable trade markets, absorb the cost of continued legislative gridlock while SNAP recipients face $186 billion in cuts with no legislative relief in sight.
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