ADVOCACY REPORT
Current Washington Situation
Congress, the Farm Bill, and Government Funding. The first six months of the 119th Congress have been defined by passage of President Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, that was the vehicle for permanently extending the tax cuts enacted during the president’s first term in 2017. The bill was passed by Congress using a unique procedure called reconciliation that allows the House and Senate to pass tax and spending measures on a simple majority basis using only votes from Republican members. The president signed the bill at a White House ceremony on the 4th of July. The bill made permanent the individual tax rate cuts from the 2017 bill that would have expired in 2026 and made permanent the 20% deduction of qualified business income—also known as Section 199A—which also would have expired in 2026. In addition to extending tax rates, the One Big Beautiful Bill also included significant changes to federal nutrition and farm programs. House Agriculture Committee Chairman G.T. Thompson (R-PA) and Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Boozman (R-AR) took advantage of the unique legislative situation to achieve reductions in federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) benefits by requiring additional cost sharing from the states to increase support in several farm programs. This included a doubling of the Market Access Program to help with international trade efforts and a permanent exemption to the adjusted gross income limitation for Title 1, disaster, and conservation programs if 75% of income is derived from farming. While some of the adjustments in agriculture programs in the One Big Beautiful Bill are a positive step for almond growers and other producers, the inclusion of agriculture programs in the bill will make it difficult to get a wholesale review of farm programs in a Farm Bill done during this Congress. For the remainder of the year, Congress will focus on passing the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes defense programs, and Appropriations bills
that provide funding for government agencies, including the Department of Agriculture. The House initiated the process and successfully passed the Agriculture Appropriations bill out of Committee on a partisan basis, with only Republicans voting in favor in June. The House bill cut funding for agriculture programs by 4.2% below the previous fiscal year and has yet to get the bill passed by the whole House. The Senate is expected to start moving bills through Committee in July, starting with the agriculture bill, and will continue working on them through the summer. The outlook for passing Appropriations bills across the floor in the Senate is not good and it appears that the government will spend a significant amount of time on continuing funding resolutions until Republicans and Democrats can agree to overall spending levels. International Trade. The situation on the international trade front can best be characterized as chaotic and ever changing. The president’s trade team is staffed by several figures from the first Trump Administration including Peter Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, and U.S. Trade Representative Jamison Greer. The Trump trade team is in favor of using tariffs as a tool to bring trading partners to the table to negotiate more equitable trade deals. As a part of this overall strategy, the president has used traditional tariff authority under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. He has also utilized novel and untested authorities under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. This would issue broad tariff increases for our trading partners. The president has levied 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, reciprocal tariffs of at least 10% with variable rates for each country for all goods, and targeted tariff increases for 14 countries, including important Blue Diamond markets such as
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ALMOND FACTS
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